Earlier today, Keith Ellison tweeted a link to an article titled “If You're Liberal and You Think Hillary Clinton Is Corrupt and Untrustworthy, You're Rewarding 25 Years of GOP Smears”.
The article was written in January and is certainly worth a read. I agree with the article that the caricature of Clinton as corrupt and untrustworthy is unjustified and is the result of decades of RW attacks. I agree with the article that both Bernie and Hillary are good people trying to make peoples lives better, with the main difference being a matter of path to the goal, not the goal itself.
I know… Hillary isn’t running again, Bernie isn’t running again, so who cares. What’s the point?
Ellison followed the above tweet with this one...
I can’t say for sure what Ellison’s motivation was for linking to that article, but two things struck me.
Ellison is currently being attacked by some Democrats using smears that originated with Republicans, just like Hillary was. This needs to stop. We need to stop attacking our own. We need to stop demonizing people who should be allies.
That does not mean we can’t disagree or argue about the direction the Democratic Party should move. But there’s a constructive way to do this and there is a destructive way to do this.
And that’s the other point that struck me.
Ellison has a positive view of the Democratic Party and people like Hillary who have tried to champion progress.
Ellison is widely viewed as a progressive champion. Many here strongly support his candidacy to head the DNC. It is not lost on me that some of the people supporting Ellison have a strong dislike of Hillary and the Democratic Party. Whether they dislike the actual Democratic Party or just a caricature of the Party is debatable.
What is not debatable is that Ellison does not share that view. He does not hate the Democratic Party. He does not try to demonize or tear down our own.
“I'm trying to do addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division.”
— Keith Ellison
We should all take a lesson in tone. We need to constructively improve the Democratic Party without attacking each other.