The Weekly Sift

Don’t react to labels, paraphrases, or guilt by association. Listen to what he says.

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It wasn’t the blow-out the polls had predicted, but progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated the Democratic establishment’s candidate Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. El-Sayed will face Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in the fall election.

Not being a Michigan voter, I didn’t give this race a lot of attention until last week, when the primary was almost upon us. I knew that El-Sayed was the progressive candidate (backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC) and that Stevens was the establishment candidate (backed by Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, and $32 million from the pro-Netanyahu group AIPAC). I watched a couple of videos and came to the conclusion that El-Sayed was the more talented retail politician. He’s clearly smart (a doctor and a Rhodes scholar), but he is also uncommonly good at boiling things down in a way that any voter can understand. He focused his campaign on three points:

• Money out of politics.
• More money in your pocket.
• Medicare for All.

So while I haven’t consistently lined up on either the progressive or the establishment side in the Democrats intra-party debate, I was rooting for him. And though he got outspent something like 9-to-1 by Stevens, he won.

Since then, I’ve paid a lot more attention to him and I’ve become a fan.

I’ve seen Republicans launch a McCarthy-style red scare against him. El-Sayed is a “Communist“, Trump says, speaking from his complete ignorance of what Communism is or has ever been. Senator Tommy Tuberville (whose name always comes up when people are challenged to name the dumbest person in the Senate) charged that Sayed is a “terrorist“.

Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.

I mean, with a name like “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed” (or “Barack Hussein Obama” for that matter), how can he be anything but an America-hating terrorist?

Meanwhile, a few Democrats freaked out about “electability”. This is always a bad topic to keep discussing after the primary is over, because it gives cover to Republicans who lie about the “unelectable” candidate. El-Sayed is unelectable if people start to believe that he’s a communist or a terrorist, and by worrying about his “electability” you’re implying that maybe he is.

So here’s the main point I want to make about El-Sayed: Listen to him. Don’t judge him on his Egyptian name, or his Muslim faith, or the color of his skin, or some objectionable thing one of his supporters said. Don’t judge him by a label somebody else attaches to him, like “socialist” or “antisemite”. Look for evidence. What has he actually said or done that justifies that label? And finally, take a moment to appreciate that we have a charming, personable, articulate candidate. I just love this campaign ad his grandparents made.

I also love the subtle generational message here: He’s young enough to still have living grandparents.

A good place to hear what he has to say is this interview with Katy Tur. The heart of his message sounds a lot like Obama’s 2008 “hope and change”, with a touch of Sanders’ working-class edge.

I’m asking people: “What is it that you want from your government?” Maybe if we broke the chokehold that corporations had on our government for so long, maybe if we actually used this to put money back into our pockets rather than into our politics, and we guaranteed everybody healthcare, maybe life could be a little bit easier. … We need a movement at the federal level that says actually [Medicare for All] is about what we can do when we’re not sending our money to drop bombs on other people and their kids, if we’re using that here at home.

Tur raises the electability issue.

Now, I know I wasn’t supposed to run for office. I’ve got the wrong name, I’ve got the wrong skin color, I pray the wrong way, my family comes from the wrong place. But I’m also not going to use this seat to tell you what you cannot have and you should not fight for. And I know that when we’re willing to have a conversation across the divides they tell us we can’t breach, that we really can build big things. That’s the story of this country.

El-Sayed dismisses labels like left and right, blue and red, and so on. He says that a lot of people feel left out of our system, and there are people from both parties who are locking them out. He wants to stand with the people who are locked out.

Tur also raises antisemitism: Why shouldn’t Jewish voters “feel alienated by a candidate like you”?

I’ll tell you this: Nobody understands better what it’s like to be discriminated against for how you pray than someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time we don’t ask how we pray, most people are asking what you pray for. And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they’re Jewish kids who are a couple house down from me, or my kids who are Muslim.

And I’ll tell you that it’s really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this culture (which are vast) and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things.

I, when I’m elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. My family emigrated from Egypt. That doesn’t make me anti-Egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply this same exact principle to Israel. I don’t want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide, when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare or schools for our own kids.

And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word antisemitism to spread, to defend a foreign government. And I just think it’s really important for us to differentiate between those two, because I don’t want to be held accountable to what another government does, simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers.

And he nails something I’ve wanted to hear for years:

We have a two-year runway to do the things that Democrats haven’t been doing for a very long time, which is about persuading people. I think Democrats, we do this thing where we have these polls, and the poll tells us what’s popular. And we just say the thing that’s popular, and we wonder why nobody wants to join us. … We have given up on the idea that you can actually persuade people. There’s a reason why I go to 101 different cities. Not because they’re all Democrats. It’s because I want to prove that if you’re willing to take your message — if it’s authentic to you, if you believe in it — and have that conversation with folks in places where they say you can’t, you actually can start to change people’s minds.

The case against him revolves around guilt by association: He campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has said things like “America deserved 9-11.” (But Piker didn’t say anything like that in front of El-Sayed, who has called that comment “dumb”. El-Sayed himself has not said anything similar.) He was supported in the primary by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes planks that some people find far-out or objectionable. But El-Sayed does not call himself a Democratic Socialist and has not endorsed that platform.

Pay attention to what he says and does.

So far, the media freakout against El-Sayed isn’t drawing any marquee figures. To her credit, Stevens endorsed El-Sayed immediately after the votes were counted. So has the rest of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. Kamala Harris has endorsed him, and President Obama is working towards party unity.

There is one overriding political threat in America today, and it is fascism, not socialism or communism. We need a Congress that stands clearly in opposition to the fascist and authoritarian vision of the Trump regime. If we have learned anything from watching the Senate lay down for Todd Blanche to be approved as attorney general, it’s that Republican senators will not defend our democracy or the rule of law.

In this situation, I’m for any Democrat. But I particularly like El-Sayed.