Inside Hillary Clintons Secret Takeover of the DNC (By DONNA BRAZILE November 02, 2017)

[Ken Burch]

418. This isn't about Hillary vs. Bernie

It's about the process.

The 2016 primaries are over and the outcome of those primaries cannot be reversed. We're past that now.

Let's look at the implications of this for the future, the only point in time we can still influence:

If we're going to say that a candidate who can afford to make a huge donation to the party gets some sort of preferential treatment in the nominating process and possibly gains control of the entire party in exchange for a period of time, that means we are no longer democratic in the small-c sense. That means that there is no reason to hold presidential primaries or caucuses or delegate selection at state conventions, because the whole thing will be decided in advance. That means there will be no reason ever to hold another national convention, because a convention at which everything will be a pre-determined formality, at which there can be no debate or discussion, in the run-up to which nobody other than the nominee will have any say about the platform, is pointless. Nothing that matters can happen at such an event, and no one would have any reason to watch or attend such an event.

As to your question:

I don't know how much money Bernie contributed...HRC is massively wealthier than he is on a personal level, so she would always be able to provide more financial help. But is financial contribution the only thing that matters now?

Are we just going to create a culture in this party where we say "only multimillionaires can run for our presidential nomination"?

As to Bernie's contribution...I'd say he brought a massive number of new people into the political process and created the conditions in which those people would see this party as a place where they could play a meaningful role and work for what they believed in. If we don't have all of those people working for us now, it's because there's been a concerted effort to keep the Sanders-Clinton rivalry from ending and a lot of those people are being treated as untrustable outsiders who can't be assumed to be against institutional bigotry or social oppression and strongly pro-choice, even though the prohibitive majority of people on this side of the spectrum center those issues, while also centering economic justice.