What's Tony Thinking

As the Dust Settles

Whoo-hoo! Marie Gluesenkamp Perez won. She defeated a super-MAGA guy, Joe Kent, for the second time. No small feat as her district in southwest Washington State is pretty red. She ran 7% points ahead of Kamala Harris there. Which makes me think of the guy I met when canvassing for MGP last weekend. He was voting for Trump for President but Marie for Congress.

So how did she do it? Here’s an excerpt from a post-election interview at
The Seattle Times.

ST: You were considered the most vulnerable House Democrat, and yet you are set to win by a fairly comfortable margin in a very difficult political environment. How did that happen, and what can Democrats learn from you?

MGP: I just refused to let this race be nationalized. It’s not about the message. It’s about my loyalty to my community. The messenger is the message in a lot of ways. My awareness of my community has been durable, and it’s reflected in my vote record. That is a huge asset.

The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people.

I truly love casework. The other week, we had a case: Somebody was marked as deceased by the IRS; their tax returns kept getting flagged. I got to bring someone back from the dead. We’re at, like, 1,600 cases and $3 million returned to constituents.

Might the Democratic Party, instead of shunning MGP as they did after she refused to fall in line on Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, turn to her to learn something?

In his post-election column, “Voters to Elites: Can You Hear Us Now?,” David Brooks had a paragraph that made me laugh out loud. Here it is.

“There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.”

I have heard some of this, essentially blaming the voters. Better, I’d think, to be curious about what the voters might be saying.

But what I really thought when I read this in the Brooks column was how perfectly it applied to my church/ denomination, The United Church of Christ. We hold to our politically correct positions with an undisturbed assurance of our superior enlightenment . . . while the numbers of our churches and their members approach the vanishing point.

Why didn’t the Cheney’s help? Liz Cheney became an unlikely hero to many liberals for her stand against Trump and her leadership in the January 6 hearings. So how come the endorsement of Dick and Liz, and taking Liz with her on the campaign trail, didn’t seem to help Kamala?

In an article at The Free Press titled “I Raised $50 Million for Democrats. This Week I Voted for Trump,” a former Democratic operative and fund-raiser, Evan Barker, explained the miss with the Cheney’s. Her entire article is worth a read, but she hit a nail on the head when she said taking Liz Cheney into a working-class community was tone-deaf, because those folks there remembered the wars, and the lies, of the Bush/ Cheney administration. Here’s Barker:

“Meanwhile, through the loss of my brother, I knew enough about the military to realize what a mistake it was for the Kamala Harris campaign to trot Liz Cheney all across the Rust Belt. The campaign fundamentally misunderstood all of the middle-class and working-class families who had sent their sons and daughters off to fight the wars of Cheney’s father.”

I’ll give the last word to Dave Zahl who writes a post-election “Letter to Americans” at mockingbird.com His opening paragraph rings changes on I Corinthians 13:

Love never gloats. Love allows others the space to grieve. It does not rush to correct people’s emotions or police their responses, especially those of people with whom we disagree. Love does not tell others they are wrong to feel something, whether that be financial anxiety, or class resentments, or hurt over debasing rhetoric, or terror over perceived powerlessness. Love does not lecture or condescend.

Good words for this post-election time.