My Kind of Democrat

Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is my kind of Democrat.

The Blue Dog from Washington state keeps winning in a district that Donald Trump has carried… three times. To learn more about one of the few moderates in a party that’s gone off the rails, check out this interview in one of my favorite online publications, The Free Press.

Here are some excerpts from that piece.

On ideological purity: Her success—which she says is rooted in her “respect for people’s reasonableness”—is generally attributed to the fact that she’s a moderate; a co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, Gluesenkamp Perez regularly gets in trouble with her party for voting with the GOP, on everything from immigration policy to environmental matters.

Not that she minds. “I think it’s generally bad for democracy when we’re like, ‘There is one way to be a Democrat,’ ” says Gluesenkamp Perez. “I don’t think that’s good for anybody when there’s one way to be anything.”

On the culture wars: “I came here to talk about what I hear about at the grocery store, and at drop-off, and at the shop,” she says, “and it’s sometimes frustrating to me that it’s hard to get floor time and votes on what I hear the most about from my constituents.”

Culture war issues, she’s suggesting, are getting way too much airtime. “Like, all of the votes that we take on this,” she says, referring to the issue of sex segregation in sports. “Can I just get air-conditioning in the junior high?”

On immigration:  She’s driven by practicality, not ideology. The ICE funding package on the table in January, she has written, “was not perfect, but it was the last real chance Congress had to attach accountability to this agency before the next election.” It would have required agents to wear body cameras, forced officers to visibly identify themselves, and limited their capacity to enforce immigration law at “sensitive sites” such as churches, schools, and courtrooms. The bill would have curbed some of ICE’s worst excesses—but Democratic leaders still refused to endorse it.

“A lot of people didn’t want to get their boots dirty,” says Gluesenkamp Perez. “They wanted to have this purity thing, and I’m like, ‘It’s not about messaging; it’s about utility.’ ”

On environmental extremism: Meanwhile, some of her Democratic colleagues are participating in what she calls “a spectator’s environmentalism” by “pursuing their utopia” at the expense of constituents like hers. “A waterfront with no working boats on it inevitably results in a waterfront with yachts and homeless encampments,” she continues, emphatically. “We cannot have a powerful environmental movement that is based on shoehorning out working people.”

On gender in sports: There’s another culture war in which Gluesenkamp Perez is reluctant to participate: the question of whether biological men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Gluesenkamp Perez twice voted against Republican-led bills requiring schools to segregate sports based on sex instead of transgender status. Seventy percent of the American public favor sex-based sports. So why oppose it?

There are times, says Gluesenkamp Perez, where she might “agree on a premise and disagree on a solution.” Essentially, she is skeptical of how the government could enforce this particular policy without overreaching. “I think that we’re a lot worse off if we have genital exams,” she says.

On abortion: Gluesenkamp Perez, though she is unwavering in her support for abortion access, has little time for anyone who shouts at her about Roe v. Wade when she’s just trying to help the roughly 1 million women in America who spontaneously lose a pregnancy each year. “I don’t think that we should sacrifice the median experience of miscarriage in a culture war on abortion,” she says. (Gluesenkamp Perez has had two miscarriages.)

On college: “In the rush to claim a moral high ground, we do sort of miss this question of: Why do you need a college degree? Why do you feel that this is your entry point into a secure spot in the middle class for your child? And also, why does college cost so much?”

There’s a lot more there. I encourage you to read the full interview and to subscribe to The Free Press. It’s one of the bright spots in the media landscape these days.

One caveat. Gluesenkamp Perez has an unfortunate tendency to speak inappropriately for a public official, a quirk she shares with many politicians of her generation. For example, she’s quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of really great Blue Dog candidates who I think are gonna flip seats this Congress,” she says, “and they’re doing it not because they’re thinking about the partisan shit but because they fucking love where they’re from.”

She didn’t need to use the profanity. I guess young pols think it makes them sound more “authentic,” a word that in itself has earned retirement, or at least a long vacation. I think it sounds unprofessional and, worse, it degrades her office. There’s language that’s fine to use when you have your hair down, but in making public comments public officials should always speak appropriately just as they dress appropriately when they’re on the floor of the House or another such body.