There are a few interesting things about getting older, along with the depressing ones: women in their twenties are now potential babysitters rather than potential dates (I passed that threshold a long time ago); having lunch with the widow of a friend; learning that another good friend has died – and you didn’t hear for nearly a year, which reminds you of what a bad job you’re doing as a friend.<\/p>\n
And then you get a mailer, and discover that a high school friend is running for Congress. Holy Crap, we’re old enough to be Members of Congress?<\/p>\n
So Marcy Winograd<\/a> sent me a mailer – not because of any long-standing relationship, but because I’m in the district she just moved into to run against incumbent Jane Harman<\/a>. Harman then abandoned her seat for an ill-considered and somewhat inept run at the Governorship, retired for several years, and then came back to California with the support of the national party and bigfooted several good local Democrats to take the seat back.<\/p>\n So I didn’t start this dance as a Friend of Jane.<\/p>\n And Marcy, when I knew her in high school and intermittently afterwards, was smart, engaged, someone who cared about the world – a good person to sit and talk issues and life with.<\/p>\n So I read the mailer, visit her website, and take a look. And sigh.<\/p>\n Because what’s there is pretty much a straight-ahead Kossak platform.<\/p>\n When we talk about security, we must talk about jobs for all, health care for all, and a foreign policy that embraces diplomacy and builds trust among nations, a foreign policy that chooses war as a very last resort – if ever – and a foreign policy that forever renounces the use of nuclear weapons- because to use those weapons is to ensure our own annihilation.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Marcy is our coast’s Net Lamont<\/a>. She’s a manifestation of the single-issue orthodoxy that the ‘suicidal lemming’ wing of the Party wants to try and enforce. According to MyDD and Kos and Josh Marshall, you can’t be pro-war and be a Democrat.<\/p>\n And that’s wrong, on just so many levels.<\/p>\n First, and foremost, on the issues. I’ve blogged<\/a> the kind of foreign policy I think is the intermediate state of this kind of isolationism:<\/p>\n In essence, it’d be a position that said \u201cwe’re washing our hands of you\u201d, bulked up border and internal security, and made it a point never to drive through \u2018those neighborhoods\u2019 without locking the doors, and never, under any circumstances, to stop there. It solves that whole messy \u201cwar\u201d thing, and makes sure that no one says bad things about us in our hearing. We’d be clean-handed liberals, and feel secure.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But I don’t think we’d be secure, or really have clean hands. It’s a nice thing to talk about in the Palisades (or actually, Marina del Rey), or in Georgetown. But the reality of governing America in the 21st Century takes more than this.<\/p>\n Harman has actually been damn sensible<\/a> about security issues, walking a line in trying to stand for her Party while first of all doing the right thing – as she sees it – to defend America.<\/p>\n
\nNow I have had a tetchy attitude toward Congressmember Harman since before she ran for the first time – we met at one of her exploratory coffees, and I thought her an unprepared, establishment apparachnik.<\/p>\n