The long-simmering notion among many grassroots liberals that the national party is in the tank for Hillary Clinton spilled into public view on Friday, as a nasty fight between Bernie Sanders and the Democratic National Committee tore into the open.
Some liberals have long held that the DNC’s sanctioning of fewer debates this cycle, with half of those debates taking place over a weekend, was an attempt by the national party to shield Clinton from scrutiny and ease the path to the nomination for the prohibitive front-runner.
But the Sanders campaign and supporting liberal activist groups didn’t start making that case publicly until Friday, when controversy erupted over the DNC’s handling of revelations that a Sanders staffer had been fired for inappropriately accessing Clinton voter files housed on a central party server.
Some Democrats believe that bringing the hammer down on Sanders — his campaign has been shut off from its own database of voter files until the situation is ironed out — hands grassroots liberals the ammunition they needed in a war they’ve been agitating for.
“From a process standpoint, the DNC may have done the right thing,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, a veteran of Howard Dean’s 2004 insurgent campaign. “From a political standpoint, they played right into Sanders’s hands.”
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The other working title was “Food fight at the old folks home”