In 2012, Nancy Pelosi described Tulsi Gabbard as an “emerging star.” In 2019, Hillary Clinton decried the Hawaii congresswoman as a “Russian asset.” Suffice to say, the honeymoon is over.
Gabbard is a major target of the liberal elite’s disgust. She feuded with the party organs in 2016 over her backing of Bernie Sanders. Now, during the 2020 election, she is upping the ante — Gabbard isn’t just criticizing the party mainstream; she’s doing so as a candidate for president. She hasn’t pulled punches, toed the party line, or been silenced by criticism from her peers or intraparty backlash. She’s an outsider and a long shot, but her poll numbers have edged slightly higher as she battles the Democratic old guard.
In the eyes of Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership, Gabbard turned out to be quite the disappointment. But given the long history of conflict between Gabbard and the Democratic National Committee, she just might take that as a compliment.
It’s easy to see why party elites were once so excited about Gabbard. As a woman of color who is solidly left-wing on most issues, she seemed to mark the emergence of the new, Obama-era Democratic Party, more diverse and liberal. After all, Gabbard was the youngest woman ever elected to the Hawaii state legislature and the first Hindu elected to the House, winning an underdog election to boot. She also boasted a decorated record of military service at a time when Democrats were seeking to add more veterans to their ranks.
Gabbard chose to leave the Hawaii legislature to serve in the Army National Guard. She was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009. As a female combat veteran, she is something of a rarity in Congress. Gabbard is enlisted in the Guard’s reserves today and still deploys to participate in training exercises.
Given such an impressive resume, it’s only natural the party establishment was initially delighted to see Gabbard come to prominence. And in her first few terms in Congress, Gabbard didn’t do too much to rock the boat, focusing on passing relatively uncontroversial legislation targeting sexual abuse in the military and bills helping veterans.
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise to see Gabbard elected vice chairwoman of the DNC in 2013. It was harder to predict her bitter split with the DNC during the 2016 election.
The 2016 Democratic primary put the party’s internal divisions on full display. Sander’s insurgent candidacy pitted the party’s left wing against the establishment’s favorite candidate, Clinton. This left Gabbard, an economic progressive and Sanders ally, at odds with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Clinton loyalist. Gabbard grew increasingly concerned that the primary was being unfairly tilted toward Clinton at Sanders’s expense.
Their first open conflict came over the debate schedule for the primary season. The DNC sought to minimize the number of debates, a move that Sanders supporters saw as an attempt to shield Clinton. When Gabbard used an MSNBC appearance to openly call for more debates, she was uninvited from the first debate.
She didn’t take the slight lying down.
“It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them,” Gabbard told the New York Times. “When I signed up to be vice chair of the DNC, no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door.”
Gabbard began to express private concerns about the DNC’s anti-Sanders bias and ultimately resigned from her position as vice chairwoman to endorse Sanders. She said, “I cannot remain neutral any longer. … The stakes are just too high. We need a commander in chief who exercises good judgment and … will not waste precious lives and money on interventionist wars of regime change.” After the election, Gabbard started a petition to end the use of “superdelegates,” which had helped swing the primary in favor of Clinton.
As one might imagine, the party establishment didn’t appreciate her stance, and Clinton and her allies in the media would never forget the insult.
This all led the Washington Post to describe Gabbard as “the Democrat that Republicans love and the DNC can’t control.” The paper mused in 2015, “The question now for party leaders is how they handle a young, rising star who is as much a wildcard as just about anybody in their party.” Little did the Post know that Gabbard’s rebellion was just getting started.
In large part, Gabbard has frames her 2020 campaign as an insurgency against the Democratic establishment. She’s criticized party figures such as Clinton for their support for military interventions in Iraq and Libya, and targeted one of the establishment’s favorite candidates, Sen. Kamala Harris, in the second Democratic presidential debate over Harris’s record as a prosecutor.
This came after Harris boosted her poll numbers and name recognition in the first debate by attacking front-runner Joe Biden as racist over his past opposition to mandatory busing. In the second debate, the congresswoman put Harris on blast.
“Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. And she fought to keep [a] bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.”
Gabbard spoke to Harris directly: “When you were in a position to make a difference, you did not. The people who suffered under your reign as a prosecutor, you owe them an apology.”
Harris began to drop in the polls shortly thereafter, and her campaign is now showing signs of collapse: It just announced major staff layoffs and downsizing. Meanwhile, Gabbard has seen an uptick in polling, coming in at 5% in a CNN New Hampshire poll, passing Harris.
Gabbard continues to reject Democratic orthodoxy in her 2020 campaign by speaking with and even befriending commentators from across the political spectrum, such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, YouTuber Dave Rubin, and podcast host Joe Rogan. Additionally, Gabbard staked out somewhat more moderate positions on other issues. Unlike many of her 2020 peers, she opposes third-trimester abortions and has rejected what she calls the “open borders” policies of fellow contenders Beto O’Rourke (who dropped out recently after dragging his party to the left ) and Julián Castro.
Of course, in 2019, the Democratic elite has no tolerance for any liberal who doesn’t demonize the other side or toe the radical party line on every social issue.
A CNN story released shortly after Gabbard’s campaign announcement demonstrated this, with a headline that blared: “Tulsi Gabbard once touted working for anti-gay group that backed conversion therapy.”
Gabbard came from a religious and socially conservative family in Hawaii. Her father, Mike Gabbard, ran an anti-gay group and a campaign against gay marriage, which Tulsi Gabbard volunteered for as a young adult. Gabbard continued to oppose gay rights into her early years as a Hawaii state legislator. But she switched her position over time, as did Democrats such as Barack Obama and Clinton, who received notably warmer media coverage of their respective conversions.
Gabbard has apologized for her past views on gay rights, saying, “In my past, I said and believed things that were wrong, and worse, they were very hurtful to people in the LGBTQ community and to their loved ones.” She now backs gay and transgender rights legislation such as the Equality Act, and the congresswoman has received an “A” rating from the left-wing gay rights organization the Human Rights Campaign.
But the Democratic establishment won’t let it go. At the first Democratic presidential debate, Gabbard was confronted by MSNBC moderators about her past stances. Gabbard reiterated her evolution and apology, but establishment figures such as Neera Tanden still regularly cite her past as evidence that she is an extremist.
Next, Democrats brought out the big guns. Clinton re-entered the fray to suggest, without producing evidence, that Gabbard is a “Russian asset.” This smear was echoed and defended by shameless establishment political figures and new media alike, from the Center for American Progress to the airwaves of CNN.
Gabbard wasn’t dismayed by these outlandish criticism. She shot back, decrying Clinton as “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” She suggested that Clinton is behind “a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation … through [her] proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine.”
This feud made painfully public the fact that the Democratic establishment turned on Gabbard. But the congresswoman doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, she has decided to lean into that outsider status and make it a key part of her 2020 brand. Having announced that she will not seek reelection to her House seat, Gabbard’s future remains unclear. But freeing herself once and for all from Democratic Party constraints suggests she won’t be making life any easier for its leaders.
Brad Polumbo is deputy contributors editor for the Washington Examiner.
