Bernie Sanders has gone all Rambo on the Democratic establishment, putting the splintered party on the verge of open warfare — with one veteran senator predicting Wednesday that this summer’s nominating convention might erupt in riots, as at the infamous 1968 gathering in Chicago.
“It worries me a great deal,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said of Sanders’ vow to take his campaign against Hillary Clinton all the way to the July convention in Philadelphia.
“You know, I don’t want to go back to the ’68 convention because I worry about what it does to the electorate as a whole — and he should, too,” Feinstein told CNN.
Chicago cops and anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed violently at the party’s convention in August of that year.
After the June assassination of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was running on an anti-war platform, anti-war Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy faced off against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had vowed to continue the Vietnam policies of retiring President Lyndon Johnson.
Humphrey emerged victorious, enraging the anti-war left.
Party tensions spiked this week between Team Sanders and the national party after the Vermont senator’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, accused national party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of trying to stop Sanders’ populist outsider candidacy.
“It’s been pretty clear almost from the get-go that she has been working against Bernie Sanders for personal reasons,” Weaver told MSNBC.
“It’s clear there is a pattern of conduct from the beginning of this campaign that has been hostile to Bernie Sanders and his supporters and really she has become a divisive figure in the party.”
Weaver slammed Schultz a day after she blasted Sanders supporters’ rowdy behavior during the Nevada Democratic state convention last weekend.
Sanders’ backers overturned furniture, threatened state party officials and had to be escorted out of a Las Vegas convention hall by cops after party bigs disqualified 58 state delegates supporting Sanders.
Nevada’s Democratic Party charged that the Bernie backers posted state Chair Roberta Lange’s personal info online and threatened her and her family.
Sanders condemned the violence, but mixed that with a swipe at the party’s leadership.
On CNN, Weaver accused Wasserman Schultz of “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign since the very beginning.”
He criticized the party’s decision to limit the number of debates and hold some of the showdowns on weekends.
Wasserman Schultz replied, telling CNN, “My response to that is SMH,” an acronym for “shaking my head” in disgust or disbelief.
She said Democrats needed to focus on getting through the primary season and working to prepare for the general-election campaign against presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, New York Democratic Party officials assured the Sanders campaign and its local supporters that they will be treated fairly at Monday’s state party convention — to avoid a Nevada-type debacle.
“They want everything to go smoothly. They don’t want to happen in New York what happened in Nevada,” said Sanders’ New York campaign lawyer, Arthur Schwartz, who on Monday held a preliminary meeting with the Clinton campaign and state Democratic Party brass.
With Post wire services