Hillary Clinton

riversedge

(70,242 posts) Tue Apr 19, 2016, 11:33 PM Apr 2016

Sanders’s campaign manager previewed a very undemocratic strategy for the Democratic primary

Hillary had a bad campaign manager in Mark Penn last time--now Sanders has an equally bad campaign manager in Weaver!!

Sanders’s campaign manager previewed a very undemocratic strategy for the Democratic primary

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11465392/bernie-sanders-superdelegates

Updated by Ezra Klein on April 19, 2016, 11:23 p.m. ET @ezraklein

Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

There is, to say the least, a certain amount of tension between two of the arguments the Bernie Sanders campaign made today.

First, Sanders blasted New York's primary for being closed to independents. "Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary," Bernie Sanders said. "That’s wrong."

But later that same night, Sanders's campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, went on MSNBC and said that the campaign's plan is to win the election by persuading superdelegates to dump Hillary Clinton.

This isn't the first time the Sanders campaign has previewed this strategy. They began talking about it in March, arguing that if they could finish the primaries strong, then even if they trailed Clinton in delegates, they could use their strong poll numbers, tremendous small-donors fundraising, and general momentum to persuade superdelegates to switch sides and hand them the nomination.
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It is, however, a bit unseemly for Sanders to blast New York's primary for barring independent voters only to have his campaign manager go out and say they're explicitly planning to use superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

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There's nothing new about seemingly principled arguments about process covering opportunistic jockeying for candidate advantage. But imagine if it was Sanders who was leading in pledged delegates and Clinton who was suggesting New York's primary results weren't legitimate and her campaign would use superdelegates to win even if they lost the primaries. Sanders's voters would be furious, and rightly so.