The Wrong Argument Against Abdul El-Sayed

On 4 August, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan. Bernie Sanders called it the most extraordinary victory in modern American politics.

I am not going to spend time on the campaign. The campaign works. The message is disciplined, the candidate is fluent, the operation clearly out-organised a better-funded opponent. That question is settled and it is the least interesting thing about him.

Within hours of the call, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s press releases stopped saying "Abdul El-Sayed"and started saying "Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed." The first attack ad tied him to the Muslim Brotherhood. The NRSC chair called him "the most radical Democrat Senate nominee ever." The Senate Majority Whip stood on the floor and called him dangerous. Trump called the result good news forRepublicans.

It is worth pausing on who, exactly, is being described here. El-Sayed graduated from Michigan with highest distinction, won a RhodesScholarship, and took a doctorate in public health at Oriel College, Oxford, finishing in 2011. His thesis used agent-based computer modelling to study health inequality in England. He then completed an MD at Columbia, taught epidemiology there, and has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers.Whatever this man is, "foreign menace" is a strange costume to try tofit onto an Oxford doctorate.

This is the Barack Hussein Obama playbook, restaged. It has the advantage of familiarity and the disadvantage of having already been tried.

Here is the part I find genuinely odd, and I will say it plainly even though it cuts against the grain: his name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

Then in his victory-speech version he said: "keep the name out your damn mouth." Meanwhile in interviews some journalists have settled on "Doctor El-Sayed," sometimes "DoctorAbdul," and the honorific does its own quiet work — it says physician, it says competence, it says trust me.

So we get a week of American politics conducted entirely on the terrain of what to call a man. The Republicans want that fight because the name is the message. He wants that fight because it is a fight he wins, and because his own best line — "my name is not raising your gas prices" — only lands if somebody first brings up the name.

Everyone is well served except the voter. Nobody spent that week asking the question that actually matters.

He is running on Medicare for All. On clean water. On affordability.

But he is running for one seat out of a hundred, in a chamber that needs sixty votes to do almost anything, for a term that ends in2033. Nothing on that list is deliverable by a freshman senator. Not on the first day, not in the first year, probably not in the first term. Medicare forAll is not blocked because nobody has said it clearly enough in Michigan. Clean water in Flint or Benton Harbor is a state-capacity problem and an EPA problem, and a senator touches this partially, through a committee he will not chair.

He knows the arithmetic. His voters half-know it too. It does not matter, because the promise is the product. People do not vote for a legislative strategy. They vote because they want to believe in something, and he is offering something to believe in, and the offer is sincere and the delivery is uncertain, and those two facts sit side by side without embarrassing anyone.

"Stop sending money to other countries, spend it here" is currently the cheapest line in American politics. Public opinion on Israel has moved, and there is no risk left in saying what a Democratic primary electorate already believes. Extending it to Egypt, to Lebanon, to the whole architecture of regional assistance sounds bold and costs nothing to say.

It is also not a senator’s power. Security assistance runs through appropriations, through decades of framework agreements, through a foreign policy establishment that has absorbed larger insurgencies than this one. He can vote no. He can force an uncomfortable floor vote. That is a real thing and it is not nothing. It is also not what the sentence implies to the person hearing it.

Maybe the beautiful words are the mechanism. Maybe you have to say the impossible thing for fifteen years before it becomes the possible thing. I find this argument respectable. I do not quite believe it, but I hold it loosely.

My objection to Abdul El-Sayed is not that he is radical, or Muslim, or dangerous. Those attacks are false, and worse than false, they are lazy — they let him skip the hard question entirely.

My objection is that he will turn out to be ordinary.That in four years there will still be no universal healthcare, the water in parts of Michigan will still be a problem, and there will be a very good, very sincere explanation involving the filibuster and the committee calendar, and it will even be true.

And the cost of that is not borne by him. It is borne by the people who believed. Because the third or fourth time beautiful words fail to materialise, voters do not conclude that the Senate is a difficult institution. They conclude that everyone is lying, and they go looking for someone who promises to break the whole thing instead.

That is the risk. Not the radical. The disappointment that comes after him.

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