The Democratic National Committee apparently still doesn’t like Bernie Sanders or his supporters.
DNC Vice Chair and Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison clashed with a Bernie backer on Wednesday as he was attempting to hold a press conference to slam Republicans and President Trump.
A video of the incident shows Ellison enacting mob rule, asking for a show of hands of who would like the man to stop talking and to “go on with the press conference.”
Ellison attempted to get the man to stop asking questions about the party’s position on single payer health care, and the DNC leader refused to answer the question and instead argued back.
“Why can’t the Democrats pass a single payer program? Why did they kick Bernie Sanders out of the debates as he was talking about singler payer and Glass-Steagall?” he asked.
“Look, man…” Ellison responded.
“You guys want to go on and on about the Republicans. Democrats are as much to blame,” the man said.
“Can somebody call security?” Ellison snapped.
“He wants to be pulled out of here so lets accommodate him.”
Instead of answering the questions and moving on, Ellison battled the Sanders supporter.
“I mean, that’s what you want, ’cause you won’t let us continue on, right?” Ellison said.
As the man continued to ask questions, Ellison continued to not answer them and instead, worked to eject him from the room.
“Look, can we get someone to help us?” Ellison said in vain, waving his hand to get people to hurry up.
“Okay, we’re going to get somebody to help you, if that’s what you want,” Ellison said as the man stopped.
The DNC and Sanders supporters have had a prickly relationship since internal emails showed the party attempted to undercut Sanders during the presidential primaries last year.
The Guardian reported last July:
The emails include several stinging denunciations of Sanders and his organization before and after the DNC briefly shut off his campaign’s access to the party’s key list of likely Democratic voters.
The DNC temporarily curtailed Sanders’ access to the list in December 2015, after the party accused his campaign of illegally tapping into confidential voter information compiled by the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign briefly sued the DNC but the parties reached an accord, and the suit was dropped in April.
The emails show that after the furor over the voter records was resolved, hostility simmered from top DNC officials over the Sanders campaign.
In mid-May emails with Miranda, his deputy, Mark Paustenbach, questioned whether the DNC should use the spat to raise doubts about the Sanders campaign.
“Wondering if there’s a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,” Paustenbach wrote.
Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach’s take: “True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we’ll have to leave it alone.”
The same month, in another email to DNC officials, another official identified only as “Marshall” said of Sanders: “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps.”
Leave a Comment
COMMENTS POLICY: We have no tolerance for messages of violence, racism, vulgarity, obscenity or other such discourteous behavior. Thank you for contributing to a respectful and useful online dialogue.