C4 Thursday, July 16, 2009
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The Washington Post
A Lawmaker, And Always A Symbol
PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA — THE WASHINGTON POST
Ellison, first sent to Congress from Minnesota in 2006, won reelection last fall with 71 percent of the votes cast. “I don’t really have any calculated plan,” he says. “I’m just doing me.”
ELLISON, From Page C1
American was recently elected to Con- gress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his person- al library.” Without trying too hard, just by being who he is, Ellison has multiple publics. To Arabs overseas, he is evidence that Americans can embrace Islam. To Mus- lim Americans, he is a role model for po- litical engagement. To the voters in the urban liberal Min-
neapolis precincts who actually elect him, well, they seem to like his politics, which he sums up as peace, working- class prosperity, environmental sustain- ability, civil rights. He won 71 percent of the ballots cast in November for his elec- tion to a second term. His district is about 77 percent white, 13 percent black, 5 percent Asian, with Muslims making up an estimated 3 percent. Members of labor unions and people who have Arab surnames are among his more reliable campaign contributors. His identity is the sum and distillation of all this — as subtly constructed as a three-cushion bank shot, a high-wire act in which wobbles to the left or right might be forgiven, but overcompensa- tion in any direction is fatal. At 45, he’s crossed treacherous can-
yons on that high wire. What’s his se- cret? A legion of puzzled, disoriented, frightened, ambitious people in the new America could use some of his moves. “I’m an African American Muslim,
and how do I get elected by mostly Lu- theran whites in my district?” Ellison re- phrases the question. Yes, exactly. The full answer is the story of his life. The short answer is delivered with a no-big-deal shrug. “I don’t really have any calculated plan,” he says. “I’m just doing me.”
Obama’s use of Ellison for interna- tional diplomacy was only a little subtler than that of George W. Bush’s State De- partment, which published no fewer than four interviews with Ellison for dis- semination to foreign audiences, to dem- onstrate this country’s diversity and reli- gious freedom. “I wasn’t particularly flattered or grat- ified,” Ellison says of the unexpected shout-out from Obama. “I just thought: Well, hey, if something I did can help you open a door with the Muslim world, then I’m happy to have done that.” He patiently indulges the fascination with his standing as the first Muslim elected to Congress. (Now there are two: AndréCarson, aDemocrat from In- dianapolis, was elected to the House last year.) The curse of being first is that it can swallow your identity. When people compare him to Jackie Robinson, Ellison says he expects Robinson mainly wanted to play good baseball. Obama and Sonia Sotomayor, if she is confirmed to the Su- preme Court, face similar challenges. “I don’t get tired of talking about it,” Ellison says. “But my struggle is to main- tain a certain amount of breadth. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as only under- standing Muslim things, all things Islam- ic.”
All the same, he adds: “But look, here’s the fact: Eight years after 9/11, so
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed as only understanding Muslim things.”
Rep. Keith Ellison
much of the conflict America faces con- cerns things occurring in the Muslim world. If my knowledge of the faith and sensitivity to the issues concerning the faith helps make friends for America and shortens gaps between us, why wouldn’t I use that?”
Raised Catholic in Detroit, the son of
a psychiatrist and a social worker, he converted to Islam at 19 while a student at Wayne State University. Nothing spe- cific precipitated his conversion, he says. He is a Sunni Muslim. He does not eat pork or drink alcohol. He prays five times a day. He is not a member of a mosque in Washington, but if he’s in town for Friday prayers, he joins Muslim Hill staffers in a room in the Capitol. He and his wife, Kim, have four chil-
dren. He got his law degree from the Uni-
versity of Minnesota, but after three years at a firm in a Minneapolis sky- scraper, “I was called to do social jus- tice,” he says. In his early years as a community ac- tivist, he viewed politicians as inter- changeable objects upon which activists had to act to create change. The example of Paul Wellstone, the late liberal senator from Minnesota, made him reconsider. “You needed people in office who really did vibrate sympathetically with what the people needed,” Ellison says. “Paul Wellstone helped me see somebody in action trying to make the world better for working people, people of color, everybody who’s in the so- called out crowd.” After two terms in the state legislature, the Democratic- Farmer-Labor Party — Minne- sota’s Democratic Party — en- dorsed him for an open House seat. But there followed revela- tions from his past of late filings of income taxes and campaign finance reports, unpaid moving violations and parking tickets. Most damaging were claims that he was associated with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Ellison said he had never been a member but had spent 18 months organizing a Minne- sota contingent to the 1995 Mil- lion Man March. He wrote a let- ter of apology to the Jewish community for failing to “ad- equately scrutinize” some posi- tions of the Nation of Islam. “They were and are anti-Semit- ic, and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.” Many in the Jewish com- munity accepted the apology, and he was endorsed by a Jew- ish weekly paper. Ellison’s frank owning up to past mistakes, and hammering
key issues — including calling for quick withdrawal from Iraq — helped avert electoral disaster. He says he might not have prevailed had he not been running in a city and a state with a progressive tradition forged by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy andWell- stone.
“His core values are very reflective of the people he represents,” says Donna Cassutt, associate chairman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “They are applicable to a variety of faith tradi- tions.”
“There are certainly more people of the far left persuasion in Minneapolis” than other parts of the state, says Ron Carey, chairman of the state Republican Party. But the GOP’s core argument against Ellison is that he is outside the mainstream for even Minneapolis. “He’s just been a cheerleader for President Obama’s move toward social- istic positions,” Carey says. On Iraq: “If we had listened to Keith Ellison . . . we would have exited Iraq before we could have achieved that hope of a stable de- mocracy.” On Ellison’s activism: “I was appalled in late April when he got arrest- ed protesting actions in Darfur.” Ellison was one of five members of Congress who staged a civil disobedience action outside the Sudanese Embassy in Wash- ington. “We’re all opposed to genocide,” Carey says. “I thought it was unbecom-
ing a member of Congress.”
Carey attributes Ellison’s large victo- ry margin in the last election to voters’ reflexive support of whoever’s the Dem- ocrat on the ballot. “I never say never,” he says, about a Republican win in the district in the future. “We’re going to have to find that special candidate in a year when the Republican brand is in vogue.”
One recent evening, Ellison is on the floor of the House. He is conservatively dressed, studious in little spectacles, low-key and friendly, not fiery. He’s got an easel for a prop, and a loose-leaf note- book stuffed with facts.
His subject: The energy bill. Sample rhetorical zinger: “Let me talk about the renewable energy standard in the bill.” The nation’s first Muslim in Congress does a lot of the prosaic spade-work as- signed to a relatively junior member. It rarely has anything to do with his faith. Of course.
Despite the public profile available to him as the first Muslim, he is trying to work his way up in the House the old- fashioned way. It’s as if his identity has two sets of muscles: one already overde- veloped and one that needs bulking up. Back in his office, the Minnesota soy- bean processors are calling. Ellison is be- ginning to have small-scale nonsectarian legislative successes. His pro- posal to stop credit card com- panies from raising rates on people with unrelated debt problems was included in the credit card bill Obama signed. His initiative to give tenants some leeway before they can be evicted from foreclosed properties was added to the mortgage reform act also signed by Obama. On a Saturday morning in a
The congressman has grown used to being viewed as a symbol. “In some cases, being a person of my faith will . . . open a door,” says Ellison. “Other times it will shut a door. You just deal with it.”
Washington hotel ballroom, he brings the same low-key, em- pirical style to a convention of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee. “You should not look at Oba- ma’s speech as ‘Happy day!’ ” Ellison says of the Cairo ad- dress. “You should look at it as, ‘Wow, I guess we have a lot of work to do.’ ” The crowd of nearly 200 ap- plauds. He has a busy calendar of addresses before Muslim and Arab American groups, not to mention more casual en- counters with Boy Scout troops, college students, young activists. When the for- mal programs are over, he has to tarry for an hour or more, obliging people who want to meet him, get a picture, an au- tograph, a bit of advice from this political pioneer.
“He has been an inspiration
to Muslims in general but in particular to young people who have been disheart- ened by the politics of division and alien- ation and exclusion after 9/11,” says Ni- had Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “He serves as a good example of what America is and can be.” Presumably, Ellison could adorn his suit with some subtle pin or chain or tie pattern that would signify his religion, but he doesn’t. Muslims do not neces- sarily want a charismatic spokesman who wears his faith on his sleeve. “His brand of Islam, the way he has conducted himself, really resonates with the majority of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans,” says Hassan Jaber, ex- ecutive director of ACCESS, a Detroit-based national network of Arab American community organizations. “That’s exactly the way Muslim Amer- icans want to be judged, not as being Muslims but by their contributions to their communities as Americans.”
He need not call attention to himself, because attention will be paid, not al- ways welcome attention.
Ellison’s decision to use the Koran during his ceremonial swearing-in caused a stir before Obama described it to the world. (No book is part of the offi- cial congressional oath; any book, or none at all, may be enlisted during the ceremonial photo-op.) Then-Rep. Virgil Goode Jr., a Virginia Republican, wrote to constituents: “The Muslim Represen- tative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district, and if Amer- ican citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigra- tion, there will likely be many more Mus- lims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”
During the presidential campaign, El-
lison was an early Obama supporter. He planned to speak at a mosque in Iowa on Obama’s behalf. But the campaign staff asked him not to. The explanation, Elli- son recalls, was: “We have a very tightly wrapped message.” “I’ve just taken it in stride,” Ellison
says. “In some cases, being a person of my faith will sometimes even open a door. Other times it will shut a door. You just deal with it.” In February, Ellison was one of the first members of Congress to visit Gaza after Israel’s attacks to weaken Hamas. He took a video camera, and he showed the devastation wrought by Israeli bombs. “Here’s a bomb site,” he says on the video. “Someone’s home, flattened.” He comforts a man whose parents were killed. “You lose your family, brother? I’m very sorry.”
Next he crosses the border to an Is- raeli city where the rockets of Hamas have been raining down for years and a majority of the children are said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. He focuses his camera on a playground that also contains a bomb shelter, brightly painted in primary colors.
“It reminded me of Gaza, where there are so many children,” he says behind the camera, balancing on that tightrope. “It’s an awful situation for both.”
Staff researcher Madonna A. Lebling contributed to this report.
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