The Weekly season 1 episode 8 recap: Hard Left

A change in the party

The Weekly then takes us to the California Democratic convention, the event Sunrise was training for. With no Biden around, they put their efforts into Kamala Harris.

We see one Sunrise member fighting and struggling to get a word in as Harris is flooded with supporters and well-wishers. The Sunrise member was unsuccessful.

Elsewhere, Cory Booker had offered to sign the pledge without even being pestered by Sunrise. This is contrasted with John Hickenlooper who you can see try to politic his way out of having to sign their pledge—claiming that asking people to sign something is dividing people rather than bringing them together.

Herndon says that, by the end of the convention, Sunrise got 16 candidates to sign their pledge. Harris was among them.

Next, Herndon sits down with Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas-D) who says that candidates are gearing their stances now toward the primaries and not thinking about what will happen in the general election. He firmly believes that the party is moving too far to the left.

He says that making far left thoughts the only ones that matter destroys the diversity of the Democratic party. He uses a joke he attributes to President Lyndon B. Johnson which asks what the difference is between a liberal and a cannibal. A cannibal doesn’t eat their own, he says.

The Weekly jumps closer to the debate and Biden is announcing his climate policy, finally. It didn’t completely embrace the Green New Deal, but it used aspects and Prakash and Sunrise got a shoutout and were thanked for their advocacy.

Herndon hops on a video call with Prakash who says Sunrise is taking a victory lap after the announcement. She says the only question is whether or not Biden will go far enough with it.

The Weekly winds down with finally getting to the debate. We join Prakash and some Sunrise members as they watch the second night. The small group explodes with excitement when Harris says, on the debate stage, that she supports the Green New Deal. But, as Herndon points out, this is just one example of many topics where the Democratic party has shifted further to the left.

The episode ends at a Trump rally a few weeks after the debate where Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, says the activists are playing right in their campaign’s hands. Trump issues a message to his base, saying that a vote for any Democrat is a vote for radical socialism.

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination, Herndon concludes, will face the daunting task of facing a Republican party that is energized and united.

What did you think of this episode of The Weekly? Let us know in the comments!