This is an excerpt from a column I wrote for Dome Magazine.

 

By Chad Selweski

On the campaign trail in suburban Detroit, Andy Levin avoids a sales pitch to voters based on his perhaps perfect pedigree for a 9th Congressional District that remains solidly Democratic.

He is the son of longtime Democratic Congressman Sandy Levin, who is retiring from the 9th District seat at the end of the year, and the nephew of another fixture in Michigan Democratic politics – Carl Levin, who served in the U.S. Senate for decades.

Yet, as he pursues his dad’s seat in Congress, Andy Levin doesn’t seem particularly interested in being labeled as chapter three in the Levin legacy.

“I am not my dad. I am running as Andy Levin,” he told a group of Macomb County voters earlier this week. “I am … quite the rebel.”

Though the 57-year-old doesn’t look the part, the younger Levin seems determined to run, to some extent, based on passions from his past, which resulted in several arrests in the 1980s for civil disobedience while participating in protests supporting oppressed people in South Africa, Haiti and Tibet, and other liberal causes. 

He’s not a member of the Democrats’ #Resistance movement, though he’s done a whole lot more resisting in his life than most in the new generation of left-wingers in the Democratic Party. As a young man in college and law school, he said, his heroes were not politicians, they were 20th century icons like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

In his pursuit of the 9th District nomination, Levin supports a substantially higher minimum wage, universal health care for all, and a “bottom-up” economic policy that ends “unfair” trade practices. But his focus on protecting human rights abroad is not a typical 2018 agenda item.

While soft-spoken Sandy Levin served as a solid liberal throughout his 36 years in the House, his son emphasizes his “hell raising” abilities if elevated to Capitol Hill as the Levin family successor.

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