Amid booing by Bernie Sanders backers, the chairwoman of the San Diego County Democratic Party said she had trouble hearing speakers Monday night at her party’s convention in Philadelphia.
But Francine Busby, the chairwoman, predicted the California delegation will unite behind Hillary Clinton for president.
“It’s really clear this morning,” Busby said Tuesday after attending a state delegation meeting at the Philadelphia Marriott. “We had the most fabulous breakfast.”
Noting the “passionate” pitches Monday by Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Busby said: “Everybody agrees with them. They’re with Hillary. It went a long way to uniting us.”
Within the ranks of Sanders delegates, she said, people are celebrating the progress made in changing her party “and the ongoing revolution we’re going to have. So I believe that we are there. I think that most people are there” — ready for Hillary despite their booing Sanders at his breakfast appearance Tuesday.
Busby, a longtime Clinton supporter, said she sat right next to a group of the loudest Sanders fans at the Wells Fargo Center, “and so for me I had eight hours of people shouting and booing. … It was hard to listen to that for eight hours.”
But she said clearly the majority of the people at the convention were “encouraged and enthusiastic about our speakers. The grand finale with Michelle Obama was fantastic.”
She contrasted average San Diego voters with the Sanders delegates who “tend to be very, very involved in the minutiae of politics” upset about retiring national party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and accusations of her favoring Clinton via the debate schedule.
“Democrats will move forward to unite and win this election,” Busby told Times of San Diego in a brief interview at the Philadelphia Convention Center.
She defended a recent column in which she wrote: “The only thing missing from the Republican National Convention mobs and their hateful chants, whoops and hollers are the white hoods.”
Tuesday, Busby said: “I really felt that the divisiveness and the racist comments and hatred at the Republican Party was so strong and so integrated into their entire message and their being that it really was scary.”
She hoped her likening Republicans to the Ku Klux Klan people wouldn’t offend people.
“I think they really have to listen to what was being said and realize that I’m not the scary one. They are.”
How might Clinton win over voters — and even Sanders supporters — who say she can’t be trusted?
Busby said Clinton faced this challenge as a result of 30 years of being “attacked and undermined by the press and the Republican Party.”
“But I think when you have validators like President Obama and Michelle Obama and Vice President Biden and all the others that we heard — Sen. [Cory] Booker and [Al] Franken — how they worked with her. That’s going to go a long way to settling people’s minds, I believe.
“She’s been framed like this — like so many others.”
Times of San Diego contributing photographer Chris Stone reported from Philadelphia, with contributing editor Ken Stone from San Diego.
