During the midterm election next year, the Democratic Party hopes to regain lost ground on Capitol Hill by running a new crop of “service candidates” — men and women whose campaign bios stress their past experience in the military and national security agencies.
One booster of this approach is Elissa Slotkin, a business-friendly Democrat who won a US Senate seat in Michigan last year. She first entered politics as a successful candidate for the House in 2018 after three tours of duty in Iraq as a CIA analyst and then working as a top-level Pentagon official, whose responsibilities included “ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge.”
In a candid interview with Politico, she urged Democrats to ditch their reputation for being “weak and woke” and field more candidates like herself, who have “goddamn Alpha energy” and can “fucking retake the flag.” In pursuit of this objective, her mainly male ex-colleagues in the House who served in the military have created a Democratic Veterans Caucus (DVC), cochaired by Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA), Pat Ryan (D-NY), and Chris Deluzio (D-PA).
The DVC is rightly concerned about MAGA threats like President Donald Trump’s “politicization” of the military and unlawful multistate deployment of the National Guard for domestic policing purposes. According to Deluzio, a former Navy officer, it’s now a very “powerful thing for us to organize, as Democratic veterans, on some of those issues where we can’t reach compromise, and nor should we. We should fight for our values where we can.”
To counter the influence of more than fifty vets on Capitol Hill who are loyal supporters of Trump, the DVC is trying to create “a pipeline for the next generation of veteran and national-security-expert elected leaders.” Its favored Democratic candidates — who tend to be former officers — will get much financial help from the wealthy donors behind VoteVets, a Democratic Party–aligned Super PAC that…
Auteur: Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
