Hawaii U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard started her November trip to New York’s Trump Tower as a rumored job interview and apparently ended it as an hour-long lecture on American foreign policy for the president-elect.
Odd on either front.
When the national media reports first circulated, some flew so high that it appeared they generated their own helium to keep them aloft.
“The 35-year-old Hawaii congresswoman is being looked as a candidate for secretary of state, secretary of defense or United Nations ambassador. If selected, Gabbard will be the first woman as well as the youngest pick for Trump’s Cabinet,” said ABC News on Nov. 21.
“The Trump transition source said that their sit-down was a ‘terrific meeting’ and that the Trump team sees her as very impressive,” the report added.
It turns out that what the soon-to-be leader of the free world really needed was a policy lecture from a junior member of the minority in Congress.
After the meeting, Gabbard said in several statements that she “shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country and the world.”
Later, a Gabbard spokeswoman denied that a job offer was on the table.
“Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard did not meet with President-elect Trump seeking a job, nor did he offer her one,” Erika Tsuji said.
Others viewed the denial as hardly credible.
“I’m calling ‘shibai’ on that one,” said Maui Democratic state Rep. Angus McKelvey. “You don’t walk into a meeting with the new president to talk policy, you talk about positions to be filled.”
“I don’t think for a minute they were talking policy.”
Indeed, the job rumors last week were not only persisting, they were escalating.
Conservative news website Breitbart News last week was rerunning an opinion piece from the Washington insider newspaper, The Hill, headlined, “Tulsi Gabbard Is the Best Pick for Secretary of State, Not Mitt Romney.”
Attorney Maxwell Anderson, in the commentary from last week, said: “Gabbard embodies the very essence of the president-elect’s ideological departure from the interventionist policies that have plagued this nation for the past two decades.”
McKelvey said getting a well-known progressive rising star such as Gabbard into the Trump Cabinet in any form, would be a political gold mine, both because it shows Trump is reaching across the aisle and also that he is looking for diversity.
“And look, if she loses the next election, the Republicans aren’t going to cry about it,” said McKelvey, a 10-year legislative veteran.
On the always-important issue of winning elections, it appears that Gabbard is stepping on a new Hawaii Democratic Party fault line.
Bart Dame, a longtime Democratic Party activist, said that Gabbard, with her Trump meeting, “is helping to normalize Trump.”
“She is a strikebreaker in this,” Dame said in an interview last week.
All that may be a benefit for Gabbard’s resume, but other local Democrats like McKelvey and Dame have doubts.
“There is no unified view on this, but there is a lot of misgiving,” said Dame.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
