Sanders Campaign: We Will Fight On!

By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News

07 June 16

 

enator Bernie Sanders’ spokesman, Michael Briggs, on Monday issued the following statement:

“It is unfortunate that the media, in a rush to judgement, are ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer.

“Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates, who do not vote until July 25 and who can change their minds between now and then. They include more than 400 superdelegates who endorsed Secretary Clinton 10 months before the first caucuses and primaries and long before any other candidate was in the race.

“Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump.”

Sanders closed his campaign in front of a crowd of thousands in San Francisco. He showed no signs of surrendering, even though the Associated Press and other major media outlets declared that Clinton was the “presumptive nominee.” Sanders told the crowd that wins in North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana and California will give his campaign enormous momentum going into the July convention. Sanders has vowed in recent days to take it all the way to a contested convention.

Defending his decision to stay in the race, one of his most passionate surrogates, former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, led the crowd to chant “We will fight on,” and promised to take his movement all the way to the convention. Speaking more broadly, musician Dave Matthews told the crowd that the senator and his campaign was just “the beginning.”

Civil rights activist and professor Dr. Cornel West was even more forceful. “Let us hang together, struggle together, laugh together, and love together. Go up swinging, down swinging, and when we go to Philadelphia we are going to go in swinging.” West went on to say that we don’t want to talk unity that just hides and conceals mendacity. “We want a jazz orchestra where you lift your voice, we don’t want a military band.”

These statements came after the media continued to misreport the facts in race for the Democratic nomination for president. Even Luis Miranda, the communication director of the DNC, told CNN to stop reporting the superdelegate count back in April. “One of the problems is the way the media reports them. Any night that you have a primary or caucus, and the media lumps the superdelegates in, that they basically polled by calling them up and saying who are you supporting, they don’t vote until the convention, and so they shouldn’t be included in any count.”

Jake Tapper then asked, “But when we do our totals, do you think it’s OK to include them?”

Miranda responded, “Not yet, because they’re not actually voting until the convention in July and they are likely to change their mind. Look at 2008 and what happened then –there was all this assumption about what superdelegates were going to do, and many of them did change their mind before the convention and it shifted the results in the end.”

Did the media listen? No, in a rush to judgement they declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee, even though 25% of her delegates could change their mind between now and July. Yup, one quarter of the delegates Hillary Clinton has right now are not pledged to her – they are based on what superdelegates are saying they will do in July, but they could change their mind, as they did in 2008.

What we saw last night was a shrewd political move to suppress the vote today in the six states that vote today. They could have waited until all of the votes were cast before reporting on a new batch of 25 superdelegates. Clinton is 571 pledged delegates short of securing the nomination. Those are the facts. People in the six states voting tomorrow should not be told that 571 super delegates are more important than their vote.

Sanders supporters should fight on, and change the rules so there is a more democratic process in the future. And they should fight for every delegate. After all, some Democratic Party leaders are talking about finding a replacement for Hillary Clinton if she gets indicted. They want to ignore the Sanders supporters and recruit John Kerry or Joe Biden. They’d better go in swinging.

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Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.

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