Interesting and encouraging profile of Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American progressive who will almost certainly become the new Congresswoman for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District this year.
Rashida Tlaib Is the Left's Way Forward
Highlights:
Rashida Tlaib won a fiercely-contested, four-way Democratic primary, defeating City Council president Brenda Jones -- the presumed frontrunner who had been endorsed by trade unions and Detroit mayor Mike Duggan -- by fewer than 1,000 votes.
She did so by running on a platform of “Medicare for All,” a $15 minimum wage and tuition-free college.
Since no Republican plans to oppose Tlaib in November, she will almost certainly inherit Michigan’s 13th Congressional District from Rep. John Conyers Jr., who resigned the seat he’d held for more than a half-century.
Tlaib will be the first Muslim woman ever to sit in Congress, and just the second Palestinian-American.
Since her presumptive district includes Detroit, the state’s most populous city and the engine of its economy, and the seat carries a longstanding symbolic importance due to her predecessor’s civil rights leadership, she should be able to assume "an impressive, prominent position".
The fact that a Palestinian-American woman will likely soon represent what has historically been a black political stronghold is itself an enormous achievement, "and proof of the appeal in an ultra-liberal district of Tlaib’s left politics and indefatigable campaigning style".
"Tlaib is just as passionate as Sayed and Ocasio-Cortez, but far more poised and knowledgeable—and that makes her far readier to make her mark on Washington.
So why, then, the breathless hype cycle around Sayed’s quixotic campaign, when another true-blue progressive had a far greater chance to make her mark on the national stage?"
In contrast to the refreshingly inexperienced Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib has a track record of progressive achievements in political activism:
Quote:Tlaib, a lifelong Detroiter who graduated from the city’s Wayne State University, quickly built a reputation as an outspoken progressive who had the skill to back up her tough talk, helping to block bridge owner Manuel Maroun’s plans to demolish area homes as part of a long-standing, convoluted dispute over the construction of a second bridge.
Tlaib was even for #AbolishICE before it was cool. In early 2011, amid reports and complaints that ICE agents were conducting illegal searches in her heavily Hispanic district, Tlaib stood with protestors and accused the agency of illegal searches and seizures. “Without warrants, they stalked parents from across southwest Detroit,” she declaimed, according to a Detroit News report at the time.
When Koch Carbon began dumping massive amounts of pet coke on a Marathon site along the Detroit riverfront in her district, smothering houses and cars in noxious dust, Tlaib found little recourse among regulators. So she took matters into her own hands, as she described in a campaign video, trespassing onto Marathon’s property and collecting samples in Ziploc bags. The headlines that followed in the stunt’s wake spurred more protest, and Detroit mayor Duggan eventually ordered Marathon and Koch to remove the piles.
Steve Tobocman, Tlaib’s predecessor in her seat at the state house and her political mentor, described the relentlessness and willingness to sidestep convention that made her such an effective advocate for progressive causes. “Most of us would have stopped and told the residents there’s nothing they could do,” Tobocman said in an interview. “Maybe they would have introduced a bill that would go nowhere in [Michigan’s] Republican[-controlled] legislature, but she went above and beyond, and figured out a way.”
As former state legislator, she has a shared profile in approach and experience with politicians like Keith Ellison, Pramila Jayapal and Raul Grijalva, which poses something of a contrast with candidates with shorter progressive histories who get more airtime, like Cynthia Nixon:
Quote:Not every progressive challenger is going to have the combination of experience, charisma, and a friendly political climate that Tlaib enjoyed in her first shot at national office. […] But if you look at some of the most prominent elected leaders on the left today, they’re proof that the kind of dues-paying, ladder-climbing political trajectory long scorned by much of their base might be the best way to make sure their reforms actually see the light of day. Progressive congressional leaders like Washington’s Pramila Jayapal and the now-departed Keith Ellison were able to develop effective power bases by working their state legislatures relentlessly, building both the political skill and the trust with their base they needed to rise to national prominence—much the same way Tlaib has.
An oxygen-hungry, national-facing “outsider” candidate like Cynthia Nixon in New York, on the other hand, has precious little at their disposal aside from a willingness to tweet the party line and paint themselves in caricatured opposition to their establishment opponent. And should they end up in office, a season-long campaign of bridge-burning may mobilize the base, but also leave them with precious few of the tools and relationships needed to govern effectively. […]
Left organizers have done an admirable job since 2016, to be sure, of correcting course and avoiding the excessive focus on national politics that’s hobbled Democrats in the past. “Progressives view 2018 as a valuable opportunity to put different pieces into powerful positions on the chessboard,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, in an interview. “That includes building the bench locally that will eventually grow into future members of Congress, and even presidents.”
And the wind is clearly in progressives’ sails, much to the chagrin of establishment Democrats scrambling to formulate a response. But there’s no denying that high-profile losses like Sayed’s, and high-profile gaffes like those of Ocasio-Cortez, are […] own-goals […]. Meanwhile, experienced hands like Tlaib, Jayapal, and Raul Grijalva in Arizona plug away for the cause, no less uncompromising than their more camera-ready peers but far more productive, and resistant to missteps at that. It takes all kinds, and someone needs to be the mouthpiece of a movement, of course—but by elevating steady pols like Tlaib in districts that are ready beyond a doubt for the socialist full monty, the left can prove that it’s ready to play in the big leagues.
