This is Rep. Jamie Raskin.
The most important political epiphany I ever had was on the day I announced my first campaign for public office, when I was running for the Maryland State Senate many years ago.
I made a speech setting forth everything I wanted to accomplish: abolish the death penalty in our state, increase the minimum wage, decriminalize marijuana, ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, launch the National Popular Vote interstate compact, and pass marriage equality for our LGBTQ community.
A woman came up to me and said, “Great speech, but one thing—take out everything you have in there about gay marriage. It's not going to happen, and even gay candidates don’t talk about it. It makes you sound really extreme, like you’re not in the political center.”
I paused because I didn’t want to offend her, but my kids were with me watching, and so I said this:
“Thank you so much for saying that to me, because it makes me realize that it is not my ambition to be in the political center, which blows around with the wind. It is my ambition to be in the moral center. That is why I’m a Democrat and that is why I’m a progressive.”
“It is our job to move public opinion and bring the political center to the moral center.”
I was running against a 32-year incumbent who was president pro tem of the Maryland Senate and chair of the Montgomery County Senate delegation. A pundit told a local newspaper that my chances of victory were considered “impossible.”
But nine months later, after building a grassroots campaign that educated and mobilized thousands of people, we won 67 percent of the vote. The day after the election, the Washington Post quoted a pundit who declared that my victory was “inevitable.”
We went from impossible to inevitable in nine months.
John -- I teach the young people in our Democracy Summer project that, in politics, nothing is impossible and nothing is inevitable.
Change is only possible through the democratic arts of educating people and organizing them to create real change.
We Democrats accomplished everything that I had set out to do in the State Senate. Now I’m in Congress fighting every day to defend American democracy and the voting rights of the people.
Media pundits are predicting that right-wing gerrymandering, voter suppression and the filibuster will make it impossible for Democrats to hold the House and Senate in 2022. But with your help, we can build grassroots majority power, defend our crucial blue majority, and prove that organized democracy can defeat organized insurrection and corruption.
Please join me and support my critical work!
With solidarity and nothing but high hopes for America,
-- Jamie Raskin
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