As someone with Bay Area roots, I found one bit of good news on Tuesday: incumbent Democrat Mike Honda's triumph over challenger Ro Khanna. Please allow me to explain.
Years and years ago, I walked for Mike Honda. He already had a long career in state and local politics, and was running against a Republican for the seat that Tom Campbell was vacating (while challenging Dianne Feinstein). Campbell had held that seat reliably since 1995. When you walk for a candidate you feel a bit invested in them afterward - I spent some quality time on miscellaneous San Jose streets, and spent the morning of Election Day 2000 (a day that none of us will ever forget) doing my minuscule part to support Mike.
Ro I don't know. I do know that he challenged Tom Lantos a couple of districts up (Lantos held a seat that encompassed the south of San Francisco and San Mateo County). Ten years later, he was running in the San Jose area. OK.
Some great candidates can run in places they are relatively new to, but I always had the feeling that Khanna was shopping around, looking for a vulnerable elderly incumbent to topple. Honda seemed to fit the profile, as had Lantos. And given Khanna's diverse resumé, I had the feeling that Khanna would have the seat for a couple of terms and wait for something else to open up. The voters of CA-17 would go back to the drawing boards, having lost the seniority that Honda had accrued since 2000.
Age was the unconcealed message of Khanna's campaign. He was happy to pitch himself as the fresh, energetic new guy, while casting aspersions about Mike's ability to do his job. That was noxious. So, too, was his conviction that what CA-17 really needs is a candidate who speaks to the interests of the computer industry. No. CA-17 is economically dominated by software firms, to be sure, but I won't lose sleep over whether they are being heard in Washington. In fact, I'd wager they're being heard just fine. I'd worry about effective advocacy for the people struggling to make rent in an astronomically expensive part of the country, not the people at work driving up the rents. But maybe my take on politics is a bit different from Khanna's.
Khanna could present himself well, but there was a hint of something that ranged between One Percent elitism at worst and noblesse oblige at best in his pitch. It dipped obnoxiously into TED Talk territory, particularly when he proclaimed that he would be a "disrupter" in Congress. Actually, Congress is already quite disrupted, thank you very much.
There's also the icky coincidence of Khanna's two runs for Congress - in both instances his targets were people who had been interned during the Second World War. Lantos, I know, may be a divisive figure here. I did not agree with him on Iraq. Still, I am glad that the U.S. Congress had a survivor of the Holocaust. By the same coin, there is something invaluable in having someone who remembers firsthand the internment of Japanese-Americans in the body. We absolutely need legislators who can speak about human rights abuses with that kind of credibility. I would not eject him for the (fleeting) privilege of having a congressman who can talk like a character on Silicon Valley.
The right guy won in CA-17 on Tuesday and we should take that as something fundamentally encouraging about our elections - even if so much of this week's news was unpleasant.