The editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile Congressional Representative Marcy Kaptur, not merely the woman presently having served in the House the longest but the woman who has served in the House the longest full stop—20 terms:
Ms. Kaptur still lives in the same simple house where she grew up, in Toledo.
She is an old-fashioned Roosevelt-Truman Democrat. But does she feel like a minority, a lonely voice, in the House caucus and in her party? “Yes, I do,†she says.
Well, Ms. Kaptur is not going to retire or change parties or become a congresswoman without a party. She will keep on, and keep fighting for what she believes. Her latest cause is to establish an infectious disease unit in the National Institutes of Health.
But she, like many Democrats, is disillusioned and alienated.
A devout Catholic, she cannot share the obsessive enthusiasm of her party for abortion. She is for women’s rights and rights to privacy, but not for government funding of abortion or late-term abortion.
She is an environmentalist, passionate about saving Lake Erie, but she also wants to save the auto industry — all that is left of industry in Toledo or Detroit.
Cultural questions are tough ones, morally and politically, but most people seek a balance.
And, no small thing, Ms. Kaptur has been seriously disrespected by her party. She has been denied a major committee chairmanship after all these years — 20 terms in the House. Think about that and what it means to disrespect that.
“I think economics can bind us. I think that when we divide into too many subgroups, we lose the overarching theme,†says the congresswoman.
She’s right. Dead right.
The overarching theme should be opportunity, not identity.
Democrats in the House need to respect Marcy Kaptur, respect the people she represents, and respect what she identifies as the right and resonant overarching theme: opportunity, jobs. They need to counter the GOP’s appeal to the working class, and not simply surrender the field.
Ms. Kaptur has watched her beloved Ohio, once the ultimate swing state, become more and more deeply red. The Dems will lose a lot more people if they do not start to listen to, and represent, middle America. They will wish they had first listened to Marcy Kaptur.
I think they fail to make their case. As long as they can capture the White House, House, and Senate by controlling major urban areas like New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, why should Democrats care about anywhere else? It doesn’t really matter if such a strategy is inimical to republican government. It’s democratic.
