Hey Democrats, This Florida Primary Could Be Your Future---It's about Donna Shalala,
I personally like Shalala and know her from the Univ of Wisconsin-Madison. I wish her well.
Hey Democrats, This Florida Primary Could Be Your Future
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-this-florida-primary-could-be-your-future_us_5b118d41e4b010565aabe3d0
It’s about Donna Shalala, who served in the Clinton administration, and whether she is a real progressive.
By Jonathan Cohn
MIAMI ― Donna Shalala has led a Cabinet agency and three different universities. Now she is running for Congress, vying with four other Democrats for a shot at a South Florida seat that looks like one of the party’s best pickup opportunities in the midterm elections.
At 77, Shalala would be among the oldest people ever to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time. But age seems unlikely to stop the preternaturally energetic Shalala’s bid, and it’s not clear anything else can, either.
It was just three years ago that Shalala stepped down as the University of Miami’s president. After a highly visible decade and a half in that position, she has by far the strongest name recognition of any Democratic candidate running. That’s no small thing in a district where ethnic diversity and a splintered media environment make it difficult to reach large numbers of voters at once ― and where the primary, set for Aug. 28, is less than three months away.
Shalala also has easy access to campaign cash and endorsements from organizations like EMILY’s List, the liberal fundraising group that focuses on electing Democratic women who support abortion rights and that Shalala helped found more than 30 years ago.
“Few people have dedicated their careers to fighting for working families the way Donna Shalala has,” the organization’s leaders gushed, citing, among other things, her role in creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program while she was secretary of health and human services under President Bill Clinton. Today, 9 million kids and pregnant women have access to health care because of that program.
Shalala’s unabashed support for large safety net programs and reproductive rights, along with her efforts to fight hate speech as a university president, helps explain why by the 1990s she had developed a reputation as something of a radical, or what passed for one in Washington at the time. Prior to her confirmation hearings, a pair of conservative Washington Post columnists warned that she was the “farthest to the left and most controversial of all of President-elect Clinton’s Cabinet appointments.”
But a quarter-century has elapsed, the political environment has undergone some profound shifts, and now Shalala is drawing criticism from the other side of the ideological spectrum ― on the left, where some rivals and columnists are arguing she has proved to be an overly cautious, instinctively moderate politician who compromises her principles and sometimes her own integrity.
The basis for the critique is Shalala’s tenure at Miami, where she clashed with labor unions and environmentalists while serving on cushy corporate boards, as well as her close associations with the Clintons, whose centrist streak and cozy relationship with wealthy financiers alienated many of the party’s progressives long ago. More recently, Shalala has attracted scrutiny for her commitment to universal health care, which one of her competitors says is weak, and her self-described wariness about eliminating private insurance in order to enroll everybody in a version of Medicare.
It’s easy to get carried away with arguments like these. The distinctions between Shalala and her rivals are smaller than they seem, especially relative to the gap separating all of them from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies. Still, some differences exist and they raise a genuinely important question: What does it mean to be a progressive nowadays? ........................
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Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has represented a South Florida House district since the late 1980s. . Now she is leaving Congress, in part because the Republican Party has left her.