Shalala would spoil Demos chances in Miami’s District 27
Florida State Senator José Javier Rodríguez, State Representative David Richardson, city commissioners Kristen Rosen Gonzalez (Miami Beach) and Ken Russell (Miami), and ex-Miami Herald reporter Matt Haggman all want to represent the Democratic Party in this November’s election that will determine who succeeds retiring republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The prize is the District 27 seat that has seen a major shift to the left in the past few years.
All the candidates are young, ambitious and qualified. It’s a new generation of politicians that Miami is in dire need of. They are all persons with fresh faces and new ideas, and not tied to the past, who have pledged to fight for their district in Washington. And one of them, I believe, will end up as our next member of Congress. That is unless another Clintonite shows up and spoils the proverbial soup.
For weeks the Miami Herald has speculated whether Donna Shalala would jump into the District 27 race. Shalala was president of the University of Miami and after leaving that post became president of the Clinton Foundation. In the 1990s she was the Health and Human Services Secretary under Bill Clinton. Shalala is 77-years-old and under her tenure at the University of Miami a university chaplain called her an “enemy of the working poor” during a nationally followed and watched hunger strike by UM janitors seeking to unionize.
On Valentine’s Day 2018, in a report by the Miami Herald, Shalala announced that she was mulling a run for the district seat and calling herself, if she runs, “the best candidate for the job.”
And it’s not that she’s old. Bernie Sanders is almost as old as Shalala and has more energy than most 40-year-olds, and offers the most progressive platform of most any politician in this country. It is that Shalala would spoil a perfect opportunity for up and coming new, young progressives from the area by the mere fact that she’s tied to the Clintons. And her stint as president of the university — seen as a positive by some — would open old wounds that would hurt the Democrats. Opponents would point to the time when she wanted to keep school janitors from earning a living wage, while she pampered her dog with the luxuries of a million dollar home on Old Cutler Road.
There’s also her hesitancy and willingness to tackle the hard work needed to beat the rest of the field in this highly contested congressional race. She told the Herald that “I’m weighing the kind of work that it will take to get elected. I want to make sure there’s support out there for my candidacy.” I may be totally off base here, but she gives the impression that if the support is out there than she should be the candidate. The door to door work, the endless walking and talking, and the sweating in the Miami sun while doing this may be a bit below her…
The Herald seems to back Shalala’s wishes by stating that “in Shalala, Democrats have never had a bigger name to try to flip the seat.” In other words, she’d be the one to beat.
Wrong. I am convinced that if Shalala were to be the candidate, Democrats would lose that race. She carries way too much baggage, and Democratic and independent voters are looking for someone new, a person who offers a hope and expectations that Shalala can never offer them. And then there’s the Clinton albatross. Although, and this is interesting, Hillary Clinton won this congressional district by 20 points in 2016.
The best thing Donna Shalala can ever do for Democrats in District 27 is to contribute to those young people running, stay home and care for her dogs. And continue teaching her political science class at the University of Miami.
