Michigan lawmaker represents new face of House
Slotkin among Democratic women from military
Elissa Slotkin met her husband on her third tour in Iraq at the palace of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
Slotkin, a top Pentagon adviser on Iraq at the time, and U.S. Army Col. Dave Moore were part of a U.S. team sent to negotiate with the Iraqis in 2009.
“Our entire life has been connected to serving our country and serving in combat zones,” she said after a morning spent on her family farm in Holly, northwest of Detroit.
A few hours earlier, she had unseated a congressman who admitted publicly he was a bit stunned. “This didn’t work out the way I anticipated,” Rep. Mike Bishop told reporters after learning the election results.
But people who know Slotkin weren’t surprised at all.
“Don’t get in a knife fight with Elissa,” said her brother Keith Slotkin, a scientist based in St. Louis who said anyone who knows his sister expects her to prevail, regardless of the odds.
Elissa Slotkin defeated incumbent Bishop, a lawyer by training and former
Republican state senator from Rochester.
Raised on a Michigan farm, she brings to life one example of the changing face of American politics. She is among 96 women officially declared winners of U.S. House seats on a night Democrats seized control, up from 84 female members in the current Congress.
Slotkin is joined by other Democratic women with national security experience, including a former Navy pilot in New Jersey, an Air Force veteran in Pennsylvania, and a retired Navy commander and former CIA officer, both from Virginia.
Her own credentials are more impressive than the sound bites of campaigning. She was a CIA team leader in Iraq in 2006-07 who advanced to the White House as National Security Council director for Iraq, then to the State Department and Pentagon, where she was acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from January 2015 until Donald Trump took office in 2017.
Her LinkedIn profile says she “played a leading role designing the counter-ISIS strategy,” helped oversee $40 billion a year in arms sales and “chaired the U.S.-Russia channel on flight safety over Syria, the senior-most channel between the two governments.”
Michigan and its jagged-edged Congressional District 8, which stretches across the middle of the state, had been watched by national strategists for months.
Both political parties spent big money. An estimated $26 million poured in, according to campaign filings. Candidates raised about half and outside groups spent heavily on an endless loop of vicious TV ads.
Slotkin, 42, wondered aloud how many military spouses serve in Congress.
“Our family lives military and veterans issues in a way few others do,” she told the Free Press. “My stepdaughter, who is based in Alaska right now, is a brand-new lieutenant in the Army. She could be deployed in 18 months. And another stepdaughter is a physician for the VA.”
Slotkin continued: “I bring a voice to veterans’ issues in a real clear way. On military insurance, I know in extreme detail both the positives and negatives with military health care. I know from personal experience the issues veterans are facing, issues around PTSD, making sure our military officers and enlisted can transition to new careers.”
She believes America must do more to help veterans coming home connect with businesses and job training programs.
“And we need to ensure high quality and timely health care — that, specifically, means filling the large (staffing) vacancies in southeast and mid-Michigan” at VA medical centers, she said.
Her husband’s help
In public and private, she recognizes her husband for his ongoing support, which included walking Brighton and East Lansing precincts with her in the rain on the last day of the campaign.
Moore, a retired Army colonel who flew Apache helicopter missions, now works as a counter-terrorism planner.
She emphasized:, “People are looking for leaders who know what it means to negotiate in good faith, work across the aisle, get something done and who don’t believe compromise is a dirty word. My entire professional experience and Dave’s entire professional experience is working for our country, not a party.”
During Slotkin’s victory speech just before 1 a.m. Wednesday and again later, she said her politics serve all residents who live in the predominantly Republican district.
“We’re bringing back the term of a Midwestern Democrat,” she said. “That is, practical, reasonable and willing to work across the aisle to get things done. Independently minded and laser focused on this simple idea: All hardworking American families deserve a fair shake. No more and no less. People want rational, positive, empathetic leadership.”
While Slotkin raised and spent the most money, she declined to accept corporate money from political action committees. And she won’t in the future, either.
“I got a lot of angry phone calls from a lot of senior Democrats when I made that announcement,” she said.
“That was not a positive series of calls. But I did it out of principle. I believe money is poisoning Washington. It undercuts progress. If politicians are bought and sold by big drug companies, how can you have a real conversation about lowering the cost of prescription drugs?”
Democrats moving to Washington in January 2019 bring new perspective, she said.
“I understand certain parts of the (Democratic) Party are leaning further and further left but also further toward pragmatic, hardworking, getting things done, American dream party. If our party is not doing something for people’s pocketbooks or kids, we don’t deserve their vote,” she said.
She holds firm her opposition to the reelection of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco because it’s “time for a new generation.”
She tells of having a Republican father and a Democratic mother.
“In Michigan, we fought about sports, Michigan versus Michigan State or Michigan versus Ohio State. Those are the things that got people agitated. We were always a swing state of Democrats and Republicans. This vitriol has been imported from Washington.”
Now, supporters tell stories of stressful Thanksgivings divided by politics and play dates that are ruined by parents who argue.
“That’s not how we were here and not how we want to be,” Slotkin said. “Adults can disagree and still respect each other.”
‘That is our history’
For now, Elissa Slotkin is planning regular town halls to better understand the views of her constituents as she advocates on their behalf.
Her top priorities: Protecting health care coverage for pre-existing conditions, clean water, tariffs and careful oversight of how the U.S. military is deployed.
“In my district, in the Huron River, we can no longer eat the fish. We cannot eat the deer that forage around the Huron River. We have a problem. We need to accept that problem. We need a once-in-a-generation investment in our water infrastructure. Our state has the greatest concentration of fresh water and we cannot provide clean drinking water to our citizens.”
She sees tariffs as another issue creating concern among constituents.
“Everyone understands the instinct of President Trump or anyone to want to push back against China,” she said. “Unfortunately, the tariffs are making the cure worse than the disease. People are starting to feel the impact. We lease our land to a soybean farmer and he’s living with a whole new level of instability. The price of soybeans is dropping and markets are closing off to him.”
Her emotion rises when she talks about sending U.S. military forces into combat zones, saying that Congress “has abrogated responsibility” dictated by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution when it comes to authorization. Politicians have indicated it’s “too politically sensitive” to “weigh in on deploying forces to fight and serve abroad.”
She worries about basing current U.S. military action on old information and what she sees as a clear lack of congressional oversight and engagement.
As for Operation Faithful Patriot, the sending of troops to the Mexico border in response to the caravan of Central American migrants headed toward the U.S.?
“Based on my time at the Pentagon, you send forces out into the field based on a threat assessment and based on an assessment of need,” Slotkin said. “It seems to me hard to understand from the outside why we needed to send these numbers to the border. I acknowledge wholeheartedly that our immigration system is completely broken. This caravan is a symptom of a much bigger problem with our immigration system.”
She linked immigration to multiple issues.
“I think that immigration is a national security issue, it’s an economic issue, and it is a moral issue. And we need a comprehensive immigration plan, not whack-a-mole take a piece here, take a piece there,” she said.
“We need to key immigration to the economic needs that we have here with our farmers, we need people to come, to our fudge shops in Mackinac, if that’s what they need. We need to key it to what we need here.
“Let them come, let them go. Our dreamers, obviously, they were brought here as children, they need a path to citizenship, but we also have a moral responsibility as a nation of immigrants, to always keep our doors open to specific groups that are fearing death and persecution.
“That is our history.”
On Election Night, her father, Curt Slotkin, sat quietly with his arms folded. Tears streamed down his wife’s face.
Keith Slotkin said his parents, especially his father, had struggled in recent months. “He’s not from the internet age. He doesn’t handle haters,” Keith said of his and Elissa’s father.
“The attack ads are personal. If you’re from an earlier generation, you just don’t have the hate.”
Hundreds of Democrats, Republicans and Independents attended the Slotkin party on Election Night. They included college students, retired military, engineers, business owners, doctors, bakers and child care workers.
The victory left supporters who met her on the verge of tears.
“Oh, boy. It’s overwhelming,” said Dennis Ritter, 73, of Clarkston, as he took a deep breath and exhaled. “I met her 18 months ago. And she had me at hello. She’s just going to be a tremendous asset to our country.”