Bernie Sanders' stop in Birmingham Monday night revealed at least two important things.

It revealed what's wrong with the Alabama Democratic Party.

And it revealed what's wrong with Hillary Clinton.

But to understand exactly how, you have to know one man in Alabama politics. That man is Joe Reed. And to understand what a poisonous toad he is, you have to wind the clocks back eight years, when Barack Obama was challenging Hillary Clinton's inevitability, much like Sanders is doing now.

You might think that for the Alabama Democratic Conference, the black wing of the state party, Obama's candidacy would have come as harvest of a very long growing season -- one which spanned decades, from voting rights struggles of the 1960s to the nascent campaign of the first black president.

But you'd be wrong. The function of the ADC was never to inspire or support black Democrats. It was built to control them like slaves on a plantation, and Reed was the straw boss -- the slave the overseer gives just enough authority to make him feel important. The straw boss doesn't challenge the status quo. He protects it. It was a system then the Clinton's were plugged into and tried to put to work for Hillary's campaign.

''We're hungry for victory, and by we, I mean Democrats, black ones and white ones,'' Reed said on the day ADC endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. ''I think Hillary has the best chance at victory.''

My colleague Chuck Dean then asked whether Reed thought Hillary was more electable because she was white.

''You just said it. She's white," Reed said. "I think America is readier to elect a white woman than it is a black man.''

At the time, Reed called Obama a very nice young man. He might as well have called him articulate, too.

Alabama Democratic Party boss Joe Reed controls the State Democratic Executive Committee like it's his very own country club, and you aren't getting in.

We all know how this story ends. Obama, obviously, won the White House, but he also won the Alabama primary and he trounced Clinton (and the other four candidates on the ballot) among those voters ADC claimed to represent.

You might have taken it as a sign that the days of ADC and Joe Reed were over.

Again, you'd be wrong.

Since then, Reed and ADC have effectively taken over the Alabama Democratic Party's executive committee and turned it into an overtly racist organization. There are whole swaths of Alabama not represented on that committee because Reed and his followers refuse to appoint otherwise highly qualified representatives on the committee from those districts.

The Alabama Democratic Party doesn't represent the state, but more importantly, it doesn't even represent Democrats in the state. It has turned into a barren plantation, abandoned by its owners after they salted the soil so nothing could grow there, but where the field hands keep tilling the dry dirt because the straw boss never stopped making them. And if anyone shows up at the gates offering real help, they're quickly chased away.

In 2008, Obama showed that, not only does Reed and his quasi political party not represent Democrats, but that Democrats can do an end run around Reed and the ADC -- by showing imagination, inspiring hope and appealing to the wants and needs of the party's people, not the egos of its entrenched political bosses.

You might think that Clinton would have learned something from that experience, but she didn't.

When her 2016 campaign made its big stop in Alabama in 2015, she went right back to the same strategy, not only running back to Reed and the ADC, who hosted her at the Wynfrey hotel in Hoover, but putting them in charge of the event, allowing those in Reed's favor through the door, and showing the door to everyone else.

Which brings us back to Monday night, when Sanders drew a crowd in Birmingham at least twice as big, if not much bigger, than what Donald Trump pulled in two months earlier.

And a lot bigger than Clinton's crowd here last year.

That crowd not only looked a lot more like a real sampling of Democrats -- not only a lot more like Obama's crowds here eight years ago -- but also a lot more like Alabama and America.

And there is no excuse for the Alabama Democratic Party that it can't count those people in its ranks.

And there's no excuse for Clinton, either. It shows that her campaign has fallen back, again, on ward heeler politics. She has shown neither any imagination nor even a reactive adaptability. Instead of seeing 2008 as transformative, her campaign has chosen instead to dismiss it as an anomaly and run 2016 out of the same failed playbook. It is beyond her way of thinking that a white Jewish man from Vermont might be able to do the same thing Obama did here in 2008.

Clinton's rally last year looked a lot like the Democratic Party Alabama has.

Sanders' rally last night looked a lot like the Democratic Party Alabama needs.