Paul Bass Photo
Congresswoman DeLauro at WNHH.
Social media didn’t exist back then. An attack on a candidate’s spouse, on the other hand — DeLauro did encounter that. About her own husband.
That was back in 1990, when DeLauro ran for the first time to represent New Haven in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Now DeLauro is currently running for her 14th two-year term. And, she observes, politics have changed — in some ways. Not all.
“Running” may be an overstatement for DeLauro. The popular Democrat’s opponent in the Nov. 8 general election, Republican Angel Cadena, has no money or organization behind him. He’s busy six days a week driving a truck. He last updated his website in May.
For the last 12 of DeLauro’s runs, the Republican Party has pretty much given up on trying to unseat her. In addition to focusing on her own reelection with local events in the district, DeLauro is hoping to help her party regain control of the House so she can serve in the majority again.
So she hasn’t had to fend off nasty personal attacks on the trail. But as she has seen politics change here and D.C., she has seen some constants as well — and a set of circumstances reminiscent of the issues that faced New Haven when she first won the seat in 1990.
Competitively, the 2016 and 1990 races couldn’t be more different. In other ways, 1990 echoes in 2016.
“Stanley Greenbucks”
Tom Scott, back in the day.
DeLauro reflected about how politics has changed — and how it hasn’t — in a campaign interview on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
DeLauro barely edged into office the first time around in 1990 against Tom Scott, a conservative Republican whose politics presaged his party’s turn to the right. Scott captured 48 percent of the vote without much help from the national party, which didn’t seem to realize how close the race had grown. (DeLauro’s vote total hasn’t fallen below 63 percent since then.)
We’ve heard a lot this year about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s husband from her Republican opponent. Back in that first 1990 race, Rosa DeLauro heard about her husband as well. Scott regularly referred to him as “pollster Stanley Greenberg.” Greenberg is a prominent pollster who has worked for the campaigns of, among others, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela.
Scott had taken the campaign into the heart of DeLauro’s base — New Haven’s Wooster Square, where she grew up, then still seen as a predominantly Italian-American Catholic neighborhood. Scott argued that liberal Democrats like DeLauro did not truly represent the culturally conservative values of white ethnic urban neighborhoods. That argument continues in similar parts of this country today amid stagnant or declining standards of living for the working class; it’s at the heart of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton battle for swing votes. New Haven was crawling out of a painful recession in 1990; it’s emerging from another recession today, with the working class feeling left out the recovery.
“At one of their rallies they kept making reference to ‘Stanley Greenbucks.’ It was nasty,” DeLauro recalled about 1990. (Scott adamantly denied any anti-Semitic intention in the repeated invocation of Greenberg’s name.)
DeLauro was no newbie to rough-and-tumble politics. She’d managed Frank Logue’s mayoral victory in New Haven against the political machine in 1975. She managed two of Chris Dodd’s U.S. Senate campaigns and ran his D.C. office. Yet she said she hadn’t encountered that level of personal attack before.
She learned she’d have to get use to it.
“You know what? I’m pretty tough,” she said. “You can’t be thin-skinned in this business. So you deal with it. What you don’t want to do is to get into the name-calling and the mud-slinging. That’s not what campaigns are about or should be about.”
2 Shutdowns, 2 Media
Truly contested races are about that more than ever today. Fortunately for DeLauro, she hasn’t had truly contested races. But she has seen the atmosphere become more confrontational in Congress, she said, since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich shut down the House of Representatives in 1995.
DeLauro and her Democratic colleagues protested that shutdown by remaining in the House. They continued giving speeches from the floor.
But Congresspeople depended on the C‑SPAN feed in order to be heard beyond the Capitol. And Gingrich shut off the feed.
“We in essence were talking to ourselves. But it wasn’t getting out,” DeLauro recalled.
The next time DeLauro and Democratic colleagues staged a sit-in the House — this past June — the media world had changed.
This time the Democrats were protesting a refusal by Republican Speaker Paul Ryan to allow a vote on proposals to require universal background checks for firearms purchases and to ban people on the suspected-terrorist “no-fly” list to buy guns.
Ryan shut off C‑SPAN again. DeLauro & co. remained to make speeches again. But this time their staffs — and C‑SPAN itself — knew about Periscope and Facebook Live. They didn’t need the gatekeepers any more. They had social media.
“The country,” DeLauro noted, with awe still evident in her face months later, “was watching what was happening this time.”
Social media has produced benefits as well as new problems to the system, DeLauro observed.
She praised the ability of constituents to follow their Congressional representatives “all the time”: “They know what you’re doing and saying. That kind of transparency is a very big part of what the democratic process should be about.”
On the downside, she said, “there’s little verification” when an attack line goes viral. She noted that campaigns have always in modern times had “rapid response teams” ready to turn around a new TV or radio commercial overnight to counter an opponent’s attack ad. Now “rapid” means responding in minutes, online.
Don’t Shoot
Cadena.
Some of the issues remain remarkably constant from 1990 to 2016.
The country’s still divided on guns, as are DeLauro and her Republican opponent, then and now. Cadena, who owns an AR-15, makes opposition to gun-control proposals and support for the NRA version of the Second Amendment a centerpiece of his campaign. (Click here for a story in which he discusses his position at length, including a story about watching his father get shot when he was 13.) Cadena argued that gun control measures don’t succeed in removing weapons from criminals but do violate the rights of law-abiding citizens.
DeLauro, who said she does not own a gun, argued that the proposals she supports — background checks, “No Fly/No Buy,” banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — can help prevent some of the 91 daily deaths across the country due to gun violence, including the kind of massacre that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She said nine of ten Americans support “common sense” measures like the background checks.
The battle for the working class is resonant of the 1990 campaign, too. Donald Trump and his followers (including Cadena) have backed the idea of building a wall along the southern U.S. border to keep out immigrants. (Asked if that’s feasible, Cadena responded, “Ask Israel.”) DeLauro argued that instead of building walls, the U.S. needs a “working families” agenda that focuses on greater investment in jobs and the social-safety net, paid sick leave, a new board to prevent price-gouging on prescription medicine (the topic of a new bill she is sponsoring), and a new tax credit for families with children under 3 years old.
She has also helped lead the opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty. (Read more about that here and watch her discuss it in the above file video.)
In another echo of the presidential campaign, DeLauro argued for “fixing” rather than dumping Obamacare, embracing a “public option” that enables more people to enroll in Medicare and Medicaid as a step toward a single-payer system.
As in 1990, liberal Democrats like DeLauro are arguing that government can help fix tough domestic problems facing working families, through greater investments in people and jobs and health care and regulation of predatory corporations. Conservative Republicans like Scott (then) and Cadena (now) are arguing that government is the problem, that the private sector can create jobs and help people improve their lives if freed from taxation and regulation.
New Haven may not have the competitive Congressional race that it last had in 1990. But as in that year, it has a choice between two candidates representing the distinctly opposed policy visions of their parties’ cores. You can listen to DeLauro and Cadena at length in the sound files below from their appearances on WNHH. And they are in fact having one debate: they plan to meet Sunday at Hamden’s Congregation Mishkan Israel, starting at 10 a.m.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full DeLauro interview.
Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full Cadena interview.