Former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s status as a shoo-in to win a congressional seat in northern New Mexico is now deeply imperiled amid charges she’s an outsider from Washington who knows too little about the district she seeks to represent.
Plame is running in the Democratic primary to replace Democrat Ben Ray Lujan, the highest-ranking Hispanic lawmaker in the House, in the state’s 3rd Congressional District, home to 15 Pueblo tribes and the Navajo and Jicarilla Apache nations, with a 41% Hispanic and 19% Native American population.
Lujan, who has held the seat since 2009, announced a run for Senate in April last year, drawing prominent Hispanic candidates into the primary.
Plame’s strategy of drawing attention to her background in foreign policy and boasting that she knows her way around Washington is flawed, said local officials and pollsters interviewed by the New York Times. Voters care about local issues and knowledge of the region, said Gabriel Sanchez, a Latino Decisions pollster and executive director of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Social Policy.
Where Plame might benefit, Sanchez said, is from the high number of Hispanic entrants into the race, splitting the Hispanic vote in an election where Anglo turnout is expected to be high.
In September, a campaign ad touted her experience as an undercover CIA operative in “hot-spot” countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, and others. Foot on the pedal, Plame careens backward down a dusty New Mexico road, calling out Scooter Libby, who President Trump pardoned in 2017, for outing her CIA cover.
That was a moment “when my own government betrayed me,” Plame says. The ad shows a photograph of her Ukrainian Jewish family.
In 2017, Plame drew criticism for sharing a link to an article, “America’s Jews are driving America’s wars,” with a picture of Bill Kristol.
“Just FYI, I am of Jewish descent,” Plame said on Twitter, amid the uproar. Raised a Lutheran, Plame’s synagogue attendance began shortly after.
Plame rebutted accusations of anti-Semitism, telling the New York Times in an interview that her grandfather’s Ukrainian Jewish family was “right out of Fiddler on the Roof.”
“One’s spiritual journey is private,” Plame said when pressed on the timeline of her relationship with Judaism.
Her spy background led to lucrative book and entertainment deals, including the 2010 film adaptation of Plame’s autobiography Fair Game, where she and her husband were portrayed by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.
Plame’s husband, the late Joseph Wilson, a retired U.S. ambassador to Gabon, famously questioned the Bush White House’s justification for invading Iraq. Writing in the New York Times, Wilson, returning from a CIA “fact-finding mission” to Niger in 2003 to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had purchased yellowcake uranium from the country, said he found no evidence. He believed that “some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,” he said.
[Opinion: Unfair blame: Valerie Plame tries to lie her way into Congress]
