Democrats worried about infighting should remember they've been through it before [View all]

[Zorro]

After all the worrying among Democrats about Bernie Sanders and his supporters going rogue in the general election and refusing to rally behind a nominee who embodies the establishment politics they detest, those concerns are fading rapidly as the presidential primaries wind to a close.

Unity does not look nearly as elusive for the party this year as it did at the end of the bitter primary campaign in 2008, and it is in no small part because the two candidates who went through the bruising process then found themselves in the middle of it again this year. President Obama and Hillary Clinton were determined to see it go more smoothly this time.

The two painstakingly planned how to go about drawing in Sanders supporters before the nomination race was even over. It helped that they had Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), herself a leader of the progressive movement like Sanders, to go along with them. And it helped even more that the alternative to Clinton in November is Donald Trump, a Republican candidate who horrifies even the most steadfast Clinton skeptics on the left.

“Nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars,” said Paul Begala, a longtime advisor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, now the strategist for the main super PAC seeking to elect her. “To Democrats, Donald Trump is not just in a parade of conservative Republicans they disagree with. They view him, rightly, as a bigot.”

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-democrats-unity-20160611-snap-story.html