Douglas Schoen, a former advistor to Bill Clinton, predicts in a column in the Wall Street Journal that Hillary Clinton may not be her party’s nominee. He suggests that if Sanders wins California, which he may well do, Clinton, with her legal problems and negative ratings in the polls, may be dumped and the convention could choose Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Schoen says in a Fox News interview that Biden is “chomping at the bit.”
This scenario may be unikely, in a year when politics has brought us many unlikely developents, but it's worth thinking through. Certainly Sanders' supporters should think about how they would react to such a development.
While the Democratic Party establishment might see such a maneuver as a way to overcome the liability of Hillary’s dubious character and unpopularity, it would risk further alienating Bernie Sanders from a party of which he was never a member and will infuriate his base. Sanders’ supporters reject Hillary not just because she’s dishonest and unlikeable, but because of her politics—which are Bill Clinton’s politics, which she always defended, though in the campaign she has been running away from them: freeing the banks from Glass-Steagall, attacking women and children on public assistance, criminalizing and incarcerating more Blacks, Latinos, and working people, trade agreememnts that bring low-wage globalization (including here at home), and humanitarian imperialism (in Haiti, Honduras, Libya).
And, of course, Sanders’ followers—who put the emphasis on democracy—will see even more clearly what they have been learning at every turn, that the Democratic Party is nothing of the sort. The party that denied Sanders endorsements, voter files, and everything else would in the end denying him the nomination. And having Elizabeth Warren on the ticket—a person who, biding her time, has done nothing to defend the democratic process throughout the last several months—would not placate the Sanderistas.
If Sanders himself failed to lead a revolt against such maneuvers, his followers surely would. They would be up in arms at the convention, but more significant, they would surge out of the convention hall to organize something, and it would be big. A mass insurgency against the Democratic Party? Protests against the entire election process? Finally a rebellion against the corrupt two-party system and the banks and corporations it defends? Who knows?
A Biden-Warren ticket or any other such corrupt convention maneuver would be the Democratic Party lighting the fuse to the political bomb that the convention has become. So the question is: Is there any way for the Democratic Party to avoid self-destruction at the convention or what could be the suicide of Hillary’s nomination? The answer is the nomination of Bernie Sanders which might also mean a victory over Trump, but the establishment seems bent on self-immolation.
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