Donna Shalala is running for Congress
That is wrong in so many ways.
Wrong for the district.
Wrong for Miami.
Wrong for the Democratic Party.
Wrong for the Country.
Wrong for the times.
The times are not for establishment Democrats, or recycled Secretaries, or straight down the middle, dance-with-the-devil Democrats financed by big donors.
That was one of the messages of Hillary Clinton’s defeat despite more money, better qualifications, and a monstrous adversary.
It’s the message of the astonishing success of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign against Clinton’s formidable political machine, which we later learned included the Democratic National Committee’s vigorous and unethical efforts to tilt the playing field for Hillary.
It’s the message of novice Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s breathtaking defeat of a powerhouse of the Democratic Party, going, in the blink of an eye, from waiting tables to vanquishing the fourth most powerful Democrat in Congress.
It’s the message of the March for our Lives kids who have had the guts to take on the NRA, conventional wisdom, and establishment Democrats’ impotence and fear of the gun lobby.
Donna Shalala is the perfectly wrong candidate for the times. She is as establishment, follow-the-money Democrat as they come. Donna Shalala also is wrong for the district. I have lived in this district over half my life. Donna Shalala has never been seen around my middle class neighborhood, a “leafy suburb of modest well-kept homes” according to a real estate research report. Donna Shalala fits the mold of the political class that has enabled the Great American Inequality—the rich pretending to support the interests of the middle class and the poor.
The fact is that, in terms of class, culture, and language Shalala has no connection to the area. She is no racist, but her contact with Latinos has more often been with the well-heeled conservative elite who sit on the University of Miami Board of Trustees than the woman or man in the streets of Shenandoah or Little Havana.
One of the slams against Hillary Clinton was that she was unprincipled, fatally compromised by a cozy and lucrative relation with players on Wall Street. The same charges can be laid at the feet of Shalala, with even more justice.
At the University of Miami, when a case came across her desk in which a candidate for a position had received the unanimous support of the selection committee, which wrote the person was the only applicant qualified for the position, with which the Dean concurred, Shalala ignored the academic peers on the committee, Dean’s recommendation, and the principle of academic independence and freedom of speech. Instead, she colluded in the ongoing blacklisting of the candidate by powerful conservative forces on the Board of Trustees and the community. In doing so, she contributed to maintaining the Miami Vise, the tacit agreement among the local powers that be to deny a public platform to those who are despised by anti-Castro fanatics and Zionist zealots.
I was that person. The blacklist was so effective that I had to move to Washington DC to make a living. I made more money there but I was miserable having been run out of a job, out of my community, out of my city, and away from loved ones and dear friends.
Shalala’s positions on key national issues also are wrong for Miami and the country. She claims she can work with the NRA. Work with the NRA, the enablers of gun violence in academic institutions from elementary schools to universities, including locally the horrific massacre at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School? The NRA bullies and punishes. It doesn’t work with anyone who doesn’t come to them on bended knee. Is Shalala proposing to do that? Or is this the kind of empty promises typical of establishment politicians?
Shalala also opposes universal, publicly-funded access to health care. Every other rich country has it. It works. The overwhelming majority of the people of those countries like it. We are the retrograde exception, and it costs big in morbidity, mortality, and money. Why does Shalala oppose it?
Donna Shalala is wrong for the Democratic Party. If she wins the Democratic primary she is likely to face Maria Elvira Salazar, a Spanish-language television celebrity, and Shalala will probably lose a winnable seat for the Democrats. I know Maria Elvira. I disagree with her across the board ideologically. But—and this is rare for me—I like her. She is personable, even charming. Maria Elvira is, to use an untranslatable but superb word, simpática, a key attribute, for Cubans at least. She is relatively young and decidedly attractive. She is new to politics. She is everything Donna Shalala is not.
Who, in the end, is Donna Shalala, and what makes her tick? Ambition unchecked by conviction, conscience or compassion. That ambition may end up denying the Democratic Party control of the House of Representatives.
