If guts and gumption were the only criteria for high office, Tammy Duckworth would already be President of the United States.
When the junior Senator from Illinois stands in front of crowds -- despite the fact that doing so is painful -- she perches on a pair of titanium legs, her feet encased in ladylike flats. When she sits in her wheelchair, which is most of the time, you can see that one prosthetic’s socket has a camouflage print, and the other an American flag.
Duckworth could probably use her congressional health insurance to pay for the most state-of-the-art cosmetic prostheses for the two legs she lost in combat during the Iraq war. But like the men and women who preceded, surrounded and succeeded her in recuperating from combat-related injuries at the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington DC, she uses the frequently criticized, much-maligned and sometimes woefully inadequate veterans’ healthcare system.
Many voters already know the most visible part of her story, which she also told on the final night of the 2016 Democratic national convention before Hillary Clinton accepted her nomination. Duckworth had excelled in school (at one point she attended the Singapore American School as well as the International School in Bangkok) and college (University of Hawaii, George Washington University) and could have focused on a safe academic career as a PhD scholar in political science but preferred instead to serve in Iraq when she was called up for duty as a member of the US Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Determined to make her own contribution, she signed up for the helicopter wing as it was the one place where American women could volunteer for a combat role. It was while co-piloting a Bell UH-GO Black Hawk chopper on November 12th, 2004 that she was severely injured when an RPG brought it down.
Duckworth lost both her legs (the right near the hip and the left below the knee) in the attack, and nearly lost her right arm except, as she explained it, for two twists of fate (or, as she prefers, gifts from God): “The only vascular surgeon in the entire Middle Eastern theatre happened to be on a three-day rotation in Baghdad ER” the day she was shot down. It took 13 hours of surgery and, quite literally, an 11th-hour blood donation from four members of her unit with the same blood type to save her arm. It was almost completely destroyed, and even to this day she has restricted usage of the limb.
But before that day in Iraq, Duckworth said that there were other “earthly angels” whose help saved her during one of the other most difficult times in her life: her family’s descent from the middle class and into poverty.
Her father, Franklin, was a World War II vet and lifetime NRA member who traced his lineage back to an ancestor who fought in the American Revolution. Her mother, Lamai, is a Thai woman of Chinese descent. Tammy was born in Bangkok in 1968 and grew up moving around Asia, where Franklin was working for the United Nations and multinational corporations.
“My daddy had lost his job when I was in middle school and, by the time I was in high school, four years later, we had gone through everything and we were down to our last $10,” she has related.
For many Americans after the Great Recession, Duckworth’s is probably all too familiar a story. Back then, her family ended up living in a pay-by-the-week motel room and came to rely on food stamps, which her parents struggled to make last the month. She remembers that at the grocery store, her family would meticulously count out the last five brown $1 food stamps and use the food stamps they had for baloney and some white bread, praying it would last the week, until Monday next week.
But, she said, her English teacher helped fill in the gaps for her and for others at her high school, where 60% of students were on some sort of public assistance. “He would keep a bunch of us kids after school long enough that he’d say, ‘Aw, kids, I’m so sorry that I kept you extra, for extra work. Here’s 10 bucks, go to Taco Bell, two for 99 cents, get something to eat before you go home.’”
The Dickensian tale gets even more poignant.
Duckworth would bring one of her tacos home to her father, and she would flat out lie to him and say, "‘Oh, Daddy, I wasn’t hungry. I only ate one because I knew he wouldn’t eat. '"
The story of her upbringing, and of her father brought low by a late-in-life layoff, resonates with many of those who supported Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016, the “forgotten” who felt disenfranchised by an unforgiving globalism their nation, like so many which blindly embraced the grand economic concept without truly understanding (and therefore preparing for) its consequences. The hard truth is that much of the world lives closer to the economic edge than their elected officials would admit -- for fear of losing votes -- that most citizens are all one bad accident, one bad diagnosis away from potential bankruptcy.
Thirteen months after the attack, Duckworth was back on Army duty on titanium legs, and was training to fly again. Duckworth has never regretted going into flying. By then she had also jumped into public service, advocating better treatment for vets and winning friends with her sunny disposition. (She’s been known to work out in T-shirts reading “Dude, where’s my leg?” and “Lucky for me he’s an ass man.”) Even after she became a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, lost a bid for Congress in 2006, and went to work for the Obama administration, her story drew praise from conservatives and liberals alike. “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley Sullenberger III has called it “beyond inspiring.”
At a time when injured Iraq vets were starting to come home in droves, Duckworth’s can-do attitude and blunt, “Tell it as it is” style, made her a darling on the morning show circuit and earned her glowing write-ups in magazines like Glamour. Talk radio host Laura Ingraham called her “my new hero.” On the vets’ blog Blackfive, a commenter gushed, “A most admirable, intelligent, impressive individual, American Patriot, and lady! If she ran for political office, she has my vote! Gee, I hope she is Republican!” But no such luck: Duckworth declared her first candidacy for Congress in 2005 as one of the “Fighting Dems,” a cohort of vets aiming to seize the national-security mantle from the GOP.
She lost her election by 2 points, and, as she put it, sat in a bathtub and cried for three days. But she was soon back in the arena, with her ambition to serve undaunted. In addition to her ongoing service in the National Guard (Duckworth retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel), she ran the Illinois veterans’ bureau from 2006 to 2009; when Obama took office, he appointed her assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In both agencies Duckworth tackled the daunting challenge of reintegrating returning vets into the economy: As recently as last year, veterans aged 20 to 24 faced a whopping unemployment rate of 30 percent. As many as a quarter of vets suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and up to a quarter may have suffered a traumatic brain injury. Suicide has been rampant: According to the Center for a New American Security, between 2005 and 2010 service members took their own lives approximately once every 36 hours. Nearly a million veterans who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan are now readjusting to life on the homefront.
In Illinois, Duckworth pushed successfully for tax credits for businesses that hire vets with wartime service. Under Obama, she boosted services for homeless vets and created an Office of Online Communications, staffing it with respected military bloggers to help with troops’ day-to-day questions. Finally, in 2011, she resigned from the VA to make another run for Congress, and won.
Her victory was twofold: Not only did Duckworth now have the platform to advance her political agenda, but she also became a living example for fellow female veterans, as the first disabled woman ever to be elected to Congress.
In the House of Representatives, Duckworth worked in a number of committees including the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as well as the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. She introduced a bill to facilitate the awarding of government contracts to those employing military veterans and also helped set up programmes to study PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorders) among war veterans, something she herself experienced and overcame. In 2013, during a House hearing, she made headlines when she took Virginia CEO Braulio Castillo to task for fraudulently representing himself as a disabled military vet and receiving millions of dollars ($500 million) in federal contracts. “Shame on you. You may not have broken any laws … (but) you broke the trust of veterans.” Duckworth added: “Twisting your ankle in prep school is not defending or serving this nation.”
Given her combative nature, it's inevitable that Duckworth has had her own share of controversy. She has fended off several challenges, even legal ones questioning her post-Iraq role as someone appointed to look after veterans in first Illinois and then the USA. At one stage, she was even sued for using a government-owned van fitted with conveniences for the disabled while campaigning for another Democrat. She paid back the entire cost of using a government vehicle while campaigning.
Her next political effort, to retake Obama’s former Senate seat from Republican Mark Kirk, was an exercise in tenacity. By their very nature, campaigns are invariably marathons as candidates have to walk, stand, talk, shake hands, answer questions, smile a lot, and rinse and repeat at a gruelling pace.When Duckworth first got her new legs she could barely walk, and she couldn’t sit for more than a few hours at a time, much less entertain visitors. The Senate candidate rode shotgun in a young staffer’s SUV, hoisting herself into the seat with twitchy triceps and expertly disassembling her legs to save space, propping them at her side. On arrival, she reattached the legs and clambered out as a staffer grabbed a lightweight wheelchair from the cargo bay, often bringing along a barstool that Duckworth sat on during long constituency meet-and-greets.
Even now, you can read the weariness on her face in photos and in televised sessions. Taking a step with her right leg, the one that’s gone up to the hip, is like “trying to control a broom by holding on to the last two inches of the broom handle,” as she’s put it. She flings her hip into each pace. A grass median becomes a hazard. So do cracks in the sidewalk. And these days there are lots of cracked sidewalks in suburban Chicago.
The campaign between Duckworth and Kirk was unique. Both candidates often used wheelchairs (Kirk had suffered a stroke which knocked him off duty for a year) to get around on the hustings trail, and the two kept a relatively low profile, campaigning even though the battle between them routinely was touted as one to watch nationally.
In challenging Kirk, Duckworth characterized her bid as part of a larger Democratic effort to change the Senate majority because "it's time for Washington to be held accountable." Helped by her compelling narrative, Kirk’s verbal missteps (including an ill-advised, perceived swop at her racial heritage during a televised debate), she prevailed with a 54% to 40% plurality. Together with current 2020 presumptive presidential candidate Kamala Harris from California (whose parents are of Tamil and African-American extraction), and Japanese-born Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono, Duckworth is one of only three curent senators of Asian descent.
Her time in Congress’s upper chamber has not been by any means sedate. Prompted by a tweet President Donald Trump posted on Jnauary 20th accusing Democrats of “holding our Military hostage” to have “unchecked illegal immigration,” just one of many partisan attacks Trump launched over the weekend trying to blame Democrats for a congressional budget stalemate that had led to a shutdown of the federal government, Duckworth struck back with the most blistering riposte on the Commander-in-Chief yet recorded.
That Trump would accuse Democrats - like herself - of not caring about soldiers, was galling. Does he even know that there are service members who are in harm's way right now, watching him, looking for their commander in chief to show leadership, rather than to try to deflect blame?” Duckworth said. “Or that his own Pentagon says that the short-term funding plans he seems intent on pushing is actually harmful to not just the military, but to our national security?”
“I spent my entire adult life looking out for the well-being, the training, the equipping of the troops for whom I was responsible,” Duckworth continued. “Sadly, this is something the current occupant of the Oval Office does not seem to care to do - and I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger.”
Duckworth saved her zinger for the end, a dig at the medical reason Trump has claimed was why he was able to avoid military service for the fifth time.
“And I have a message for 'Cadet Bone Spurs,'” Duckworth said. “If you cared about our military, you'd stop baiting Kim Jong-un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops, and millions of innocent civilians, in danger.”
Trump, uncharacteristically, offered no response. Neither did the White House press team.
It was a verbal takedown every bit as effective as Trump’s own diatribes – perhaps even more so as Duckworth’s attack was given credibility and gravitas by her own service. It has also brought her national attention at a time when Democratic Party opposition to the GOP appears both unfocused and leaderless. Given that many of the would-be candidates are either getting on in years (i.e. Bernie Sanders is 75, Joe Biden 74, Elizabeth Warren 68, Hillary Clinton 69 ), relatively inexperienced (Harris, Amy Klobuchar), relative unknowns (John Delany) or ‘establishment politician’ types (Tim Kaine, Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe) or publicity hounds (Cory Booker), there would be room for someone like Duckworth to offer a blend of service, proven toughness, speaking skills and administrative/legislative experience. Her father being an American citizen when she was born, allows her to run for president (or serve as vice president), neutralizing any potential “birther” line of attack from the GOP. Besides, Ted Cruz was born in Canada and former Republican Party presidential nominee John McCain, (Panama).
Duckworth will be 52 at the time of the next presidential election. Her social politics are progressive, being for women’s rights (i.e. ‘The right to choose’) when it comes to deciding on abortion; and in the forefront of the move to have restrictions placed on the purchase of weapons, which means the gun-lobby, including the very powerful National Rifle Association, will be very much against her. However, she is somewhat inoculated from criticism given her status as a war heroine (the first female double-amputee in US military history and the first female veteran in the Senate), the gun-lobby will not find it as easy to question either her patriotism or her commitment to the USA as they did while campaigning against the scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton who was accused of scheduling appointments with foreign dignitaries who helped fund the charitable foundation set up by husband Bill.
Given her reputation for unvarnished straight talk, neither can Duckworth be accused of straddling issues with lawyerly finesse designed -- at best to obfuscate, and at worse, to hide -- the truth. She is also vehemently for Obamacare and for smoothening the path to US citizenship for those illegal immigrants who fit all the qualifying criteria. All of this makes her the anti-Trump.
Like former President Obama, she would benefit from her roots in a state with a very strong Democratic tradition and a solid fundraising base (Illinois has voted Democratic for president in the last seven elections and has produced two presidents – Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama). But Duckworth seems much more likely to work her way up the Senate leadership ladder for now, focused as she is on advocating for her core issues and passion for the military. Moreover, her recent announcement of pregnancy foreshadows a desire to concentrate on more personal domestic priorities while balancing her day job.
Yet, in the final analysis, this confirms her connection with 21st century main street America, at least more so than the billionaire occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, Tammy Duckworth’s story -- the daughter of a war veteran and an immigrant; decorated soldier; who knows what it means to try and make end meet, living through mean circumstances and tough financial times; a congresswoman; a Senator; a wife and mother balancing work and family – is the quintessential American story of despair, hope and redemption. She’s been there, done things and knows how life is.
Would that we could say that of all our leaders.