Why Was Heath Mello Thrown Under the Bus? - The Nation [View all]

[flamingdem]

Was the candidate for mayor of Omaha held to a different standard than other Democrats?
By D.D. Guttenplan

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-was-heath-mello-thrown-under-the-bus/


Omaha—On my first morning here in Nebraska, I walked right into a glass wall. “Wow! Didn’t see that coming,” I thought, as the blood poured down my nose. So I have some sense of what it must have been like for Heath Mello, the young Democrat trying to get elected mayor of the biggest city in one of the country’s deepest-red states, when Tom Perez and the Democratic National Committee threw him under the bus last week.

Mello, who finished three points behind Republican incumbent Jean Stothert in the five-way, nonpartisan primary on April 4, has been attracting national attention—and support—from progressives for months now. Our Revolution first endorsed Mello on March 9 as one of two dozen candidates the group is backing in 2017. Daily Kos jumped in after the primary, pointing out that in addition to offering the chance to flip City Hall (Omaha makes up most of Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which the Democrats lost by just over one point), “a good showing” in the race “will energize progressives and encourage strong candidates to run” in 2018.

An Omaha native first elected to Nebraska’s unicameral legislature in 2008 at the age of 29, Mello successfully led the fight to overturn Republican Governor Pete Ricketts’s veto of a bill permitting young people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to obtain a driver’s license. Last year, he again put together a coalition that managed to reverse another of Ricketts’s vetoes—this time of a bill allowing young undocumented immigrants to apply for professional or commercial licenses. In Nebraska, which resettled more refugees per capita in 2016 than any other state, that kind of leadership stands out. As does Mello’s outspoken emphasis—unusual in a state dominated by Big Agriculture, and which still gets most of its energy from coal—on fighting climate change and protecting the environment. Likewise his record on LGBTQ issues, including a call for a law to ban discrimination in housing and employment. With strong union support from firefighters, teachers, and city workers, the Sierra Club’s enthusiastic endorsement, and the backing of an array of Democratic heavyweights, from former senator Ben Nelson to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Mello was beginning to look like the party’s best chance for a win after disappointments in Kansas and Georgia.

Especially since his opponent, Stothert, ousted her Democratic predecessor in 2013 by promising to repeal an unpopular restaurant tax—and never kept her promise. With registered Democrats in the city actually outnumbering Republicans—while Donald Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in Nebraska, Hillary Clinton carried Douglas County, which includes Omaha, by over 5,000 votes—the arrival of the Democratic “Unity Tour” on Friday was supposed to provide a final burst of enthusiasm to carry Mello across the finish line on May 9.

Instead, on April 19, The Wall Street Journal ran a story noting that Mello, a practicing Catholic, is pro-life. The story also falsely claimed that Mello had co-sponsored a bill “requiring women to look at an ultrasound image of their fetus before receiving an abortion.” A similar error was made by The Washington Post, which claimed that Mello had “previously backed a bill requiring ultrasounds for women considering abortions,” and then again the following day by David Nir, political director of Daily Kos, who announced the site was withdrawing its endorsement of Mello—a move applauded by Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, who’d launched a 12-part Twitter storm linking to the WSJ article and accusing Sanders and Perez of kicking off their tour with the message “shame women; we’ll support u anyway.”