Clinton still has a lot of work to do to unify Democrats
To gain the respect and trust of Bernie Sanders voters, Hillary Clinton must utilize some of her “change maker” skills we heard about Tuesday night.
Editor’s Note: Pediatrician Rebecca Mueller, MD, is a delegate representing Iowa at this year’s Democratic National Convention and a supporter of former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. This is the latest in a series of reports Mueller is filing for Medical Economics on her experience in Philadelphia.
Dr. MuellerWhat I heard Tuesday night was different than I expected and it reminded me of something.
As a medical student, it did not take very long to learn about the problem with premature reassurances. Every physician has experienced it, and, hopefully, most of us learn from our well-intentioned mistake the first time. Sometimes a patient comes through the door with a concern, perhaps a big concern that is statistically unlikely, or a small concern we think is not worth worrying about, and we immediately jump to reassure them: “Your child does not have a brain tumor.” “You do not need antibiotics.” “You do not have a gluten intolerance.”
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The trouble is that reassurance before listening never reassures. This is as true in medicine as it is in politics.
On Monday (July 25), ernie Sanders supporters arrived at the convention where Hillary Clinton was described as the next president of the United States in the opening prayer, where the interim Democratic National Convention (DNC) Chair rejoiced in Clinton being “the nominee” during her opening statements of the convention, and where we were told repeatedly to cross a bridge of unity without the bridge being built and with the other side taking no steps to cross it.
The Democratic Party is doing a great job of having an inclusive platform and of fighting in many arenas to ensure that 1st Amendment rights and the preamble to the Constitution are the foundational principles of our democracy. With rare exception, the platform produced in this convention represents a nearly complete unification of ideas between the two campaigns. What the Clinton campaign and supporters may be missing, however, is that for Sanders’ supporters the process of democracy is equally as important (and maybe more so) as the policies in the platform. This includes fairness of elections and the primary process as well as the elimination of special interest lobbying and corporate financing of elections and candidates.
ICYMI:
In the context of a week, and indeed a campaign season, where we felt that the DNC considered Bernie supporters to be outsiders, naïve, impractical and emotional and where our candidate was discounted by the establishment and sidelined by the media-and importantly where we were shown to be correct in our hypothesis by the leaked emails of DNC leadership-it was imperative to start this convention with not only a message of “unity,” but with unifying actions and a demonstration of our shared values and goals.
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