MI-08: Keep an eye on this race

Elissa Slotkin was twenty-five and in her second day of graduate school in New York City the day the planes slammed into the towers, and, her life, like so many others, was changed.

“I felt I had to do something in service to my country,” she said. That led to the Central Intelligence Agency and three tours of duty in Iraq, where she served with the soldiers and eventually married Colonel Dave Moore, an Apache helicopter pilot.

Slotkin was a long way from the farm in Holly, Michigan, where she spent summers, or the Detroit suburbs where her mom lived. Eventually, she worked in the White House in both the Bush and Obama administrations, rising to become acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Affairs. Now, she’s running for Congress.

But though she’s a national expert on foreign policy and security issues, things she cares deeply about, that’s not the main reason she’s running.

Nor is she, as you might expect, a Republican. She is a progressive Democrat, and what got her into this race was health care. Her mother Judith, a well-known marketing and public relations professional in the Detroit area, had no health insurance when she was diagnosed with Stage Four ovarian cancer nine years ago. “She was lying on an MRI gurney and we had to write an $8,000 check before they would treat her,” Slotkin remembers.

Judith Slotkin died in 2011. Her daughter had no desire to serve in the administration that came to power last year, and came back to Holly to run a small consulting business. Last year, she was watching when her congressman, Mike Bishop, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “He was smiling, beaming, so proud that he had voted to repeal Obamacare with no replacement in place,” she said. “I looked at my husband and said: This will not stand. You don’t get to do this. In the military, this is called dereliction of duty.”


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