The opening session of the Democratic National Convention Monday afternoon wasn’t a full-fledged rebellion against Hillary Clinton’s campaign managers. But it was a more vigorous assertion of dissent than anything at the Republican National Convention.
The opening prayer was met by boos, and the second presiding officer, Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, accused the crowd of not respecting her and not acting like Democrats.
Correct on the first count: They were cheering for Bernie Sanders and/or against Hillary Clinton. Incorrect on the second: The Democratic party, always a coalition of different constituencies, has often had convention brawls.
The star speaker was State Representative Diane Russell of Maine, who represents (Maine has very small legislative districts) the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of Portland (presumably named after the Mountjoy you find in Ireland). She’s a native, she tells me later in an out-in-the-hallway interview, from Bryant, Maine, the last town in America with crank telephones.
She’s 39, and though she has a Dan Quayle problem (she looks 10 years younger than she is), and though she was asked to speak to the convention only yesterday and at first thought that they meant she would speak from a microphone on the floor, she had the Bernie fans applauding and shouting with glee.
She was on the Rules Committee, where she says she was treated with courtesy by the chairman, former Rep. Barney Frank, and she successfully got a compromise provision requiring yet another reform commission to meet and to reduce the number of superdelegates by two-thirds.
She had first made a motion to get rid of the superdelegates at the Maine Democratic state convention, and that unsurprisingly became a goal of the Sanders campaign since Hillary Clinton won almost all the superdelegates’ votes.
“This is a serious structural reform,” she told the cheering delegates. “We are the party of the 99 percent and the working class.”
This is of course a flattering picture of the Democratic party: Like the Republican party, it struggles to get a little more than 50 percent of the vote, and white non-college-graduates — the exit poll’s best approximation of the white working class — have been voting more than 60 percent Republican, and may do so by a wider margin this year.
“I was terrified,” Russell tells me in the hallway, and “I was out of my league.” She admits she may have mangled a quote from “Harry Potter” (although she used it quite well). She works for a public relations firm writing tech blogs (the legislature is a part-time job in Maine) but, as she says, “One person can stand up and make a difference,” particularly if that one person is dedicated, articulate and almost painfully sincere.
So the Sanders supporters didn’t oppose the rules committee report in any numbers; they got at least something in it. But they clearly dominated the day’s crowd, which may partly reflect the fact that the Monday evening proceedings are left-wing night, with speeches from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
The oldtimers I saw on the floor were making the best of it. South Carolina Gov. (1979-87) and Clinton Education Secretary (1993-2001) Richard Riley compared this convention with “the Trump convention,” which he considered “crazy.” There were very legitimate differences between people, but Hillary won.”
Then he makes a point of vouching for her honesty and trustworthiness, qualiities for which most voters don’t credit her. “I have enormous respect for her. She would be a great leader for the world. I have worked with her. I have never known her to do anything that was not honest or honorable.”
Tamera Luzzato is a longtime Hillary Cllinton supporter and is now bringing her very considerable charm to the task of shepherding the Virginia delegation and helping out with always fractious New York.
In the nicest possible way, she says, “You can’t always get what you want.” Then I spotted Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, standing near the New York standard. “Are things going the way you want?” was my rude question. He smiled engagingly, and paused for what seemed like ten seconds.
I sensed from the look in his eye that he knew that the accurate answer was no and was determined not to say it. Finally he just said “sure” or something to that effect.
In the back aisle I came upon North Carolina Rep. David Price, a former political scientist at Duke who was executive director of the Democratic reform commission headed by North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt which first gave the superdelegates automatic votes at the national convention.
Naturally, he seemed a bit defensive, and he pointed out accurately that the Hunt Commission awarded superdelegate status only to elected officials and party officials. It was the several hundreds members of the Democratic National Committee who voted themselves superdelegates.
Which suggests, though he didn’t mention it, that if you wanted to get rid of two-thirds of the superdelegates you could get very close to that goal by simply excluding the DNC members. The only problem is that the commission’s decision has to be approved by DNC members, who may not be willing to disenfranchise themselves.
Price pointed to one good reason to have superdelegates: You don’t want elected officials and party chairmen to antagonize activist Democrats by running against them for delegate positions. He could have added another good reason, which I summarize by the term adult supervision. And he argued, as I have on numerous occasions, that there is no single perfect way to choose national convention delegates or presidential nominees.
I was in the hall in Chicago when Democratic delegates, against the wishes of Lyndon Johnson’s convention mangers, voted for the plank that set up the first reform commission, which established the rules by which most delegates are selected in primaries. That resolution was sponsored by my college friend Geoffrey Cowan, head of the Annenberg Sunnylands organization, whom I saw recently in Washington.
Now the Democrats will try again, thanks to, among others, Diane Russell.
