New York’s late spot on the election calendar almost always means the two main party’s presidential nominees are a done deal by the time we get to vote in the primary.
This year is a little different obviously.
The scramble for committed delegates is a lock to be hot on both sides in the run-up to NY’s April 19 primaries.
What’s nice about it if you follow politics is that the candidates will actually spend time here trying to win votes the old fashioned way rather than simply swooping in and out for campaign cash.
Bernie kicked off his New York campaign with an event at a public park in the South Bronx Thursday night. I went over there after I got off work at 215 PM.
The Sanders campaign had alerted supporters of the gathering via e-mail two days earlier. They asked for a RSVP but offered few details about the event’s logistics other than the fact they would start letting people in at 4 PM.
When I arrived in Mott Haven about 3 PM, the western perimeter of St. Mary’s Park was cordoned off with a combination of plastic tape and physical barricades with access blocked by uniformed NYPD. It was unclear from the campaign’s e-mail where the entrance to the event was. Based on movement of people wearing Sanders stuff, it became clear the south border of the park was where the action was.
It was very chaotic at the intersection of St. Mary’s and Cypress where it appeared they were setting up to let people in. A little to the west at Beekman, a long line of media were going into a separate entrance.
I could have easily blended into the scrum at Cypress and walked in when they started admitting people at about 4 PM, but then it became clear a line had formed. It stretched for as far as the eye could see up the eastern border of the park. There was no visible attempt by the campaign to administer or implement a plan to process this huge crowd so most of these thousands of people who were already there seemed to take it upon themselves to create a queue, however imperfect it turned out to be.
So, I walked and walked until I found the end of the line up near 147th St. and hoped for the best. It was 330 PM at that point. A little after 4 PM, the line started to creep but then a second impromptu line containing latecomers appeared to thwart orderliness.
NYPD appeared only interested in keeping people off the street – not at all concerned about the logistics of the big line and whether there was a fairness to it. And because this was a massive gathering of the true political left, there wasn’t any kind of bickering or dissent about how this was all playing out.
At about the three hour mark waiting in line, I had almost reached the entrance. I was so close. But it was there that the NYPD said the “park was full” and that we would be siphoned off into a ball field to watch the rally on a video screen.
The ball field we flowed into had just been aerated so it was kind of messy. The video screen was big but the audio was hard to hear. It was 630 PM at that point. A rep from the Sanders campaign came to the podium in the main gathering spot (which we saw via video) and said the “program” would start in one hour. Even before Bernie would speak, there would be oration from a musician (Residente), an actor (Rosario Dawson) and a film director (Spike Lee).
I’ve seen Bernie’s stump speech a hundred times and so I didn’t feel like standing in a ball field watching a video screen in the dark. Had I made it into the actual rally, I would have stayed for sure. But I wasn’t feeling it in the ball field. I walked up to 149th and got on the train at Third Avenue.
I watched the full tape of the “program” the next day. Bernie actually didn’t alter or customize his speech much for the NYC audience. Dawson was pretty awesome and is a clear asset to the campaign. She’s almost alarmingly abrasive in her criticism of Hillary but why not state the obvious and allow the surrogate to do what the candidate has been pretty reluctant to do.
The media seemed to coalesce around a crowd estimate number of 18,500. I’d say if anything, it was higher. Impressive for sure. Clinton could never dream of assembling an audience of that size and energy level at this stage of the campaign. While the crowd at St. Mary’s Park tilted white, it was anything but a homogeneous collection of people. I had a lump in my throat as I stood there in line seeing the wonderful diversity in a crowd that had given up half their day to feel the Bern.
I guess the question for the Sanders campaign is whether they can convert the clear passion here for his ideas into a NY primary result that allows him to make the case he can somehow snatch the nomination away from the long-presumed winner. He’s down 12 points in the latest poll in NY which he can easily eat into in the next two weeks. What he needs is a clear-cut 55-percent or above-type outcome. There is no actual “win” from a simple 51-49 result given the proportionate delegate split. So, he needs a tidal wave. Something that puts ants in the pants of the so-called superdelegates who are nothing more than math-padding establishment yes-men (and women).
The mayor here – Bill deBlasio – is in a totally weird place as this all plays out. He has publicly endorsed Clinton after a long delay but shows no authentic zeal for her campaign – and vice-versa. When deBlaz and his wife went to Iowa in the days before the caucuses, the Clinton campaign wanted nothing to do with the coordination of their activities. DeBlasio’s politics mesh way more closely with Bernie’s. But like deBlaz’s betrayal of Zephyr Teachout during her primary run against Andy Cuomo, the Mayor makes these ham-handed alliances that seem to favor the “don’t bite hand that feeds” concept over one’s very pure and popular ideals.
I’ve come to terms with the idea the nomination is stacked in favor of Hillary but hope Bernie’s success in Wisconsin, New York, the state of Washington and hopefully California can move her to the left. In the end, Hillary will be Hillary I guess. But at some point, these little hints of revolution that you saw in Mott Haven on Thursday offer some hope the “bought-off, more-of-the-same” model is losing its luster.