Ammar Campa-Najjar Will Make An Awesome Member Of Congress

Blue America has been raising campaign contributions for Ammar Campa-Najjar for several months on our our California-- Not Blue Enough page and, since his primary win-- against a DCCC-backed Republican pretending to be a Democrat-- on our Abandoned by the DCCC page. Today we officially added him to our main 2018 congressional page, the one that the thermometer below goes to. Please consider donating what you can to his run for Congress.

Before they had a record deal-- when they were just another struggling Bay Area band, I used to go over to Metallica's studio and listen to their rehearsals. They gave me tapes of their music I could play on my radio show. I don't know if I was the first person to play Metallica on the radio. But I think I was. When I was getting to know Ammar, after we had talked about Medicare-for-All, free state college and trade schools, infrastructure spending and job creation and some of that kind of stuff, I asked him what his favorite band was. Yeah, it was Metallica. He comes across as a regular all-American 29 year old kid-- who just happened to have worked in the Obama Department of Labor. He's very easy to relate too-- far more so than candidates who parse every word they say, like they learned to do in law school. Ammar is as straight-talking a candidate as I've come to expect working-class candidates to be-- like Randy Bryce, for example. And, in fact, he told me he and Bryce had bonded already and were eager to work together in the House next year. They were two real long shots last year when they declared their candidacies in districts the DCCC was not even considering.

Randy was running against a powerful Speaker of the House and entrenched incumbent with unlimited campaign funds, Paul Ryan, and Ammar was running against the scion of a powerful political family in a district with an R+11 PVI, where Obama had lost both times and where Trump beat Hillary 54.6% to 39.6%. But both candidates-- ignored by a DCCC that doesn't take long-shots seriously enough to pay attention-- created their own brands and started climbing in the polls. Bryce took off like a rocket, gained immense national notoriety as an everyman candidate from Wisconsin and raised more money-- 100% from small contributions-- than any of the DCCC candidates other than the self-funders. The DCCC noticed and asked if they could endorse him and learn how to bottle the magic. Randy's success appealing to independent voters in Wisconsin left Ryan with no path to victory... and he announced his retirement. Ammar shocked the political establishment by beating his DCCC-favored "ex"-Republican primary opponent 25,799 to 18,944 in the state's jungle primary. He was endorsed by the California Democratic Party, by the California Labor Federation, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Working Families Party, J Street, and Our Revolution-- and by some pretty impressive political figures who don't rush willy-nilly into endorsing House candidates: Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, L.A. Mayor Eric Garretti... and by the two best DCCC vice chairs, Ted Lieu and Joe Kennedy.

This morning, Robin Abcarian wrote a piece for the L.A. Times after spending the last day or two following Ammar around southern California, Folk songs, tears and zippy one-liners: On the trail with the longshot candidate trying to oust Duncan Hunter. I should add something she didn't... the latest poll, by Tulchin, shows Ammar in an exact dead-heat with Drunken Hunter, 46-46%.

Retired FBI agent Jeff Iverson had his doubts about Ammar Campa-Najjar, the 29-year-old Democrat whose race to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter took on an unexpected importance after federal prosecutors charged Hunter and his wife with stealing $250,000 in campaign funds.

“It’s not his politics, it’s his age,” Iverson, 67, told me as we stood on the porch of a stunning home overlooking Lake Hodges in Escondido.

But after listening to Campa-Najjar speak and take questions for more than an hour Sunday morning, Iverson’s doubts disappeared like so much Hunter campaign cash.

“He’s articulate, prepared, and given his background-- growing up as a Palestinian-- I think that gives you some life experience right out of the box,” Iverson said. Campa-Najjar is a Palestinian Mexican American.

I spent about five hours with him Sunday at the campaign event in Escondido (which is in his district), at a meeting of the La Jolla Democratic Club (which is not), and at a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, where he seemed mellow from fatigue.

“It’s been a long couple of days, but I’ve been doing this for 20 months,” he said. He had flown to New York on a red-eye to attend a fundraiser on Thursday, flown back to Orange County to attend a Barack Obama rally in Anaheim on Saturday, then to Arizona for a fundraiser that evening, and back to San Diego for Sunday’s events.

In Anaheim, he met with Obama, but was not invited onstage.

...Among beleaguered Democrats in the 50th District, which includes the suburbs of northern and eastern San Diego County, there is hope that someone, finally, has come along to topple the ultra-conservative Hunter political dynasty. Ten years ago, Hunter replaced his father, also named Duncan Hunter, who held the seat for 28 years.

“This is the first time I have ever done anything like this,” hostess Rhonda Farrar said as she introduced Campa-Najjar to her 40 or so guests. “And he’s not too bad to look at either.”

Campa-Najjar, in boot-cut jeans, a blue-and-white checked shirt with rolled up sleeves, smiled. He is tall and lean, and occasionally hooks his thumbs through his belt loops as he speaks. He is fashionably unshaven and single-- “married to my campaign,” he says.

I asked Campa-Najjar if voters had a hard time remembering his name.

“Well,” he said, “a good memory device is ‘camp in a jar.’ At least I don’t have ‘Hussein’ in my name.”

As befits someone who has worked in communications at the Department of Labor and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he is easy in front of a crowd-- paraphrasing chestnuts from older politicians like Bob Dole. (The night Trump was elected, he said, he slept like a baby-- “Woke up every two hours and cried.”) He borrows Obama’s famous riff, “Fired up? Ready to go!”

And he isn’t above a cheesy joke or two:

“America,” he said, “has never been at the mercy of one person, or president, whatever the color of their skin. Even if they’re orange.”

In a community room filled with La Jolla Democrats, Campa-Najjar clasped his hands and shut his eyes as he sang a folk song with his former philosophy professor Peter Bolland on guitar. It felt a little like church, which the candidate had skipped that day. “God help me,” he said, “but I feel like this is the Lord’s work.”

Bolland, who had a profound influence on Campa-Najjar when he was a student at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, said he was proud of the young man, lauding “his kindness, his mercy, his insight, his virtue.”

“You are doing your best to make me cry,” said Campa-Najjar, whose attempt to hold back tears failed once he started talking about his mother, who struggled financially after his father left the family and moved back to Gaza. He swallowed hard, and his voice dropped.

“So this race is really personal for me. My mom’s name is Abby and there are countless Abbies out there. I meet them every day. People who tell me ‘I have to decide, do I get a gallon of gas to get to work tomorrow, or a gallon of milk to give my kids breakfast?’”

...As has been widely reported, his grandfather was a mastermind of the murder of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and was killed by Israeli commandos in 1973.

In Escondido, 81-year-old Andy Pinto asked Campa-Najjar how he plans to handle his grandfather’s “situation.”

“That’s a good question,” Campa-Najjar said. “Well, I have a biological grandfather, and he died 16 years before I was born. So to those who are wondering about my relationship, I knew him as well as much as all of you did.”

Sometimes on the trail, said Campa-Najjar, a Christian who is deeply involved in his church, people will come up to him and say, “I don’t want you to bring Sharia law here. I say, ‘Me neither. We have that in common.’”

Campa-Najjar won’t let up until election day. If he wins, he said, his first two priorities will be an anti-corruption bill and a jobs program for his district. Democrats say the race has tightened.

It’s hard to believe that San Diego County Republicans would rather elect an accused thief who might face years in jail than... a Democrat.

In American politics right now-- for better or worse-- anything is possible.