After last week’s debacle in Iowa, where nearly a week later, we still don’t know if the results are in fact valid, the chattering classes are asking, “why Iowa?” and even, “why New Hampshire?”
The horse race to November’s presidential election has begun in earnest. And as it’s been done now since 1920, presidential wannabes, political insiders, and self-appointed front-runners are forced to trudge through the cold and chill of a New England winter writ large. Running the gauntlet of retail politics is still being done in the age of Twitter—as it should be—in a very white state that doesn’t always mirror the rest of America. But to New Hampshire they all come.
During past campaigns, both my wife and I have traveled to Maine-based events together or on our own. I’ve seen Democrats like the Clintons, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich in-person. When I was a Republican, I attended events for George Bush. There’s something about seeing candidates in live settings that surpasses merely seeing them pixelated on a television screen.
On Saturday, we decided to make the 35-minute drive from Southern Maine and cross the border into neighboring New Hampshire to hear a long-shot candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. She was hosting a town hall in Rochester, at the Elks Lodge.
Why Gabbard? Both of us have been intrigued by her commercials running on the Portland station where we consume our morning news and get our weather from. Like other candidates I’ve supported: Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and in 2016, Jill Stein, Gabbard projects something different than the typical business-as-usual politics common during DNC-influenced dog-and-pony shows passed off as debates.
Gabbard was excluded from the Friday CNN town hall, even though her polling numbers were higher than candidates Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang, and Deval Patrick (who didn’t attend). What is it about Gabbard that corporate media hacks at CNN, MSNBC and other outlets fear about Gabbard?
Perhaps it’s her foreign policy prescription to end regime-change wars that are draining America’s coffers in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, with no clear purpose for us being there. While we were waiting to hear her speak on a frigid February Saturday afternoon, news reports began popping up that there had been yet another attack on American troops in a far-off land. Young men and women sent there having taken an oath of loyalty to America and to defend our Constitution. And once more, two would be coming back home in caskets. Their families will never be the same.
Tulsi 2020 (JBaumer photo)
Of all the candidates, Gabbard is the first female combat veteran to run for president. She’s also the first female combat veteran elected to Congress, along with Tammy Duckworth. Gabbard’s served six years on the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee. Her background and experience far exceed anything our sitting president brings to the table on matters related to our armed forces (or any other issue, for that matter).
Like Kucinich (when he ran in 2004 and 2008), Gabbard believes that there is a “peace dividend” that would be better invested domestically and could be spent shoring up Social Security, addressing the opioid crisis, and creating the foundation for Single Payer Universal Healthcare. There are also plenty of infrastructure projects that have been neglected and never given the scale necessary to maintain, since the 1940s: roads, bridges, dams, our power grid—to name three areas of concern mentioned by savvy politicians I’ve supported, like Jerry Brown in 1992, when he ran for president. You can check his track record for making things happen in California. I often wonder what he would have brought to the White House if given the chance 25 years ago.
Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard/Town Hall in Rochester, NH (MBaumer photo)
Gabbard is impressive live. In a town hall setting, she’s measured and thoughtful. She speaks with warmth about our veterans. She’s inclusive of other viewpoints not often discussed at town halls hosted by Democrats.
I found myself tucked between my wife and a visiting French academic who is a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institute. She told me she’d been in New Hampshire for the week and had decided to come and hear Gabbard because her views on foreign policy are so different than “all the other candidates.” My thoughts throughout her opening monologue and introduction went here: “this woman is so much more than any of the candidates I just watched last night on CNN.” That included Bernie Sanders, who I like. Unlike Bernie, Gabbard is a woman of color, who also holds an equally impressive progressive policy orientation. And differentiating herself from all the other progressive Democrat candidates, Gabbard’s has obvious appeal to voters who might have voted for Trump in 2016, or who lean towards the Libertarian side of the political pendulum.
The crowd of more than 100 that turned out in Rochester was made up of Republicans, Libertarians formerly for Ron Paul, veterans who’d fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, and people like me who are looking for something more than the same old prescription offered by most of the DNC-oriented Democratic field. I’m sorry, but Pete Buttigieg does nothing for me. If you want Buttigieg, Biden, or even Bernie (or Warren), have at it.
For me, it’s too early to settle for the lesser of evils, or even progressives who will be forced to knuckle-under to the corporate overlords in their party. Then, once again, I’ll be faced with stuffing my leftist ideals into my back pocket for another four years, or registering yet another “protest vote.” I can’t vote on Tuesday in New Hampshire, but I’m planning to caucus for Gabbard in Maine in March. Maybe 2020 will be different.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read through her stands on the issues. There is also a worthwhile article in The Nation that looks at Gabbard’s campaign and stands, objectively—particularly related to why she appeals to people not normally drawn to Democrats. She also mentioned the “Afghanistan Papers,” obtained by the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. I’d urge you to read and ask yourself, “will my candidate offer anything that will change” the wasteful spending on regime-change foreign policy that we’re pissing away $4 billion a month at waging?