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At convention, Democrats struggle with stereotypes – of other Democrats

While it's useful to see larger trends of political support, such as white millennials for Bernie, on the streets of Philadelphia there is a far more colorful mosaic.

8. 'We totally respect what Bernie Sanders has done ... [but] he didn't win'

Story Hinckley/Staff
Amalia Duarte (left) and her son Matthew Messina in Philadelphia, Penn. on July 26, 2016.

“Well, I’m not a woman,” says Matthew Messina, in response to how Hillary Clinton supporters are often characterized. “And I’m 13. I’m young.”

“I’m the child of immigrants, I’m a first-generation American,” adds Matthew’s mother and fellow Hillary Clinton supporter, Amalia Duarte. “And I totally love the fact that Bernie got all these young people out. So I’m appreciative that he brought the democratic process back.… My parents came here from Dominican Republic looking for freedom, so I appreciate any candidate that gets people out to vote.”

Matthew nods, adding:

“We totally respect what Bernie Sanders has done. You can’t deny that he brought a lot of people out and created a huge movement. But you also can’t deny that our process is a democratic process and the way it works is that he didn’t win, and they need to kind of come to terms with that and come together as a party, unify.” 

  

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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