Columbus Animates Congressional Debate

The first and only Congressional debate this year took place in Woodbridge, but its spiritual center was Wooster Square.

That began when a question about who truly represents the Italian American community transformed into three different views on history, culture, and the best ingredients for an equitable society.

Those perspectives were offered by the three contenders for the U.S. House of Representatives Third District seat, which includes New Haven and its surrounding suburbs.

Longtime incumbent Democrat Rosa DeLauro joined her two challengers, Republican Margaret Streicker and Green Justin Paglino, at six foot-plus distances inside the Jewish Community Center’s auditorium.

The hourlong debate was hosted by WTNH, broadcast live on Channel 8, streamed live on the TV station’s website, and featured questions from Moderator Darren Kramer, the New Haven Register’s Mary O’Leary, and the Independent’s Paul Bass. They all gathered in person at an otherwise audience-free event.

The question that sparked the animated historical analysis (above) centered on the city’s recent removal of the Christopher Columbus statue from Wooster Square.

The answers revealed more than just each candidate’s take on the complicated and violent legacy of the 15th century explorer. They also revealed how each candidate’s personal identity and social understanding influence their political priorities and approach to campaigning.

DeLauro: ​“I Am The Daughter Of An Immigrant Family”

DeLauro — a native of the historically Italian-American neighborhood and the daughter of two politically prominent, Italian-American immigrants — was asked about her support for the taking down of the statue amidst this summer’s nationwide reappraisal of Columbus’s legacy. 

She was also asked about criticism lobbed against her by Streicker that the three-decade Congressional veteran had ​“flip flopped” on the issue, and had ultimately sold out her ethnic heritage and the community from which she came.

That line of attack won Streicker the endorsement of the Italian American Heritage Group of New Haven, which vocally opposed the statue’s removal.

Typically a blur of energetic movement and vibrant color, DeLauro paused to collect herself before answering.

“I am the daughter of an immigrant family that could only have dreamed” that their child would end up serving in the United States Congress, she said. ​“My roots are deep in the Wooster Square community.”

The neighborhood she grew up in instilled in her values of ​“faith, family, hard work and responsibility,” DeLauro said. She called that the motivating impulses behind her decades-long support for social welfare policies like pay equity for women, paid sick days, childcare for all, and trade agreements that prioritize the wellbeing of working people.

DeLauro said that her family’s Wooster Square kitchen table was where her parents taught her to ​“stand up, speak out, and never take no for an answer.” She said her support for labor unions, safe workplaces, and a politically powerful working class stem in part from her mother’s years spent behind a sewing machine in a Wooster Square sweatshop.

“I would ask my Republican opponent not to impugn my sense of Italian American heritage,” DeLauro said. ​“You have no idea, nor are you competent to discuss my roots, my community, and my feeling with regard to that community.”

The Congresswoman didn’t criticize Columbus or communities that look to him as a symbol of Italian-American pride and accomplishment. Instead, she lauded the Board of Alders for renaming the second Monday of October, Italian Heritage Day. She said she is proud to serve on a local committee charged with coming up with a new memorial for the neighborhood that honors Wooster Square’s Italian-American roots.

“This nation is an immigrant nation, which I support,” she said.

Streicker: ​“Erasing History Is Wrong”

Streicker, a landlord and single mother who lives in Milford, began her response to the Columbus question by recognizing that ​“history is important.”

Those who don’t honor history, but choose to elide it and erase it, she said include ​“totalitarian regimes like the KKK or Nazis or Stalin or what’s happening in the Middle East.”

She said that all four of her children are first-generation Italian Americans, but that she decided to speak out against the Columbus statue removal’s not simply because of her own family’s origins.

“Erasing history is wrong,” she asserted. ​“We can add statues,” and lift up other histories and voices through new public memorials that do not require ​“tearing our histories down and erasing our common culture.”

Like it or not, Columbus ​“changed the course of world history,” Streicker argued, and for that, his statue in Wooster Square deserves to stay standing.

The Republican challenger returned again and again over the course of the night to that message that her candidacy represents an attempt at bridge-building across radically different constituencies. She pitched a ​“We can add statues” approach to appeasing those who want to keep the status quo and those who feel injured by it.

When asked about being on the same ticket as a president who referred to white supremacists in Charlottesville as ​“good people,” Streicker said she ​“wholeheartedly condemns bigotry and racism in all its forms.” That includes both neo-Nazis and what she described as ​“creeping anti-Semitism within the extreme Democratic Party.”

When asked what about the Republican Party today she disagrees with, Streicker said she supports a woman’s right to an abortion. ​“For any woman looking to make such an ultimately personal decision, it should be her choice.” But ​“late-term abortions? Absolutely not.”

She said that too much of American politics today is beset by ​“hyperpartisanship.” She pledged to ​“work across the aisle” if elected. ​“It’s about sitting down and making sure that all voices are heard.”

Paglino: ​“Prejudice Just Doesn’t Make Sense”

Paglino, a doctor from Guilford who has worked as a virologist and cancer researcher, took a more clinical approach to explaining his support for the removal of the Columbus statue.

He said that as rational human beings, we all should follow the ​“simple rule of not judging someone before we get to know them.” Someone’s race or country of origin is not a determining factor in what that person believes or how they act and treat others in the world.

“This is just logic,” he said. ​“Prejudice just doesn’t make sense.”

Paglino said that he is a proud Italian American, and that he doesn’t think that Columbus is the best representation of what people of his shared national and ethnic background should celebrate.

“We’ve got Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra,” he said. ​“We’ve got pasta. We’ve got music. We’ve got a lot to be proud of.”

Columbus, on the other hand, ​“did behead some people. He did enslave some people. He’s not perfect.”

No single person, in fact, is perfect, Paglino cautioned. And that is a core truth about the human experience that societies need to recognize before they memorialize individuals with statues.

“Just teach the facts,” Paglino said. He said that schools should not teach morality. That is up to individual students — and members of a free society — to decide on their own. But there is a true historical record, he said. And distorting does a disservice to everyone interested in understanding how and why society is the way it is today.

“History should be taught exactly as it happened,” he said.

Over the course of the night, Paglino used that same scientific approach to diagnosing what he sees as fundamentally broken about American social, political, and economic life today — and about what structural remedies he would push for.

He would champion Medicare for All, a proposal for single-payer universal health care. One in 10 Americans are uninsured, and roughly three in 10 are underinsured, he said. ​“Make healthcare free at the point of service,” and don’t let tens of thousands of people die every year and hundreds of billions of dollars get wasted on insurance deductibles and premiums every year by sticking with the status quo.

He said he would back ranked choice voting. Americans should have an opportunity to vote for candidates they support rather than against the ones they don’t like, without having to worry about a spoiler effect. Ranked choice voting, he said, is a key prescription for solving this country’s ​“two-party syndrome.”

And he said he would back transferring massive amounts of money from the Pentagon’s budget and put those billions of dollars instead towards a Green New Deal, social welfare programs, infrastructure, and jobs.

Lastly, he said he would support a progressive income tax to address this country’s drastic wealth inequality.

“If we do nothing, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”