Ep. 471 — Rep. Elissa Slotkin

The Axe Files with David Axelrod

CNN

News

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2021

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin intended to pursue international development work, but watching the twin towers fall on 9/11 as a graduate student in New York changed the trajectory of her career. Rep. Slotkin spent years in the CIA before running for office, flipping a Trump district from red to blue in 2018. Rep. Slotkin joined David to talk about the difficulty of being a Midwestern member of the Democratic Party, the rifts in Congress, the recent fatal high school shooting in her district, and how her time in the CIA and at the Pentagon inform her role as a politician.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:06.0	And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Ax Files, with your host David Axelrod.
0:19.0	I sat down this week with a list of Slotkin, the very impressive Congresswoman from Central Michigan,
0:24.0	who has a really intriguing personal story after a lifetime of service and national security, including three tours of duty as a CIA analyst in Iraq.
0:33.0	She ran for Congress in 2018 and became one of a cadre of military and national security veterans to win his Democrats that year.
0:41.0	Since then, they've formed a very influential moderate block within the Democratic Caucus. They also are in the main, the most vulnerable, incumbents in the upcoming election.
0:53.0	I sat down with her yesterday to talk about her life, her career, and the current state of affairs in Washington.
0:59.0	Here's that conversation.
1:07.0	Congresswoman Slotkin, it's so good to be with you.
1:10.0	Thanks for having me. This is great.
1:12.0	Thanks for being here. You know, there is a ton of stuff that we need to talk about that's going on right now.
1:19.0	But before we do that, I just want to talk about you and your journey, your unlikely journey to this place.
1:26.0	And your family, like me, you come from a family of Jewish immigrants.
1:33.0	Talk a little bit about that when your family got here and where they settled and what they did.
1:40.0	Sure. Well, I think the sort of senior person in my family on the Slotkin side is my great-grandfather,
1:46.0	who came from Belarus and immigrated through Ellis Island and was the youngest of 13 kids.
1:55.0	They all came to the United States.
1:57.0	Obviously, things were not good back in Minsk and ended up working in a slaughterhouse in Buffalo.
2:06.0	And, you know, rose through the ranks eventually was able to become a basically a traveling salesman.
2:16.0	And through a whole bunch of innovation ended up saving enough money that he could start his own little meat company, which was high grade foods.
2:25.0	And that grew and grew and we ended up doing all the meat for Nathan's hot dogs for the first year.
2:33.0	Let me just thank you for that. Okay, because every Sunday when I was growing up, my father and I used to drive out to Coney Island where Nathan's had its flagship place.
	...

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