I would appoint Shannon Hader to represent Washington’s 8th District if I could. Hader is the kind of person I dream of seeing in Congress. She does her homework. She does your homework. She does homework that hasn’t been assigned yet. She appears to genuinely enjoy the prospect of solving problems in unsexy, bureaucratic ways that actually work with our unsexy, bureaucratic system. If you asked her to “fix Congress” on Friday, by Monday you’d have a five-point plan that promised clear deliverables on a reasonable timeline.
“I spent my career doing precision public health,” she tells me on Memorial Day in her newly opened campaign office in Auburn. She goes on, talking like a person who’s had to give a lot of PowerPoint presentations to a lot of skeptical people. “It’s looking at a specific community at a specific time, listening to the community voice and what’s needed, looking at the evidence and data about what might work, and then crafting solutions for what might work in the short term and in the future, and not for the past or for some other community.”
