Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) knocked the soaring rhetoric of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) while endorsing Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday.
“Families in Baltimore who are hurting right now need more than the promise of a political revolution,” Cummings wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
Clinton “not only understands the challenges facing Baltimore and other cities,” Cummings continued, “she’s laid out a clear and detailed agenda that meets those challenges head-on.”
As the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Cummings has served as a staunch defender of then-Secretary of State Clinton’s handling of the 2012 terrorist attacks that killed four Americans in Libya’s capital.
His position on that panel prompted him to remain neutral in the 2016 race until now, according to the Post, but he made it “abundantly clear” on Sunday that he was fully supportive of Clinton’s campaign.
Speaking to reporters after the endorsement announcement in Baltimore, Cummings advised Clinton to focus on some of the issues that have been cornerstones of Sanders’ campaign if she wanted to unite voters on the left.
“I think that we have to understand that Bernie Sanders is speaking to the concerns of a lot of people and we have to respect those concerns, and I think that if you listen to Hillary Clinton, it’s clear that she’s getting it,” Cummings said, according to ABC.
The thought just occurred to me: what is the source of the Bernie camp’s speculation that given his “momentum” in caucuses and an occasional state, the Super Delegates to the Democratic convention will start to support him?
Why would a Super Delegate to the Democratic convention support a candidate who a) is not a Democrat, and b) is apparently warming to the idea of trashing the credentials and qualifications of the woman likely to beat him?
Sounds like a lost cause to me.
I think Bernie did have momentum coming out of WI that could have made it a lot closer in NY, maybe even another decimal point win. But he blew it up going way too negative way too strong, it looked defensive and amateurish. And following up with ‘she started it’ didn’t help. Whoever told him it was time to attack should be fired.
BE STILL MY HEART…at first glance I thought this article was referring to the Republican Chairman. NOW that was a bridge to far.
Clearly, Hillary is our best shot at the WH. ON that note I think Hillary needs to align herself close to Berne’s message. The DNC as well, BERNIE’S message IS NOT going away anytime soon. IT IS A MOVEMENT. I would rather be on the right page going forward than NOT.
Once he decided to shift his target from influencing the Dem platform to actually winning the nomination, he had no choice but to go negative. He (or his advisers…) realized that he was already nearly hopelessly behind in delegates and needed a game changer: something that would damage HRC so much that it might tempt the superdelegates to defect. That’s the reason I didn’t want Sen. Sanders to stay in the race, I knew that if he were seriously trying to win he would have to go negative on HRC.
Countdown until the BernieBros denounce Cummings as a “Wall Street lackey” and “tool of the Establishment” in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .