National Politics

In case you missed it over the long 4th of July holiday weekend, the draft Democratic Party platform was posted in advance of the convention. 2016 Democratic Party Platform DRAFT (.pdf).

Steve Benen writes, Bernie Sanders scores big wins with Democratic platform:

[Bernie Sanders] and his aides turned their attention to the Democratic platform, launching a spirited fight to move the document to the left. As of late last week, there can be little doubt that Sanders has succeeded: as MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald reported, Dems are moving forward with “what is almost certainly the most progressive platform in the party’s history.”

The draft platform states Americans should earn $15 per hour and have a right to join a union, and it supports a so-called “model employer executive order” to raise standards for federal government contractors. It calls for the complete abolishment of the death penalty, stating, “It has no place in the United States of America.”

On Wall Street, the platform lays out a number of reforms proposed by Clinton, Sanders and other Democrats, and states the party “will not hesitate to use and expand existing authorities as well as empower regulators to downsize or break apart financial institutions,” it states.

The document, which is available in its entirety, is surprising in its audacity on everything from free community college to expanding Social Security, overturning Citizens United to banning assault weapons, criminal justice reform to repealing the Hyde Amendment that prevents public funding of abortion.

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The starry-eyed idealists who see themselves as revolutionaries and demand strict adherence to their ideological platform manifesto no doubt will see this compromise as selling out their cause, a betrayal of the glorious revolution.

In this respect, the left really is no better than the Tea Party on the ideological right. They reject the old axiom that “Politics is the art of compromise,” or as Otto Von Bismark framed it,“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” For them, “It’s my way or the highway.”

Nevertheless, more pragmatic and reasonable people are coming together on the Democratic Party platform. Bernie Sanders is getting much of what he wanted, but not all, as is the way of compromise.

David Weigel of the Washington Post reports, Here’s what Bernie Sanders has won in the Democratic platform (so far):

On Friday evening, Sen. Bernie Sanders told supporters in Syracuse, N.Y., that the Democratic Party was not yet embracing the progressive platform planks that he wanted — that the whole movement wanted. On Sunday, he repeated himself, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we’re going to take that fight to Orlando, where the entire committee meets in two weeks, and if we don’t succeed there, we are certainly going to take it to the floor of the Democratic convention.”

In the meantime, four of Sanders’s five appointees to the platform drafting committee had signed off on their partially finished product. (Cornel West was the lone holdout.) Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who had starred in an America Rising video that aimed to show Democrats that they were getting sold out, voted for the platform and praised its “significant accomplishments that move our party firmly toward justice, fairness, and inclusion.”

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