The text of Senator Bernie Sanders’s address to the opening night of the Democratic Convention, which follows below, is cross-posted from npr.org.

Good evening. Thank you. Thank you very much. It is an honor…thank you. Thank you very much. It is an honor to be here tonight. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

It is an honor to be here tonight and to be following in the footsteps of my good friend, Elizabeth Warren. And to be here tonight to thank Michelle Obama for her incredible service to our country. She has made all of us proud.

Let me begin by thanking the hundreds of thousands of Americans who actively participated in our campaign as volunteers. Let me thank the two and a half million Americans who helped fund our campaign with an unprecedented 8 million individual campaign contributions. Anyone know what that average contribution was? That’s right – $27. And let me thank the 13 million Americans who voted for the political revolution, giving us the 1,846 pledged delegates here tonight – 46 percent of the total. And delegates: thank you for being here, and thank you for all the work you have done. I look forward to your votes during the roll call on Tuesday tomorrow night.

And let me offer a special thanks to the people of my own state of Vermont who have sustained me and supported me as a mayor, congressman, senator and presidential candidate. And to my family – my wife, Jane, our four kids and seven grandchildren – thank you very much. for your love and hard work on this campaign.

I understand that many people here in this convention hall and around the country are disappointed about the final results of the nominating process. I think it’s fair to say that no one is more disappointed than I am. But to all of our supporters – here and around the country – I hope you take enormous pride in the historical accomplishments we have achieved.

Read more…

Sen. Bernie Sanders will deliver the most important speech of his life on this opening night of the Democratic Convention. But more importantly, his prime time speech could prove to be of pivotal importance for America’s future.

If Sanders rises to the challenge, he can help unite progressive voters to win, not only the presidency, but a working majority of the Senate, House and U.S. Supreme Court. Those are high stakes indeed. But Sanders did not launch a campaign that won primaries and caucuses in 22 states to fade away as a short-lived blip on the 2016 political radar screen.

The stakes have been jacked up even higher by the wikileaks implicating DNC leaders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in partisan advocacy of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and opposition to Sanders, long before Clinton clinched the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. A significant number of Sanders suporters are understandably pissed off about it, and the Sanders campaign call for Wasserman Schultz’s resignation months ago was clearly justified, with benefit of hindsight.

It is important to put the wikileaks controversy in context. There are reports that the leaks were engineered by Russian hackers, likely at Putin’s behest, a disturbing possibility considering the warm relationship between Putin and Trump. There should be no doubt, however, about the timing of the leaks being designed to manipulate public opinion against the Clinton campaign. In that sense, one question is, how many American voters will allow themselves to be manipulated by Russian meddling in our politics.

That possibility is made even more unsavory by Trump’s piling on about the wikileaks, and his direct appeals to Sanders voters to support his candidacy. Chances are he won’t get many votes from angry Sanders voters, most of whom are too sophisticated to get suckered by the likes of Trump.  The greater concern for Democrats is the possibility that increased numbers of Sanders supporters will stay home or vote for Libertarian or Green party presidentical candidates, which is not so different in effect from voting for Trump.

The Republicans will want to put the worst possible face on the controversy, and they will imply again and again, without any proof, that the DNC favoritism was instigated by the Clinton campaign, even though it looks like the DNC leadership was so partisan they didn’t need any encouragement.

Sanders is not the only important speaker tonight. Elizabeth Warren will deliver the keynote address to the convention, and her speech will also be closely watched by millions of progressives nationwide. She, too, has a critical role to play in uniting progressives to defeat Trump. First Lady Michelle Obama provides another big draw. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Sen. Cory Booker will also speak to the convention tonight.

I expect that both Sanders and Warren will do their best to support Clinton. Anyone who has paid close attention to Sanders during the last year — and throughout his career — can see that he is wholly dedicated to the vision of a progressive future for America. His campaign, contrary to comments made by some of his critics, has never been about gratifying his ego. By any fair measure, he is one of the most deeply-committed U.S. Senators, always focused on reforms to advance social and economic justice.

Some Democrats grumbled that Sanders didn’t support Clinton fast enough, after she clinched the needed number of delegates to win the nomination. Both he and Clinton wanted to time his endorsement for the optimum moment when it could do the most good. I will be greatly surprised if he doesn’t do everything he can to defeat Trump and elect Clinton.

Wasserman Schultz has tendered her resignation as head of the DNC, effective at the end of the convention. As of this writing, however, she is still expected to address the convention. This may be a really bad idea, especially since she has not yet apologized to Sanders. Her appearance could be the most divisive moment of the convention and would likely invite protest both inside and outside the convention center.

Part of the dilemma facing Democratic leaders is that Wasserman Schultz has been a highly-effective fund-raiser for Democrats, particularly in Florida, a critically-important swing state. She also did an excellent job of organizing the 2012 Democratic convention. No doubt Clinton and the Obama Administration are looking for a way to allow her to save face, while playing a diminished public role at the convention. If she has real dedication to the success of the Democratic Party, however, she should take the initiative and bow out gracefully.

So day one of the Democratic convention will have more than its share of high drama and reason for good ratings. If Democrats, lead by Sanders and Warren, can leverage the increased public attention into an opportunity to educate and inspire the confidence of millions of American voters, this can be another Democratic convention that shows which political party is best prepared to govern wisely.

Immediately after Hillary Clinton’s announcement of Sen. Tim Kaine as her running-mate, I discussed at New York some of the negative sentiment expressed about this option even before it was exercised:

For all the talk of Kaine as a sort of political wallflower, he is actually an estimable man who has won losable campaigns in a state Republicans may need to win this year. He has a reputation as being ethically spotless, which matters a lot this year — any hint of scandal in a running mate could be disastrous for Clinton. As has often been noted, he is fluent in Spanish, which is not only a good weapon in a campaign against Donald “Deport ‘Em All” Trump, but a sop to those who were disappointed that the Veep was not Hispanic.

Despite the pushback from progressive Democrats when Kaine emerged as the front-runner for this gig, he’s by no means some sort of warmed-over Blue Dog. He’s a career civil rights lawyer in what was then a pretty conservative state — let that sink in for a bit. He was also the mayor of a relatively large and diverse city. He was elected governor despite an opponent pounding him relentlessly for a faith-based opposition to capital punishment, and he was smart and agile enough to turn the issue around and make it a positive. These are all good signs of both Democratic orthodoxy and political dexterity.

The one issue on which progressives have asked very legitimate questions about Kaine involves another faith-based position: his “personal opposition” to abortion. He’s been about as clear as possible in recent weeks that he’s firmly and comprehensively pro-choice, as he would absolutely have to be in a Hillary Clinton administration where the president is not exactly going to have to consult him or anyone else on this issue.

So the heartburn from the left that’s undoubtedly being felt tonight almost entirely involves economic issues, and beyond that, the sense that choosing Kaine is an insult to Bernie Sanders’ following, which could also provide an opening for Donald Trump.

In a vaccum Kaine’s unfortunately timed expressions of support for less regulation of regional banks, and for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aren’t necessarily deal-breakers for a Veep. The first issue does not involve the biggest banks that are the target of progressive ire, and the second, after all, aligns him with the Democratic President of the United States, whose popularity throughout the party remains high despite occasional lefty grumbling.

But Kaine’s economic heresies highlight the fact that Sanders supporters (and even some more ideologically liberal supporters of her own) expected Clinton to move towards rather than away from them in choosing a running-mate. Given the Clinton family reputation for taking the Left for granted or even triangulating against it, raising Kaine to the ticket plays some bad old tapes in the minds of many progressives. And it’s not like the Virginian has the sort of inspirational personal story that’s going to appeal to the young Sanders voters whose November turnout levels are in doubt. With the Republican nominee posturing as an anti-Wall Street, anti-status quo candidate, there may even be fears that Kaine will expose the ticket to further erosion of white working class support.

You have to figure Hillary Clinton is counting on Bernie Sanders (with a supporting cast of other progressives, including passe-over Veep prospects Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown) to put a halt to any serious revolt against the Kaine selection when he speaks in Philadelphia. Endorsements aside, the most important thing the Clinton-Kaine ticket has going for it in avoiding disunity is the alternative, made so plain in Cleveland this last week. As a progressive acquaintance of mine put it earlier this week when Kaine started looking inevitable: “On one side of the scales you’ve got a ticket made up of two people with troubling attitudes towards the financial sector. On the other side, you’ve got maybe fascism. They are not even remotely of the same weight.”

In that sense, the Clinton-Kaine ticket is “safe” in a more fundamental sense, and even “boring” is not so bad when compared to the bellowing bully-boy who was nominated in Cleveland.

After giving some thought overnight to Donald Trump’s big and nasty speech in Cleveland, I offered these observations at New York:

Donald Trump’s law-and-order thematics in his acceptance speech Thursday night offered little documentation for his claim that the country is ablaze with violent crime. Yes, he mentioned a spike in homicides in selected cities, and that’s real, though the experts tell us it’s unclear at this point whether it reflects a general increase in violent crime after decades of steady declines or just a blip.

But you know what? Trump doesn’t care. That there is a perception of a “crime wave” is enough to create a demand for a “law and order” politician, and that posture fits in so beautifully with his overall persona and message that it’s not surprising he chose it as central to his campaign.

For the same reasons, Trump feels no particular need to offer solutions to the quasi-problem of crime he has highlighted. As Matt Yglesias notes today, the president of the United States has but a limited role in dealing with street crime, but has some tools — yet Trump didn’t mention any last night (or in other recent pronouncements) other than the determination to appoint tough prosecutors and law-enforcement officials (and that was probably thrown into the speech as an allusion to the FBI’s decision not to ask for criminal charges against Hillary Clinton rather than having anything to do with violent crime).

But the lack of specific policy ideas is hardly a new thing for Trump. Yglesias attributes it to laziness and limited staffing. While that could be part of the rationale for vagueness on crime and many other issues, an even simpler explanation is that Trump’s whole platform is himself, a strongman in the ancient tradition of tribal chieftains whose very presence is a guarantor of safety and prosperity. Whatever the problem is, he’ll “fix it,” and that’s particularly true of challenges where “strength” is, in theory, of inherent value, such as maintaining a credible deterrent to foreign aggression, negotiating trade agreements, or in general threatening law breakers with violence. Adopting policies like other politicians actually undercuts this message, so Trump doesn’t bother with them. The convention managers last night might as well have emblazoned on the screen behind him Pontius Pilate’s words in presenting Jesus to the people of Jerusalem: Ecce homo! Behold the man!

Yes, strongman politics reassures some people and frightens others, and that’s fundamentally why Trump is such a polarizing figure, and also why his supporters thought his speech last night was a home run, while his detractors thought it was straight out of the Mussolini playbook in length, tone, and substance. When Trump and other speakers last night spoke of “making American one again,” it was clear the rapturous delegates in the hall really did think a strong father figure could somehow quell dissent. To the rest of us, the unity talk sounded like a threat to all of the “others” in this country to shut up or risk the silence of the grave.

At Daily Kos Greg Dworkin rounded up some insightful and funny tweets responding to Trump’s 75-minute GOP convention speech, including:

David Brooks: “Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution…It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained…Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.”

Ezra Klein: “He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash….He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind. He has continued to retweet white supremacists, make racist comments, pick unnecessary fights, contradict himself on the stump, and show an almost gleeful disinterest in building a real campaign or learning about policy.”

No matter how much lipstick Trump’s spin doctors put on the pig, there’s no denying that Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement stole the show — and the headlines — describing day 3 of the GOP convention.

“Cruz Speech Exposes Cracks in G.O.P.,” got the big headline type on the front page of the Thursday morning edition of the New York Times.

The Washington Post lead with “Attempt for unity falls short as Cruz upstages Pence.”

The  Los Angeles Times went with “Day 3 of the GOP convention restarts the war over conservatism.”

“Ted Cruz Snubs Donald Trump: Vote Your Conscience” blared the headline at the Chicago Sun-Times.

At the host city’s portal, cleveland.com, it was “Ted Cruz gets booed, but he also gets the better of Donald Trump: Wednesday’s RNC takeaways.”

In his Thursday New York Times column, Frank Bruni summed it up,

…Cruz had made his point and done his damage, providing the latest (and most vivid) illustration of how little control Trump has been able to exert over his own coronation, how much rancor he has failed to exorcise, how few bridges he has succeeded in repairing, how far short he has fallen in making these four days in Cleveland as dazzling and exciting as he’d long promised they would be.

In other words, yet another day of botched opportunities and convention mismanagement under the stewardship of a candidate whose claim to fame is his business acumen.

Trump can’t be very happy with the way Cruz’s diss played out. He tried to spin-tweet it as an indication of his tolerance for free speech, since he claims he expected it. He may have been hoping for a last minute gesture of support from Cruz, despite the fact that Trump never apologized for implying that Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination, insulting Cruz’s wife or calling Cruz “Lying Ted.”

Veep nominee Pence nonetheless showed he has some public speaking chops and did a competent job of introducing himself and larding out unmerited praise of his running-mate. However, as Ed Kilgore noted at New York Magazine, “once again, Trump has lost control of his own convention. Pity poor Mike Pence, the ostensible headliner of the evening, whose introduction to the convention was already under the cloud of the Trump-Cruz confrontation — the only thing that people will be talking about in the hours after this session.”

Not much else was newsworthy on Day 3. Scott Walker was predictably ineffectual, while wingnut radio yakker Laura Ingraham generated some excitement, though she may want to work on her hand gestures.

Despite the mismanagement of the convention so far, tonight Trump delivers the most important speech of his political career. The suspense will be in how much he reads from the teleprompter script vs. going off on an extemporaneous rant. Trump is not very good at working the teleprompter, as was the GOP’s sainted Ronald Reagan. If the convention substance so far is any indication, his addresss will be long on Obama/Clinton-bashing, but very short on ideas.

Meanwhile, Clinton and her fellow Democrats can only be encouraged by President Obama’s improving approval rates, a pretty reliable indicator of the success of the party in the White House in upcoming elections.