Democrats Don't Pull Fire Alarms

MGP gets the NYT treatment

A recent Sunday New York Times carried the enviable dateline of Washougal, Washington atop its treatment of US Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, or MGP.

The Washington State Democrat has been initialed into DC shorthand the way they do to partisan firebrands, like MTG and AOC. And, as we recently wrote in Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring, she is certainly an outlier.

But while MGP has the communications skills of partisan firebrands, she is far from a polarizer. MGP talks less about burning bridges than of building new ones.

The NYT article revolves around MGP working to literally build a bridge, and the bridge’s role in MGP’s re-election campaign against the MAGA extremist who defeated the impeachment-voting Republican who previously occupied the seat.

Empty populist rhetoric, the wise-beyond-her-years freshman observes, "might work for one election cycle, but people are going to need jobs. It works until the bridge collapses — and then what?”

MGP is referring to her MAGA opponent, but the admonition holds for both parties. 

The NYT touches on the comparison between MGP and AOC:

When Ms. Perez was elected, her Republican opponents tried to tag her as someone who would operate as an undercover, West Coast version of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young, working-class woman whose election to Congress no one had seen coming. But Ms. Perez said she has little in common with the progressive star from New York, nor has she had much to do with any of the other young women in Congress, even socially.

“Our districts are really, really different,” she said of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. “It is very lonely, working all the time. You go back to your apartment and eat some frozen peas and go to bed.”

If the media (cough, Ezra Klein, cough) is looking for a representative Representative of the party’s actual voters, MGP > AOC.

This is not to pick on AOC - there are dozens of other Acela corridor progressives who face no meaningful electoral competition and, as we pointed out after the midterms in the NYT in “What Really Saved the Democrats This Year”, focus all that time on getting clicks and cash from the progressive marketplace. They’re not fighting tooth and nail for re-election while making cross-country flights back to rural communities.

Leaders Say It Out Loud

Since the bizarro 2020 Democratic presidential primary, we’ve been asking why so few pragmatic leaders speak out about what they - and the vast majority of voters - perceive as out of line behavior from the far left.

MGP, the first-term seat-flipper, has voted to censure two of her uber-liberal caucusmates, one for her rhetoric on Gaza, the other for pulling a fire alarm.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the literal alarm-puller, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a $1,000 fine, and apologized after his staff released messaging guidance that included “inappropriate use of the term Nazi without my consent.”

Only two of more than 200 congressional Democrats joined MGP in censuring Bowman while headlines focused on progressives claiming the vote was an “attempt to silence” Bowman.

In an interview earlier this year on how weirdly out of touch DC insiders can be, MGP noted that “a lot of people in DC need to touch some grass.”

If you, normal reader, had a work colleague who pled guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a fine for pulling a fire alarm when running back late to a big work meeting, then had to apologize for the “inappropriate use of the term Nazi”, wouldn’t you expect your colleagues to say something?

Churched

The NYT article notes of MGP that "her social circle consists mostly of two Republican Bible study groups" and she uttered the following: “I feel like my party is embarrassed I’m a Christian." (Memo to Democrats: stop making members of your party feel embarrassed about how they worship. That is, if nothing else, REALLY bad politics.)

The NYT elaborates:

"Ms. Perez was one of four Democrats who voted for an annual defense policy bill that Republicans loaded full of conservative social policy mandates that would limit abortion access, transgender care and diversity training for military personnel. She defended the vote, saying it was important to support the military and that the Senate was always going to 'clean up' the bill by stripping out the partisan amendments she didn’t agree with."

Note the allowance for nuance within the legislative process. Purity tests < actually getting stuff done.

In Context

MGP’s MAGA opponent, Joe Kent, apparently believes flinging hot-button words at actual policy issues will carry the day. A bridge -- which back in the day used to be a fairly nonpartisan issue -- is now "an Antifa highway" (which, admittedly, sounds terrifying and/or a like soundstage rejected from the "Dune 2" script), and MGP’s agenda is grounded in "protecting biological men’s rights to invade women’s sports, spaces and bathrooms". 

Campaigns like Kent's find traction because there are, in fact, plenty of alarm-pullers in the Democratic Party, both literal and figurative, whose level of concern appears to correlate closely with the amount of time they spend online. Democratic Socialists have made a regular practice of it, fire-drilling their own former party into exhaustion and handing Republicans all the rhetorical wholecloth they need to stitch together artful phrasing like "Antifa highway." Cataloguing the Online Left's penchant for sky-is-falling exaggeration is an exhaustive task and we've made partial attempts at it elsewhere, but the danger only rises as a high-stakes election like November's approaches. 

Unfortunately, it takes a brave soul to commit Democratic heterodoxy these days, in part because the leftovers of two losing leftist campaigns are now so deeply embedded within the Democratic establishment. More Democrats -- those hoping to win elections, anyway -- should be reading off the MGP songsheet.

To make the chorus louder, contribute to MGP on our Win The Middle slate here.

The fires are too often fake, but the threat to democracy is real. Winning Democrats need to call out the ones who are pulling fire alarms -- rhetorical fire alarms and actual fire alarms.