A Contested Convention Is Exactly What the Democratic Party Needs

By John Nichols, Moyers & Company

05 May 16

Bernie Sanders will go to Philadelphia with more pledged delegates than any insurgent in modern history. Here’s what he could do with them.

oe Biden understands something about the Democratic Party and its future that his fellow partisans would do well to consider. “I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big — we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic,’” the vice president told The New York Times in April. “C’mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I’m not part of the party that says, ‘Well, we can’t do it.’” Mocking Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Bernie Sanders for proposing bold reforms, Biden dismissed the politics of lowered expectations. “I like the idea of saying, ‘We can do much more,’ because we can,” he declared, leading the Times to observe that, while Biden wasn’t making an endorsement, “He’ll take Mr. Sanders’s aspirational approach over Mrs. Clinton’s caution any day.”

Unwittingly or not, Biden made an even better case than Sanders has for taking his insurgent campaign all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. If the party is going to run in 2016 on a “do much more” agenda — as opposed to triangulating around the center — the Vermont senator’s supporters and like-minded Democrats, including Clinton’s progressive backers, will have to force the issue. Taking the Sanders insurgency to the convention is the paramount vehicle for placing demands that are ideological and, as Biden’s comments suggest, also strategic. That’s one reason why Sanders promised in a statement on April 26 to go to the convention with “as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform” — despite the fact that Clinton’s delegate advantage now all but guarantees that she will win the nomination.

What Sanders is proposing is a necessary quest — and a realistic one. Already, he is better positioned than any recent insurgent challenger to engage in rules and platform debates, as well as in dialogues about everything from the vice-presidential nomination to the character of the fall campaign. As veteran political analyst Rhodes Cook noted in a survey prepared for The Atlantic, by mid-April, Sanders had exceeded the overall vote totals and percentages of Howard Dean in 2004, Jesse Jackson in 1988, Gary Hart in 1984 and Ted Kennedy in 1980, among others. (While Barack Obama’s 2008 challenge to Clinton began as something of an insurgency, he eventually ran with the solid support of key party leaders like Kennedy.) By the time the District of Columbia votes on June 14, Sanders will have more pledged delegates than any challenger seeking to influence a national convention and its nominee since the party began to democratize its nominating process following the disastrous, boss-dominated convention of 1968.

This new reality has Clinton supporters fretting about the prospect of a chaotic convention that could expose divisions within the party when it should be uniting for what increasing looks like a fall fight against Donald Trump. But a muscular appearance by Sanders and his delegates at the convention doesn’t have to lead to bitterness. Historically, contested conventions — not carefully choreographed coronations — have led parties and their nominees to take more audacious positions and to excite broader electoral coalitions.

“Conventions are where we come together, but you don’t really come together if you avoid differences,” says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has protested, attended or spoken at nearly a dozen Democratic national conventions (and who has not endorsed a candidate in the primary race this year). “You start by understanding that it takes two wings to fly. If you have two strong wings — a wing that has won and a wing that has lost — you don’t deny the differences; you recognize them. You debate, find common ground, find ways to start working together for immediate goals — the next election — and for long-term goals that can mean as much to the nation as to the party.”

Recent conventions have been so tightly scripted that it’s easy to forget that both parties have long histories of contested gatherings — sometimes with open combat over the party’s standard-bearer (as may erupt at this year’s Republican convention), but often with spirited competition over rules, platforms and the very nature of the party itself. Contested conventions can open policy debates and clear the way for “significant political and social progress,” argues Fitchburg State University professor Benjamin Railton, who has analyzed the history of conventions. With 18 state wins so far and more than 1,350 delegates, Sanders is uniquely poised to push for such progress. Since Clinton will likely arrive at the convention with a majority of the pledged delegates and a lead in the popular vote, she’ll have every right to argue, as she did in April, that “I am winning. And I’m winning because of what I stand for and what I’ve done.” Front-runners rarely invite input from insurgent challengers, and if Clinton chooses to wall Sanders off, she’ll have the upper hand in Philadelphia. In January, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz appointed a pair of Clinton allies, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, to head the platform committee. And an ardent Clinton supporter and noted Sanders antagonist, former congressman Barney Frank, will cochair the rules committee.

But Clinton’s decision to adopt what was initially Sanders’s position on a host of issues, from wages to climate change to trade policy, shows that her campaign recognizes that a substantial portion of the party’s base — as well as its potential base — is attracted to Sanders’s more aspirational message. And the pressure to make that recognition a part of the Democratic platform will grow as the committees expand before the convention and Sanders aides urge the DNC to deliver on the promise made by spokesman Luis Miranda: that the party is “committed to an open, inclusive and representative process” for drawing up the platform, and that “both of our campaigns will be represented on the drafting committee.”

If Sanders advocates gain sufficient representation to provoke debates, what are the likely pressure points? Like Jackson and his supporters, who forced rules reforms and the diversification of the DNC in 1988, the Sanders camp could champion a more open and representative Democratic Party. There could be calls for reducing or eliminating the role of superdelegates, for a better approach to scheduling debates and for consistent primary rules to avoid dramatic variations in turnout based on whether the primary is open or closed. Even though Sanders ran well in caucuses, his backers could gain credibility by also arguing that caucuses are too incoherently organized and difficult to participate in to be justified. On all of these issues, Sanders supporters would have to establish alliances with Clinton backers who recognize that it is time to “democratize the Democratic Party.”

The prospect of aligning with Clinton supporters, especially progressive members of Congress and labor activists who will attend the convention as superdelegates, creates even greater openings for platform fights. Prospective nominees tend to favor weaker platforms; Harry Truman would have preferred milder civil-rights commitments than were made in his party’s 1948 platform, and it took steady pressure from unions, liberals and Ted Kennedy to get Jimmy Carter to finally embrace spending on jobs programs. It will take similar pressure to get Clinton and her inner circle to accept a Democratic platform that Sanders says must include “a $15-an-hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health-care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.” Clinton stalwarts may want to keep things vague, but look for the Sanders team to demand specifics, such as an explicit endorsement of a national $15 minimum wage instead of the $12 proposal that Clinton initially offered, and an unequivocal rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that President Obama supports and that Clinton once championed but now criticizes.

As it happens, many of Clinton’s most passionate allies have been outspoken supporters of the fight for $15, fair-trade policies and proposals to break up the big banks. One of them, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a potential vice-presidential pick, has argued publicly that Clinton “should work with [Sanders] on the platform” in order to strengthen the party’s appeal. Other Clinton backers like Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and nonaligned House members like Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan could play a critical role in steering the party toward unequivocal opposition to the TPP. There could also be room for cooperation on addressing mass incarceration, passing constitutional amendments to get big money out of politics and guaranteeing voting rights for all.

Sanders backers want to win these platforms fights — not to make a point about their campaign, but to make a deeper point about what the Democratic Party must stand for in order to win the 2016 election and the future. “The convention can amplify what this campaign made visible — that there are millions of Americans who are hurting — and say that the Democratic Party has to respond to that pain with bigger and bolder policies,” says Working Families Party national director Dan Cantor, a veteran of the 1988 Jackson campaign who is now a Sanders backer. “Democrats who want to win a big majority in November, to take back the Congress and to move forward in the states, know that the party has to stand for something that excites young people, that excites working people. No matter who the nominee is, the party has to take a big-vision stand.”

The Circles of American Financial Hell

By Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic

05 May 16

There’s no escaping the pressure that U.S. inequality exerts on parents to make sure their kids succeed.

ore than a half-century ago, Betty Friedan set out to call attention to “the problem that has no name,” by which she meant the dissatisfaction of millions of American housewives.

Today, many are suffering from another problem that has no name, and it’s manifested in the bleak financial situations of millions of middle-class—and even upper-middle-class—American households.

Poverty doesn’t describe the situation of middle-class Americans, who by definition earn decent incomes and live in relative material comfort. Yet they are in financial distress. For people earning between $40,000 and $100,000 (i.e. not the very poorest), 44 percent said they could not come up with $400 in an emergency (either with cash or with a credit card whose bill they could pay off within a month). Even more astonishing, 27 percent of those making more than $100,000 also could not. This is not poverty. So what is it?

As people move up the income ladder, they escape material shortages and consume more. They have “things”—goods, houses, and, most importantly, education—to show for their higher earnings, but they do not have healthy finances. Having those “things” is of course an improvement over not having them, but only for the very, very rich (or the very, very unusual) is there any real escape from the pressure-cooker of American household finances.

At its core, this relentless drive to spend any money available comes not from a desire to consume more lattes and own nicer cars, but, largely, from the pressure people feel to provide their kids with access to the best schools they can afford (purchased, in most cases, not via tuition but via real estate in a specific public-school district). Breaking the bank for your kids’ education is, to an extent, perfectly reasonable: In a deeply unequal society, the gains to be made by being among the elite are enormous, and the consequences of not being among them are dire. When understood mainly as a consequence of this rush to provide for one’s children, the drive to maximize spending is not some bizarre mystery, nor a sign of massive irresponsibility, but a predictable consequence of severe inequality.

There’s not a great term for this phenomenon and its consequences. Often, scholars and writers will use some variant of the phrase “financial insecurity” or “fragility” to describe it, but this does a disservice, implying that living paycheck-to-paycheck carries risks, that something bad could happen. But where would that show up in this measure? For millions of people without savings, those bad things have already come—they’ve had to make an emergency car repair or pay an unforeseen medical bill. They’d still answer a survey question about whether they had $400 on hand in the negative, and the survey would miss entirely that they had already experienced such a need. Risk is certainly part of the problem, but lots families are facing issues that aren’t hypothetical and in the future—they are real and immediate.

Other existing terms fall short too. More colloquially, many refer to the speed of American life as a rat race, but that’s more of a reference to the hard and fast pace of work than it is to the broken finances many face at home (though surely the two are related, as the need for more money at least partially motivates that pace). Another, separate, phenomenon that people discuss is the “hollowing out” of the middle class, but that refers to the distribution of incomes becoming more polarized, leaving fewer in the middle, not the struggles faced by those still there.

Neal Gabler, the author of The Atlantic’s story on this problem, decides to go with the phrase “financial impotence,” which succeeds in capturing the powerlessness that many feel when confronting a financial abyss. There are ways in which this is apropos—men, in particular, have seen their earning power diminish in recent decades, and Gabler isn’t the first to draw a connection between financial power and sexual power. But this is an unfortunately narrow framing of a financial crisis whose casualties are so often women.

The failure to put a proper name on this dynamic is a part of a broader failure to understand it—and to see it as a problem at all. (Cognitive scientists have a great term for this—“hypocognition”—which refers to when, as linguist George Lakoff puts it, “the words or language that need to exist to frame an idea in a way which can lead to persuasive communication is either non-existent or ineffective.”) The most common and straightforward measures of households’ financial health look at income: Are incomes rising? How many people are earning less than $40,000? How many are earning more? But a measure of income alone completely misses the fact that few are getting off this earn-and-consume hamster wheel, even as they earn more. Wealth statistics do a better job capturing just how much trouble Americans have building up real assets and savings (and the answer is: a lot of trouble), but don’t capture at a week-to-week, month-to-month level how hard it can be to cover one’s bills.

In the absence of a good understanding of what is going on, people frequently disparage those who are suffering. There are two common reactions to The Atlantic’s May cover story. On the left there seems to be a lot of, “Boohoo, a rich person who spends too much. We have real poverty to worry about.” On the right there was more of, “He made bad decisions and blames the system, our glorious system, for it!”

Yes, it’s not real poverty, and, yes, Gabler made bad decisions. But Gabler’s straits, and the straits of millions like him, demonstrate gross dysfunction at the core of the American system. If millions of people with healthy incomes are in Gabler’s situation, something is very wrong.

What is that something that is preventing people from turning their earnings into prosperity? Many have pointed to wage stagnation as the culprit, arguing that of course Americans can’t get ahead—they don’t have enough money to get ahead! And making more money would certainly help Americans afford better quality goods, housing, services, and so on—all of which are incredibly important. But there is little reason to think that higher wages would enable families to build up a financial cushion that would allow them to sleep easy at night. In fact, even the very richest largely do not put away what economists would consider a healthy retirement savings. For the vast majority of people, higher wages do not seem to translate into financial security.

So it stands to reason that the problem—insofar as it is in any real sense a definable, single problem—is driven by something that is happening on the spending side of the equation. Why can’t people live below their means, save up some money, and kick up their feet?

The place to start is by looking at what they are spending their money—and particularly their loans—on. The biggest expenditure? Housing, by far. (Transportation is next, but a good portion of that—gas—is in some ways a housing cost as well, since it’s a function of one’s commute.) And the biggest sources of debt? Housing and education. The average loan burdens for mortgages and student loans dwarf auto loans or credit-card debt, the other major types of debt that Americans tend to carry.

Housing and education appear to be two distinct categories of spending, but for many families they are one and the same: For the most part, where a family lives determines where their kids go to school, and, as a result, where schools are better, houses are more costly. This is both cause and effect: Where houses are expensive, the tax base is bigger and schools have better resources, and where schools are better, there is more demand for housing. Zoning restrictions exacerbate this dynamic, because many rich municipalities with excellent public schools oppose the density that would allow more people to access their schools, which in turn drives housing prices up further. So in a sense, for many people, housing debt is education debt.

It’s all too clear why parents will spend down their last dollar (and their last borrowed dollar) on their kids’ education: In a society with dramatic income inequality and dramatic educational inequality, the cost of missing out on the best society has to offer (or, really, at the individual scale, the best any person can afford) is unfathomable. So parents spend at the brink of what they can afford. By contrast, non-parents are far more likely to actually build up savings. (In cases where parents do manage to find affordable housing in a district with good-quality schools, it can make all the difference.)

It’s possible to imagine a country where the schools are good everywhere and prosperity is widespread. In such a country, parents don’t pour their resources into maximizing their kids’ educational quality, because their kids will have basically the same outcome anywhere. That’s not the country America is.

Gabler, for his part, sent his daughters to private school—an enormous expenditure, but one that many families prioritize at the expense of financial well-being for fear of missing out on the winnings in a winner-take-all system. As Gabler writes, “We resolved to sacrifice our own comforts to give our daughters theirs.” Considering the stakes, this is not a mistake (despite what many commenters have insisted) but a rational response to the unequal distribution of America’s good schools and its prosperity more generally. And there’s reason to think this may yet pay off for Gabler. True, he has no savings. True, he lives very meagerly. But he has two very well-educated and successful daughters. They are, in a sense, his retirement plan: Barring extenuating circumstances, they will be in a position to care for him and his wife in their later years. We should all be so lucky.

In a sense, the people who say rising wages would help are on to something, but the key is not getting households more money—it’s about building a different system, one in which the upside to getting ahead isn’t so high, and the downside to falling behind isn’t so low. Better wages are a symptom of such a system, but they don’t themselves bring one about. That would require systemic changes—changes to the tax code, changes to corporate-governance practices, changes to anti-trust law, changes to how schools are funded, to name a few. Such reforms are far off, or may never come at all. So for the foreseeable future, Gabler’s problem may be yet unnamed, but millions will know it all too well.