Nobody cares what's in the platform

Of course it's a good idea to do whatever one can to move the party away from blind fealty to hyper-militant Israel. But I hesitate to use even the word, symbolic, here to describe the actual significance of this.

The presence of Dr. Zogby and Dr. West on the 15-member panel, which also has six appointees of Hillary Clinton and four from the party chairwoman, does not guarantee their views will prevail. But it raises the prospect that one of the party’s most sensitive issues will be open to public debate while Mrs. Clinton is in a fight to unify her party and appeal to voters turned off by Donald J. Trump.

It also laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

At the end of the day, though. Nobody cares what the platform says or who was on the committee. The actual candidate for President is Hillary Clinton. And we know where she stands.