Four of the five Democrats running for president spoke at the DNC summer meeting
One candidate wants everyone to relax over those emails. A second is convinced he can start a political revolution. Another demands more debates. The other hopes you remember who he is.
What began as an orderly quorum to rally Democrats for the 2016 general election spiraled on Friday into a chaotic pageant of candidates slamming debate schedules, assuaging fears over emails, lambasting Donald Trump and demanding political revolution.
Four of the five Democratic candidates for president addressed the Democratic National Committee members and leaders at the party’s summer meeting in Minneapolis, each seeking something different.
The three-day confab is a key forum for the Democratic candidates to garner establishment support for their campaigns. Their speeches on Friday evinced tensions within the party and a wide range of interests. But one battle line was clear: there’s the establishment wing of the party, and there’s everyone else.
Here’s what each of the candidates aimed to prove at the DNC summer meeting, in the order that they spoke.
Lincoln Chafee: The former Rhode Island governor and senator, who has the mild demeanor of a mid-level manager, is polling at an unenviable 0.5%.
So Chafee spent most of his brief speech reminding the Democratic Party who he is. He boasted of his qualifications, telling the audience that as a prescient senator from Rhode Island in the early 2000s he voted against the Iraq War, warned of the dangers of climate change and supported a bipartisan immigration bill.
Plus, he has never been accused of a major scandal. “And all through these 30 years of public service, I’ve had no scandal,” Chafee said. “I’m proud of that.”
Hillary Clinton: The Democratic frontrunner, firmly in the lead for the nomination with nearly 50% in an average of recent national polls, aimed to assure the DNC’s leadership that she is the strongest candidate to rebuild the party after bad losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms.
She vowed on Friday to help rebuild a Democratic Party whose ranks have been thinned by losses at the local and state level, telling top leaders of the Democratic National Committee that her campaign will help Democrats “win up and down the ticket.”
“I’m building an organization in all 50 states with hundreds of thousands of volunteers who will help Democrats win races up and down the ticket, not just the presidential campaign,” Clinton said. “You know, in 2010 Republicans routed us on redistricting, not because they won Congress but because they won state legislatures. It’s time to rebuild our party from the ground up. And if you make me the nominee that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Meanwhile, her surrogates rounded up super-delegates at the DNC three-day meeting in an effort to build up a bulwark of support before the primary contests next year. Her goal is to assure Democrats uneasy after a rough August of press around her use of a personal email server.
Clinton also told reporters after her speech that the obsession with her emails is a passing fad. “I’m not frustrated,” she said in response to a reporter’s question, who asked her how she is feeling about a kerfuffle that has damaged her trustworthiness among voters. “I’m just trying to explain for people who have never had to follow this before that is is complicated. There’s nothing unique about [the] process being conducted around my emails.”
Clinton, whose Priorities USA super PAC was trailing behind Jeb Bush’s fundraising efforts by nearly $100 million as of June, compared high-dollar fundraisers to the wealthy industrial magnates of old. “The robber barons of the late-19th century handed public officials bags of cash,” Clinton said. “Now we have secret unaccountable money that distorts our elections and drowns out the voices of everyday Americans.”
The Republican Party, Clinton said, is scrambling over itself to look backwards. “The party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump,” she said.
