An election year where most everyone who’s running for political office is pretending they’ve got dirt under their nails, insurmountable hospital bills piling up on the linoleum table cloth, and grotesque battle scars from the fast-food french fryer.
Local case in point, Michigan Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who now wants to be your U.S. senator. Slotkin owns the old family farm on a dirt road in Holly, where her grandfather set up a cattle ranch to supply his meat business, Hygrade Foods, back in the ’50s. The flagship product was Ball Park Franks.
The cattle are long gone, but Slotkin has left it to be misunderstood that the cows are still there. A trip to Holly proved the cow farm fantasy to be bullshit. (Neither Slotkin’s office nor campaign returned messages.)
In other reports, voters are led to believe that legumes are being grown on the old Slotkin homestead. Now, I don’t know beans about soy, but a perusal of the property showed little but runaway weeds gone to seed. Not so much as a tomato can be seen growing from her property line, and the place has no farm licenses attached to it, records show. This doesn’t prevent the congresswoman from claiming a $2,700 farm tax exemption on the property.
According to campaign commercials in which Slotkin stars, the hotdog heiress tells us that her mother suffered from breast cancer as a young woman; lost her insurance as an older woman; couldn’t find new insurance because of the pre-existing breast cancer; was then diagnosed with ovarian cancer, only to get her insurance back through a miraculous “loophole.” Slotkin’s mother died in 2011.
My condolences. But why would the ex-wife of a wealthy man be without health insurance? What was this miraculous loophole?
It would really be none of my business, except for the fact that Slotkin has made this story a centerpiece of her election bid for three cycles now. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer tells a similar tale of health insurance woes, never bothering to mention that her father was the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield.
The political elite understand that populism is real, and that they, the scions of the moneyed class, have benefited from corporatization and globalization. The American political system has been hijacked by the well-heeled, while working people continue to watch their jobs get shipped away.
So when the offspring of the opulent come pandering for our votes, their pitch is a devilish one: I’m one of you! I’ve got co-pays and prescriptions bills, too.
The state of Michigan politics is so infected—and the public so fed up—that the rich folks who seek the conspicuous chairs of Congress find themselves having to move away when their district lines get redrawn, because their own neighbors won’t vote for them.
There are at least a half-dozen of them by my count.
Worst among them may be Slotkin, who moved from Washington D.C. in 2017 to the old family farm to run for Congress. That was before she moved into a lobbyist’s condo in Lansing when she was re-districted, only to abandon the new district and return to the family farm in her old district after winning election in the new district.
An enterprising young person might think of starting a relocation service for our congressional members. Call it “Clown Cart Associates.”
It’s not as though Slotkin never worked for a living. She has indeed. Her campaign commercials tell you…sort of.
Slotkin was recruited by the CIA after 9/11 and did three tours in Iraq. That much is true. She worked from 2003-2017 for the alphabet soup of the American Intelligence agencies: CIA, DNI, NSC, DOS, and DOD. Her specialty was supposedly Iraq and Iran, and she climbed to the highest echelons of the Deep State during America’s abject adventures in Mesopotamia.
It was under her advice and counsel, in part, that a quarter-million Iraqi civilians were killed; nearly 40,000 American service members died or suffered injuries; the state sanctioned torture; the dark prisons; the sieges of Fallujah; the rise of Isis, and the failed Iran nuclear deal.
So naïve and superficial was Slotkin’s knowledge and intel that the late Sen. John McCain famously told her at her 2014 confirmation hearing for assistant defense secretary that she was “totally unqualified” and that her understanding of the American policy in Iraq defied credulity. “Either you don’t know the truth or you are not telling the truth,” he said.
Slotkin’s nomination never made it out of committee.
Oddly, little of Slotkin’s past has been relayed to the public during this, the most important election of our lifetimes. But that’s the thing about unquestioned personal histories and work resumes served up by political professionals.
They’re a lot like Ball Park franks. They plump when you cook them.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools.
