Meeting Senator Elissa Slotkin
On power, and getting things done, and having a plan
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
Elissa Slotkin is one of my few political heroes. As a member of the U.S. House Of Representatives she’s won in some very swingy districts in Michigan. As of today, she is Michigan’s newest United States Senator, having won as a Democrat against a well-funded opponent in a state that Trump carried. Before running for election, she worked in the CIA and Department of Defense, serving several tours in Iraq. She’s lived a life of public service, called to it after 9/11.
Her family also did a great but very different service to our nation: inventing the Ball Park Frank.
Slotkin has helped see the country through tricky times (she was the person who delivered the Presidential Daily Briefing to President Obama). And her districts have had challenges, too. She became the first member of Congress to represent not one, but two school shootings: Michigan State and Oxford High School, where she gave the graduation speech for that class. Not an easy assignment.
Through it all, Slotkin has managed to stay above the fray. Concentrating on issues of national security and job creation she’s about as moderate as they come, and has proven herself to be quite pragmatic and effective at keeping her job by keeping the people of Michigan happy and being able to speak to very different groups of constituents effectively.
And she was at Cranbrook when I was, graduating two years behind me. Which means there will still be a Cranbrook Senator as today also marks the end of Senator Mitt Romney’s term. He was in school with my mom, and she opened for him at an alumni event as she won the “volunteered a lot and made a direct difference in the school” award the year he won the “dude’s a governor and might run for president” award.
I’m not sure what it says that I don’t have a lot of political heroes, nor whether that says more about me, or about politicians. Nor have I met or interviewed many political folks. Other than mayors of mid-sized town, whom I talked to and met often during my Livability days. Mayors are a good general blanket set of heroes. For the most part, they can’t mess around getting caught up in whatever political nonsense happens at the state and federal levels. They have to functionally run their city. The parts of government that impact everyone, every day: plowing streets, taking out the trash, schools, parks, permits, zoning, etc.
Mayors get stuff done. Slotkin does, too.
As a kid I got to go to the Capitol with my family on a spring break trip to D.C. We got to meet our representative, William Broomfield, who served in Congress beginning in 1957 until 1993. We saw his office, and I got his business card and autograph and later he sent me a signed photo of then-President Ronald Reagan. All of that was pretty cool for an elementary schooler.
Closer to home, two of my kids had the chance to “Page for a Day” for Illinois Senator Don Harmon, whom we found to be gracious and generous and Meredith and Jane enjoyed meeting so many of the Illinois leaders and touring Springfield. (Andrew got pandemic-ed out of the chance, sadly.)
Later, my friend Sean hired me to help decorate the office of his boss, Congressman Mike Quigley (IL-5), who had just been elected to his first term and needed photos of his new district to hang on the walls. Later Sean would hook my kids with a Capitol tour and a chance to meet Congressman Quigley. Much had changed in the Capitol, as we had one of the first tours after the pandemic and the attempted insurrection of January 6th. It was a much more fortified Capitol, but Rep. Quigley’s staff were excited to have citizens back in the Capitol, and he met with us and answered questions and showed us his office, which still includes some of those photos.
But back to Senator Slotkin…
In late 2023, I was working on an issue of What the Future about the future of war Conflict. She was my first ask and we were able to make the interview work. She got it done, even if that meant she called a staffer on the phone, and her staffer held the phone up to her laptop as we did the interview over zoom. The staffer seemed to be doing laundry in the background. It worked. It got done, and that was the point.
The interview was quick and focused and she closed it by saying, “The po
lrization in the U.S. is the No. 1 threat to our national security because it completely freezes decision-making.” And, she added, our enemies are watching.
We have to figure out a way to get back on track as a country and focus more on all of the things we agree on and less on the things we don’t. Any discussion of polarization that doesn’t talk about how outside forces are swamping Americans and our allies with disinformation and propaganda is missing a big part of it. Our enemies and other actors have profited greatly from stoking the fires and fissures among us.
Slotkin will try to be a part of that solution, I’m sure.
I got to meet her at a fundraiser event at the home of Christy Hefner, who lives in one of the most storied condo towers in Chicago. It’s where many of the names in Crain’s Who’s Who (which I used to edit) lived. And many of those old familiar names were in the room as she spoke. She was just as measured and smart and impressive and genuine and pragmatic in person, in a small closed-door event as her public persona. I won’t go into specifics because these things are generally considered off the record.
But I will say broadly that Slotkin talked about how conservatives have been playing a long game: impacting policy, electing officials at all levels and especially working the courts and the SCOTUS to their advantage. “Where is our 10-year plan,” she asked the room.
I didn’t have a good enough plan when I actually met her. Hopefully you’ll note that’s unusual in Meeting my Heroes. I usually have something I want to ask them, or talk about. In some ways I had already made the big ask: The interview had already published. But I did work my way over before she slipped out to make sure I could say hi, and put my face to my name and, yeah, grab a selfie with the future Senator.
Had I more time I suppose I should have seized the chance to lobby for things that matter to me, some obvious and some more pet causes. But it’s also good to recognize when you’re less important than the other folks in the room, be gracious and not take up important people’s time.
Everyone left the event, went back to work and helped her get elected by raising money, or making calls, or knocking on doors. And they all got it done. Now it’s up to her, but I’m confident she’ll make for a great Senator for the big purple that is Michigan.
Here’s what I wrote for What the Future:
Why polarization is our biggest security threat
U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin has seen conflict, war and the surrounding policies firsthand. Her background includes deployments in Iraq with the CIA, as well as work at the Pentagon, the White House and her own stint at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Today, she represents one of the swingiest swing districts in the nation. In a global economy,
conflicts in one region can affect others quickly. There are many threats out there, but she thinks the biggest is close to home.
Matt Carmichael: What is the war in Ukraine telling us about the future of conflict?
Rep. Elissa Slotkin: What we’re seeing in Ukraine is what it means when you don't invest in modernizing your military. In a weird way, it’s partially retrograde, but then you add into it modern technology like drones and cyber warfare. The U.S. would never be fighting a war like this. This is a war that for all intents and purposes is a war of attrition via artillery. The U.S. basically doesn't conduct warfare like this anymore because we have invested so heavily in air power.
Carmichael: What does that signal?
Slotkin: It shows us that the days of relying on a military heavy with only [artillery] equipment and not technology is not going to be useful in the future. Also, small investments in things like commercially available drones can undermine what should be traditional military hardware advantages [like planes and munitions]. Other countries who the U.S. has an adversarial relationship with have spent time investing in technology that undercuts American military advantages. The last thing is that you can have all the sexy tools you want, but if you can't get your logistics operation competent, then you’re going to be embarrassed on the world stage.
Carmichael: It also seems that war in one part of the world can still wind up a global conflict?
Slotkin: It's changed thinking for other countries around the world. It changed the thinking of our European allies who have forever sort of had a failure of imagination that this could actually happen. And we know that China is watching and thinking and processing what this means for them and a potential clash with the United States over the Straits of Taiwan. And what are we seeing in terms of how even a conflict in one kind of small region can disrupt the entire global supply chain in our global economy.
Carmichael: It seems new to equate conflict and supply chains so closely.
Slotkin: COVID-19 plus Ukraine in such short proximity to each other has really demonstrated that supply chains are vulnerable. They are not resilient. And if you don't understand your own supply chains, you're destined to be at heightened risk. During COVID-19, we saw that with things like toilet paper. Now we understand how vulnerable our food supply chains are. Or those 14-cent microchips that enable you to make a car and keep our economy going. Or active pharmaceutical ingredients. We do not make the majority of the drugs that Americans take.
Carmichael: This is a cause that’s important to you.
Slotkin: I led a bipartisan defense supply chain task force in the Armed Services Committee with Rep. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin. It was like picking up the rug to see what's underneath and there being a lot of creepy-crawlies under there. Even with our defense supply chains where there's so much law and regulation around buying American products because it’s military equipment, we still had all these dependencies on places like China that made us vulnerable. The most obvious example was propellant. The chemicals that make our ordinances go boom — 90% come from China. God forbid, if we had to be in a conflict with China, we would depend on them for making things go boom. The military is now taking steps to deal with that. But that played out over and over again for a million companies across the country, across the globe.
Carmichael: Will the motivations for why we go to war shift with climate change in terms of natural resources?
Slotkin: Human beings will always go to war over scarce resources, whether that's oil or water or access to places like the Taiwan Straits. It’s not a resource, but if 70% of your trade traffic goes through that one strait, then it is critical to keep those straits open to keep ourselves fed and fueled and living a normal American life.
Carmichael: How dangerous is polarization?
Slotkin: The polarization in the U.S. is the No. 1 threat to our national security because it completely freezes decision- making. It makes it difficult to have unanimity or agreement on what we want our role to be abroad. In prior eras, issues could have been worked out among adults across the political spectrum. When you leave the water's edge and go abroad, the U.S. should speak with one voice. That doesn't happen right now and that's a real problem for national security.