(Re)introducing Jamie Raskin, Champion of the Moral Center in American Politics

It was 2005 when Jamie Raskin decided enough was enough. His State Senator, Ida Ruben, was a conservative machine Democrat, a 32-year incumbent who had been in office since Raskin was in sixth grade.  She had just been listed as one of the top ten least effective Senators in Maryland by one newspaper. She supported the death penalty. She wanted to raise campaign contribution limits to make it easier for corporate money to flow into politics. And she had sponsored a pro-Iraq War resolution in the Maryland Senate.  All the while representing an extremely liberal district.

So Raskin decided to do something about it. He decided to enter the Democratic primary and run against her.

Conventional wisdom considered it an impossible race for him to win.  As the Washington Post reported at the time, "[Ruben] is the Senate's president pro tem, … serves as vice chair of a subcommittee that oversees state capital budget expenditures; and leads the Montgomery County delegation in Annapolis." She was the kind of politician who concentrated on cutting the backroom deals that allowed her to bring home the bacon.  She was also well positioned to raise campaign contributions far in excess of anything an upstart challenger could be expected to bring in. How could he possibly run a competitive race against an opponent with such advantages?

There was also one other important difference between the two of them. Their political compasses pointed in very different directions.  As Raskin tells it,

I announced on my front steps, and one of the things I talked about was marriage equality. And after my speech, one of my supporters came up to me, and she said "Jamie, great speech. I loved it. But take out the stuff about gay marriage, cause it's never going to happen. It makes you sound extreme, like you're not in the political center." And I had to swallow hard, because I didn't have that many supporters at the time, and I said, "I appreciate that, but I guess, when you put it that way, my ambition is not to be in the political center, my ambition is to be in the moral center. Because the political center moves around out there. So, we will stake our claim in the moral center and we will educate, and we will organize, and we will persuade and we will get the political center to move to us."

It was a tough race, one of many such battles in Maryland politics at that time that insurgent progressives were waging against entrenched incumbents, like Donna Edwards' long, hard fight to unseat Albert Wynn in the neighboring Congressional district.   But by the time it was over, the impossible had come to look more like the inevitable. Jamie Raskin won that election, and won it handily, 67% to 33%.

Big and powerful opponents always look like Goliath in the beginning, but sometimes David wins.

And now, after nine years in the Maryland State Senate, Jamie Raskin is running for Congress, where many think he has the potential to become a progressive leader of national significance.