Spencer Fordin
Jen Perelman will gleefully take the path of most resistance to achieve her political ends.
Perelman, a first-time Democratic congressional candidate taking on an established opponent in U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, doesn’t recognize party boundaries as much as a one-question political litmus test.
Do you take money from corporations? If so, Perelman wants to replace you with someone who doesn’t.
Perelman, an attorney who grew up in south Florida, said last week that the organizing principle of her campaign is that regular people — and not professional politicians — should be representing their communities.
“Congressional representation is a term of service and not a career,” she said. “These are people who are supposed to be speaking on behalf of their communities. The fact that you have to spend this exorbitant amount of money to do that precludes regular people from representing their communities. Now we’re suffering the consequences by having a millionaire Congress that is completely out of touch and doesn’t understand what’s going on for regular people.”
Perelman said that her campaign embraces being an underdog, and she pointed to campaign finance as a pretty easy factor to illustrate the difference between her and her opponent. Perelman has raised $315,000 and retains $90,503 in cash on hand, while Wasserman Schultz has raised $1.5 million and has $600,000 in cash on hand.
And what does that cash difference mean in the race to represent Florida’s 23rd Congressional district?
“She’s been able to have her ads on local television on a loop,” said Perelman of her opponent. “She will be able to do unlimited mailers. Grass roots campaigns depend heavily on canvassing. And we’re still canvassing. We’re socially distant canvassing. We’re wearing masks. We’re distributing sanitizer. But the money matters.”
The primary will be decided on Aug. 18, but for Perelman, the message will remain the same every day against Wasserman Schultz, and it would be the same against a random Republican opponent.
For Perelman, a proponent of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, there is just no debate to be had with people who disagree with her whether they’re on the Republican or Democrat side of the aisle. The need for an overhaul, said Perelman, is obvious every day when you see the carnage of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wasserman Schultz has openly spoken about proudly supporting the Affordable Care Act, but Perelman wants sweeping systemic change in American healthcare and she doesn’t want to go through formalities.
“Debating her would be like debating a Flat Earther,” Perelman said of the incumbent. “I feel like there’s no value in that debate. I’m not going to debate Medicare for All with her. Quite honestly, I’m not debating it with anybody anymore. I’m not going to try to explain to you that the world is round. I don’t have the wherewithal for that.
“The key element that we have to understand isn’t what we call the system or how the system works. It’s that we currently have a profit motive in healthcare,” she added. “And that’s a huge problem that manifests in so many different ways. The idea of single payer is you get rid of the profit motive. By doing that, you’re able to stand up to Big Pharma. You’re able to get things when you’re bargaining as a whole country as a collective. You have one payer. ‘This is what we’re doing or we’re not buying your drugs.’ You have so much more power as a collective.
“And of course the corporate interests and the private interests have very successfully done major propaganda campaigns for years scaring people that they’ll lose their choice. ‘People want their good employer healthcare.’ Nobody wants that. They just think they want that because they don’t know any better.”
But what about the practical matter? Popular perception is that the Republican party might be a larger obstacle to enacting systemic change in healthcare policy, but Perelman isn’t sure she believes that.
“It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle or what color or letter is next to their name,” she said. “What matters is if they take corporate money. If you take corporate money, you are not going to support this because those are your donors feeding at the trough. …We’re talking about the roadblocks presented by corporatism in Congress.
“And the way you get past that is you rally the people and you start plucking [seats] off one by one like we’re doing. Eventually — and it will take a while — we level it out where there’s as many of our voices as there are of their voices. Then we can actually see some real debates and policy discussion. Right now we can’t even do that.”
Perelman is also passionate about providing tuition-free public education, and she said that will entail a societal compact that values not just a K-through-12 education but also trade schools and universities.
Many of Florida’s most pressing issues, said Perelman, can be filtered through a number of lenses.
Sure, it’s important to protect the environment, but not just for moral reasons. For financial ones. Floridians need to be vigilant about what’s in their drinking water because its purely in their best interests.
“Our biggest industry is tourism,” she said. “When you start having horrible red tides and very exacerbated blue-green algae, you’re messing up tourism for our state. I had a trip planned to Sanibel Island about a year and a half ago and I cancelled because the red tide was so horrible. Even dealing with COVID.
“All these things that are bad for our state are bad for our business. It isn’t just, ‘Oh, the manatees are dying,’ although that is a big concern. For people that don’t see it on a moral level, ultimately it does affect our drinking water. We have a finite amount.”
Perelman said the campaign has been draining and exhausting and that it has taken up much of her daily life, and she noted that it’s just been challenging and isolating to be running a primary challenge against a Democratic opponent. The candidate noted that someone had purchased a natural web domain related to her campaign — JenPerelman.com — and redirected it to Wasserman Schultz’s Congressional bio page.
That, in and of itself, is indicative of the up-hill challenge she’s been facing.
“It’s very difficult to run against a machine,” she said. “The Democratic party is not as Democratic as people might think it is. They do not take well to challengers. They really are only supportive of people running for open seats. They do not ever see merit in challenging a sitting Democrat. They pretty much will always direct you to challenge a sitting Republican. And they have this premise that a Democrat’s a Democrat. And no, that is not true.”
The Wasserman Schultz campaign did not return a request for comment regarding the website domain or the overarching issue of money in politics.
Knowing what she knows now, does Perelman think twice about her fight?
Would she have preferred to perhaps contest an open seat or target a vulnerable Republican in a nearby district?
“People have asked me, ‘Why don’t you run for this or that?’ That’s for people who want a career in politics,” she said. “You start with city commission, you work yourself up to the state legislature. That’s the whole mentality that I think is the source of our problems. I don’t think someone needs political experience to be a representative. I don’t want people with tons of political experience; that means they’ve been in that system for so long.
“The reason I’m running for this seat is this is my congressional district. I live here. That’s my representative. She’s not doing her job and I think I can do it better. So why would I run for someone else’s district?”
