PHILADELPHIA >> Even though it’s now one of the bluest of blue states, California hasn’t always been kind to the Democratic Party.
It’s produced Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan — and this week the Golden State unleashed dozens of mad-as-hell Bernie Sanders delegates onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention.
Scoffing at calls for party unity, California’s sizable Bernie-or-Bust contingent was the vanguard of an insurrection Monday that threatened to send the proceedings into disarray. Bernie backers, led by California’s massive delegation, sparred with opposing delegates, booed when Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned during the opening prayer and interrupted a civil rights icon with chants against a proposed trade deal. And Sanders delegates from other states took the California delegation’s cues.
On Tuesday, Sanders delegates from California set a different tone, choosing to walk out of the convention hall rather than boo Clinton’s nomination or her husband’s speech.
The walkout of Sanders delegates from many states Tuesday happened organically, but other delegations this week have been contacting California’s Sanders contingent looking for guidance, said Katy Roemer, a Sanders delegate from Berkeley.
“They’re saying that whatever you’re doing, we’re in,” she said. “They are basically recognizing that California is leading.”
Sanders realized that, too. So he paid a visit to the delegation’s Tuesday breakfast meeting with a blunt message for his most vocal supporters.
“It’s easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face who will be living under a Donald Trump presidency,” Sanders told them.
That remark elicited yet more boos from several of his own delegates. But as Tuesday wore on — and into Wednesday, as well — it appeared that many Sanders delegates, including Roemer, had decided to adopt less confrontational tactics — at least while the convention was in session.
Protests from Sanders supporters seemed inevitable after WikiLeaks on Friday published thousands of emails, some of which showed that Democratic National Committee officials had sought to undermine Sanders’ campaign fight against Clinton.
The California delegation’s leading role in the rabble rousing, political analysts say, was both a product of the delegation’s size and the state’s tradition of left-of-center vs. far-left politics.
Whereas progressives in many states have to unite to hold political power, California’s ultrablue status has led its most left-leaning citizens to view mainstream Democrats as their biggest adversaries, said Bruce Cain, director of Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.
“Here the enemy is the establishment Democratic Party, because it is the dominant party,” Cain said. “There is a lot more tension within the party than there would be in a red state.”
However, after some soul-searching — and a little bit of arm-twisting from influential Democrats — many Sanders supporters agreed to voice their frustration in a less disruptive manner.
Hundreds of them, including dozens from California, walked out of the convention hall and proceeded to occupy the media tent shortly after Sanders called for nominating Clinton by acclamation.
Roemer, a nurse who joined the walkout, said she and other delegates didn’t want their booing to overshadow their legitimate concerns about whether Clinton will address their concerns from health care to growing corporate power.
“It’s not about whether we boo or don’t boo,” she said. “It’s about the Sanders delegates and our ongoing demands to get the Democratic Party to pay attention to us.”
On Monday, their in-your-face approach backfired when delegates from California and other states agreed that when the first speaker on the convention stage uttered the word “platform,” they would all start chanting “No TPP,” in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed international trade agreement that Sanders supporters say will cost American jobs.
The unexpected problem? Turned out they were interrupting civil rights icon Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who was starting to tell the emotional story of his family’s roots.
“It came across as disrespectful — and it was the last thing we meant to do,” said Alex White, a Sanders delegate from Berkeley. “Lesson learned. It made us reconsider our actions.”
Many Sanders delegates had already agreed to halt the booing early Tuesday before they were invited to a private meeting at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant by U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland. White said he was surprised to find he was part of a group of no more than 50 or so who were greeted by Democratic stalwarts, including Cummings, Jesse Jackson and Sanders himself.
They invited the Sanders supporters to “hear their stories of their struggles and to know they were in our shoes, struggling against an oppressive system,” White said.
He even got a hug from Sanders.
It’s unclear whether Monday’s protests damaged Clinton.
Thad Kousser, a professor of politics at UC San Diego, said most voters care more about what Michelle Obama had to say than what is being blurted out by Sanders delegates on the convention floor.
Still, he said, the protests were a telling sign that the Sanders movement might not have the staying power of other grass-roots political groups, such as the Tea Party that has demanded less ideological purity from its candidates.
“This is a clear sign that the Bernie movement won’t become an energized wing of the Democratic Party,” he said. “It will find another champion, or it will fizzle.”
Roemer insists the movement is built to last even if its association with Sanders might be coming to an end.
“Sen. Sanders is working within a political system, and we knew that going in,” she said. “But we get to be bigger than that. We get to be a movement. And if our issues take us outside the political system, so be it.”
Gov. Brown dismisses convention sparring
California Gov. Jerry Brown, a veteran of three failed bids presidential bids, downplayed the infighting that roiled Monday’s session of the Democratic National Convention, comparing it favorably to his tussle with the Clintons nearly a quarter century ago.
The 1992 “convention was so controlled, they wouldn’t even let me talk,” Brown recalled Tuesday in an interview with the Washington Post’s James Hohmann. “This is a lovefest compared to that.”
Of course, Brown had refused to endorse Bill Clinton up to that point, and he didn’t have nearly as many as potentially disruptive delegates as Bernie Sanders brought to Philadelphia.
For all the booing Sanders supporters unleashed Monday, Brown said he expects “the vast majority” of them to back Clinton, if only to stop Donald Trump.
“No knowledgeable Democrat is complacent about Trump,” Brown said. “Trump is a force. He’s a force to be reckoned with.”
Brown wasn’t convinced that Trump’s tough stand against illegal immigrants would damage Republicans nationally, in a manner similar to California’s Proposition 187, aimed at denying education and social services to illegal immigrants and pushed Latinos into the arms of Democrats, where most of them have stayed even after the measure was overturned by a federal judge.
“I would never minimize the potency of the concern people have when their … understanding of who they are and what their community is, is being challenged,” Brown said. “And it is being challenged when we’re having massive waves of immigration as we’ve seen in Europe.”
Brown said the lesson from both the Sanders and Trump campaigns is that voters see that “things are really screwed up.”
Clinton’s job, he said, is to fix it, but doing so “takes experience, takes consensus and it takes over time retooling the machinery of government on the side of ordinary people,” Brown said. “It’s a big challenge and it’s something we all got to pull together on.”
