Stories from the streets outside the Democratic National

July 26,2016 2:20 PM

A guy dressed in a rat suit and a sign that says "DemocRATS give rats a bad name


Demonstrators take part in a clean-energy march in Philadelphia on Sunday. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

CONVENTION EVE, 12:55 p.m.: The drugstores in downtown Philly might want to stockpile more aspirin and deodorant.

If I have any prediction for how the Democratic National Convention will go when it starts tomorrow, all I can tell you is that it's going to be in the upper 90s all week and the Berniecrats plan to be out in force on the streets of Philly, protesting the party and agitating for a miracle.

It's 95 degrees right now, and I've already seen more protesters this morning in Philadelphia than I saw all last week in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention.

In fact, I've been wandering through a crowd of at least several hundred demonstrators who gathered around Philadelphia's City Hall for a climate activist rally, and I still have yet to see a single Hillary Clinton sign, button or T-shirt.

What I've seen instead, aside from the anti-fracking and anti-climate-change signs: Sanders shirts. Sanders buttons. A few Green Party shirts. A guy dressed in a rat suit and a sign that says "DemocRATS give rats a bad name," holding a giant pencil with its own small sign that says, "Write in Bernie."

And this was just the first of several rallies and marches planned. There's a "March For Bernie" planned near here in a couple hours.

I moseyed over to a gentleman with a pro-Sanders sandwich-board setup and asked him what he thought about Hillary. "Who's Hillary?" responded Mark Kelderman, 60, of Brownsville, Wis., deadpan at first.

The race for the Democratic nomination is over in all but name only. But like many Sanders supporters I talked to this morning, Kelderman wants the superdelegates to vote for Sanders even though Sanders has endorsed Clinton.

"After I got done throwing up, I decided I would make my own vote of conscience come election time," he said. Not Clinton or Donald Trump. "At this point, maybe Jill Stein," the Green Party candidate.

I asked him what it would take to make him vote for Clinton. "A brain injury," Kelderman said. "I don't see it happening."

***

Another former Democrat.’ Philly is full of them


Rebecca Waring of Baltimore said she was "horrified" by recently leaked Democratic National Committee emails. (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times)

CONVENTION EVE, 2:28 p.m.: Rebecca Waring's sign said "ANOTHER FORMER DEMOCRAT brought to you by DWS and the DNC." The DWS stood for U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. The DNC stood for the Wasserman Schultz-headed Democratic National Committee.

The recent leak of internal Democratic committee emails — apparently showing the supposedly neutral national committee's bias against Sanders — has already whipped up resentment among the Sanders supporters who are gathered around Philadelphia City Hall.

"I made this after I read the emails on WikiLeaks," Waring, 57, of Baltimore, told me. "I was just horrified. So unfair."

I saw another woman with a sign taped on her back that simply bore the words "WIKILEAKS" and "DNC," with the "DNC" crossed out.

Several of the Sanders supporters I spoke to already believed the primaries had been tilted against them — that there had been some kind shenanigans or outright fraud that skewed the vote toward Hillary Clinton.

The emails have now only hardened that view among some supporters who talked to me.

Kristy Marshall, 57, holding a sign reading "DNC: Destroying Nation's Confidence," said she'd already believed there's been "collusion between HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] and DNC." The emails posted on WikiLeaks, she said, were proof.

"To have it in black and white is — huh," Marshall said.

***

Protesters storm the barricades, politely


Protesters are detained and cited as they climb past a barrier set up by police at the Democratic National Convention (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

DAY 1, 5:53 p.m.: One by one, like passengers escaping a disabled airplane, a protester would step out of the crowd, carefully hop over the metal barricade and then politely and immediately get detained by the waiting police. Meanwhile, the crowd chanted, "Election fraud, election fraud, election fraud."

At one point, a whole crowd of protesters tried at the same time to hop over the waist-high metal barricades outside the Wells Fargo Center, where the Democratic National Convention is being held. But even that became orderly after a few seconds of frenzy.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" the cops said to one guy trying to hop the fence quickly. The protester stopped. "Wait your turn," a smiling officer said. "You'll get arrested." He did, and he was — at least for a while.

Bernie Sanders supporters tried to enter the secure perimeter around the conevention tonight, and police told me there have been 55 civil citations issued for disorderly conduct.

From where I'm sitting, I can see a police officer holding plastic zip ties like a bouquet. Hundreds more protesters stand outside the gates of the convention hall, calling for an end to the superdelegates system, the end of money in politics, and for the nomination of Sanders for president.

I had been following around several dozen protesters with Democracy Spring for a couple of hours, knowing they were planning to engage in some civil disobedience that might get them arrested.

They had come down Broad Street in the 93-degree heat. Protesters wore yellow or blue ribbons as clues to their roles — yellow for the marshals managing the crowd, light blue for the "tactical" team.

"Can we talk like this?" Desiree Kane, 34, of Denver asked me as we walked backward, side by side. She had a yellow ribbon, and so she was holding her arms out wide, like a rock singer about to fall backward into a crowd of her fans. She was trying to keep people from blocking the view of the enormous “DEMOCRACY SPRING” banner at the front of the crowd.

Walking backward, I asked her why she was marching.

"You can listen to the chants," Kane said.

So I did.

"Money ain't speech, corporations aren't people."

"One person, one vote."

"We want the billionaires out of politics," Kane said. Typing while walking, my phone auto-corrected "politics" to "platoons."

"At some point, asking over and over again — it goes nowhere," Kane told me. So "we're going to rush up on the steps of the DNC and crash the party."

The Democracy Spring protesters caught the police guarding the perimeter of the Wells Fargo Center by surprise at first, and they broke past a barrier some bicycle officers had created with their bikes. Then, singing the national anthem and "This Land Is Your Land," they sat down and watched the police place metal barricades in front of the crowd.

At that point, protesters started hopping over. Most weren’t really trying to get through the wall of police; it seemed they were just trying to get arrested and make a statement.

"I feel great! It's time!" Phil Jakobsberg, 53, of Silver Spring, Md., told me from beyond the barricade, where a police officer had handcuffed him with a zip tie. "People got to stand up and make change.... It's time for the people to take a stand on our corrupt election system."

And then, as they did with everyone else, the police took him away.
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FOR THE RECORD, 4:48 p.m.: An earlier version of this post reported that more than 50 protesters were arrested. In fact, they were briefly detained and issued civil citations.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-n...htmlstory.html