Swearing Off Corporate Cash: A Q&A With Saira Rao
The former Wall Street lawyer wants Democrats to commit to economic reform and racial justice.
By Raina Lipsitz
June 25, 2018
DeGette, 60, is a business-friendly, don’t-rock-the-boat Democrat who’s heavily favored to win. Saira Rao, 44, is challenging her by pressuring the Democratic Party to work less for corporations, and more for people of color.
Both women are graduates of NYU Law School: DeGette finished in 1982, and Rao, in 2002. Both supported Hilary Clinton wholeheartedly in 2016. And they share many standard-issue positions, such as supporting a woman’s right to choose. At first glance, it’s not clear what divides these women politically. What would a white-collar Hillary Clinton supporter find so objectionable about DeGette?
The district the two candidates are running in is more diverse, urban, and liberal than the state of Colorado. It’s also more prosperous than most of the country; its median household income is $62,718 and its mean household income is $92,638 (the national median in the United States is $59,039 and the mean is $83,143).
“If you look back at what happened in November 2016, in addition to people voting for this lunatic white supremacist, a lot of people didn’t vote,” Rao says. “And who didn’t vote? Communities of color didn’t vote; young people didn’t vote; the Rust Belt didn’t vote; the Obama coalition fell apart.
The status quo gave us Donald Trump.”
DeGette has blamed the media for Trump’s rise, as well as suggesting that he successfully tapped into the feelings of a subset of voters who are struggling financially and fear foreigners. Rao’s objection to this explanation seems to be that it fails to count voters of color among those the Democratic Party has taken for granted. “As a brown woman,” she wrote on
The Huffington Post, the party has “taken my love, my money, my
tokenism” and given nothing in return: “You married the white woman and hooked up with me on the side.”
Another topic on which Rao and DeGette don’t see eye to eye is the influence of corporate money on politics. Rao is adamant that corporate money is poisoning our democracy. “We don’t have a clean Dream Act because Dreamers don’t have a Super PAC,” she says. “We continue to trash our earth because the earth does not have a Super PAC. We can’t even get to the guts of what’s wrong and figure out a way to fix it because we have this dark black cloud of corporate PAC money hanging over Capitol Hill, and until and unless that’s out we can’t get in and fix the stuff that’s broken.”
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