Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean attacked some of his fellow progressives as “whiny” after they criticized Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) for supposedly being too cozy with The Evil One Percent.
“There has always been a section of the left, which I call the whiny party — the party that doesn’t really wanna win, they just wanna be pure, and if they go down swinging purely, then that’s fine,” Dean said on MSNBC.
“Well, the problem with that is it leaves behind the people who really need their help,” said Dean who ran for president in 2004. “If we’re gonna have a single-payer or Medicare for all or whatever, we’re gonna have healthcare that covers every American, as every other industrialized country has, then we all have to pull together.”
Bernie Sanders supporters have been saying Harris is the wrong potential 2020 presidential candidate to look after the people the Democratic Party is supposed to represent.
Winnie Wong, who co-founded People for Bernie, complained that Harris “is the preferred candidate of extremely wealthy and out-of-touch Democratic Party donors.”
Some have raised similar concerns about Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D).
Dean dismissed the criticism of Harris.
“And people who sit out or crank on some candidate because they did this or that that wasn’t to their purity test are basically turning their back on the very people they pretend to represent,” Dean said.
“So I don’t have a lot of patience with this wing of the progressive party.”
