Hillary Clinton supporter Cynthia Dill has a colorful vocabulary to describe supporters of Bernie Sanders: “bozos,” “angry scrum of Bernie Bros,” “loons,” “bums,” “idiots.” (“Cynthia Dill: Excited for Philadelphia, despite strife on all sides”) Dill was surprised that anyone would find that offensive.
Dill has defended her piece as satire. It isn’t, it perfectly expresses her feeling of entitlement. “People who appear to have it all are thought to be incapable of understanding or helping people who have nothing,” Dill had said. No, people who seem incapable of seeing others as human, nevermind equals, are thought to be incapable of understanding or helping others. Dill is a Democratic Donald Trump.
As it happens, Dill believes it crucial that Trump be defeated. She does not seem to understand that victory in November is not just another attribute that will be hers automatically as part of being “‘rich’ or found living in a nice town or driving a new car.” If Dill wants Clinton to win, her candidate is probably going to need votes from those distasteful “fringy elements.”
For the record, the “extremists” who went as Sanders delegates to Philadelphia from Maine included four lawyers (I am one), several present and former members of the Maine legislature, two representatives from Maine to the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a scientist working on a US military base, a one-time president of a union and three current union leaders, a USM professor and others contributing similarly to the Maine community. Pretty dangerous group.
Which may be why Dill has said – as if it makes it better – that she didn’t mean us, she meant some other extremists. But no one conformist enough to join the corporate Democratic Party is an extremist – unless disagreeing with Dill is enough to make us so. Sticks and stones and all that. But the more purple Dill’s prose, the more the Democratic Party seems dangerously unhinged.
Dill’s language is not a good way to convince people not already in her choir that Clinton and the DNC have values worth supporting.
A couple of weeks before Dill’s rant, Clinton and the DNC unveiled a neat new slogan: Stronger Together. As in, Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters walking hand in hand. Neat. New. But totally on the surface. It is not enough to have a slogan “Stronger Together.” As long as Cynthia Dill remains a voice of the Clinton campaign and Sanders supporters continue to be treated like children throwing tantrums there will be fallout.
Fourteen million Sanders supporters are not just not extremists, we are also not a fringe – we are almost half the Democratic Party. We are two-thirds of the Democratic Party in Maine. Establishment Democrats cite a Pew Report that at least 85 percent of Sanders supporters will end up voting Clinton. That strikes me as grossly underestimating the level of discontent. But even if true, that is over two million votes Clinton almost certainly needs and might not get.
Clinton is starting to lose those votes. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein got 0.36 percent in 2012, according to realclearpolitics.com. Stein now sits at 3.3 percent, more than any Green Party candidate has ever gotten before.
This might not sound like much, but remember that Ralph Nader supposedly tipped the 2000 election with 2.74 percent of the vote, but 1.63 percent in all-crucial Florida. Stein is already in game-changing territory. And her numbers are increasing.
And if Sanders supporters stop thinking kindly of the Democratic Party as a whole, that is two million votes down-ticket Democrats might not get either. Goodbye prospects for winning the Senate, gaining in the House, or changing the face of state politics.
The numbers suggest that Dill’s stated lack of concern about how Sanders supporters vote could be catastrophic for the Democratic Party across the country.
Candidate Clinton and the Democratic Party have three months to convince squalor-loving “[l]eftists… stomping around waving stapled sheets of tobacco-stained paper” that “Stronger Together” means something more inclusive to them than it does to Dill.
Because the longer Cynthia Dill is taken as a voice of the Democratic Party, the worse the Party is likely to do.
Though Dill could always get a job as a Trump speechwriter.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
