Should You Come To Wonkette's Mallory McMorrow Fundraiser? Yes! What If You're Not In Michigan? Yes!

Talking to Mallory McMorrow on Labor Day weekend.

Photo by Dominic Gwinn. I bought that shirt with my own money when I was 15 years old.

I like Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who’s running for US Senate. But what if I just liked her based on vibes? What if I was asking you to come to my fundraiser for her — if you’re not in Michigan, join us on Zoom! — and then she won and turned into some bullshit “bipartisan” centrist dick?

Boy would I have egg on my face!

So I told her people I needed a call with her, and we arranged it for 2 p.m. on Labor Day Sunday, and then I forgot. When she called at just exactly the appointed time, I was settled in with a Carl Hiaasen book and my Labor Day Sunday 2 p.m. Sipping Tequila. “Hi, it’s Mallory,” she said in her cool deep voice, and I said something like “ACK URGH UH!” and didn’t want to make her wait while I tried to figure out how to record on my phone (I’m pretty sure it’s easy) and got a pen with which I took all of three notes.

Do not expect this to be a good interview. McMorrow speaks really quickly — she’s got a lot to say! — and I said things like, “Wait, there was something else I wanted to … ugh, nope, it’s gone, FUCK!”

But there were three main things I wanted to confirm beyond just my vibes of what she would do. I wanted a commitment:

• Would she get all fucking bipartisan, and confirm his horrendous people? She would not. I said some unkind things about Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, and how she’s bagging on progressives while doing some reach-across-the-aisle bullshit, and McMorrow pointed out that our state’s senators split on the budget Continuing Resolution, with Gary Peters voting for it (URGH) and Slotkin voting against because she had asked for two incredibly reasonable commitments in return — that they stop Elon Musk’s rescissions of duly allocated monies, and that Donald Trump actually follow the law — and they would not. We agreed that this was the proper ask, and the proper vote.

• What about Democratic leadership? I wasn’t trying to make her say anything impolitic, and early on offered to go off the record, providing she actually said “off the record” at any time first. She did not go off the record. She agrees that Democratic leadership are nice enough people who are not meeting the fucking moment. (She didn’t say fucking.) Calling tanks in fucking DC a “distraction” from “kitchen table issues” is preposterous, and they don’t understand how enraged Americans are right now that Trump and his lunatics are tearing down all of our actual society.

• I forget what the third thing was. Oh, yeah, I wanted her to promise to impeach a bunch, like every single time, but she wouldn’t go for it, because he’s been impeached twice already and he’s still fucking there. (She didn’t say fucking.)

We talked and talked, about leadership’s whole game plan being “winning in 2026” despite the fact that he doesn’t listen to Congress anyway, and the courts are mostly letting him. (McMorrow thinks that we can at least slow things down, and brought up the fireball of public emotion when they tried to murder Head Start in its crib. They backed down!) We talked about Zohran Mamdani, and meeting every person and focusing relentlessly on making your city better for everyone. We talked a lot about Michigan’s budget, which the state House just passed months late so that the Senate would have no choice but to pass it lest the government shut down, hurting everyone. It cuts $6 billion from the budget, $1 billion from Medicaid. It literally defunds the state police, because they don’t like the (Black) guy in charge of it. It shuts down universal free breakfast and lunch for all the state’s students. I asked about polling on universal breakfast and lunch, and McMorrow said it was approved by over 76 percent — a number she had right at the ready when I brought it up. “But we still have the Senate, right? Are they going to pass the House’s version because they’re the responsible ones, so they have to be responsible, responsibly?” McMorrow took a moment to gather her thoughts before answering, which is a thing I’ve never learned to do. She believes the Senate’s Democratic caucus deliberations should remain private — okay — but (forcefully) she hopes not.

She’s tired of offering olive branches to people who fucking light them on fire. (She did not say fucking.)

Let’s all hop in Obama’s time machine to when we all first met Mallory McMorrow.

See why we all like her?

And this is what I kept forgetting to ask her, because sometimes I am bad at my job: Does it really matter who’s got the perfect, just right, Goldilocks and the Three Bears policy platform right now, or shouldn’t we care who’ll fucking fight? Luckily, she had been on Ali Velshi that very morning answering the question I kept having on the tip of my tongue before getting distracted by my menopause brain (I was only on my first tequila):

And that is exactly what I am asking for in my senator, and I hope you agree. I invite you to my Detroit home, Sunday evening, Sept. 21, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. (it’s officially set for 6 p.m., but that didn’t seem long enough for us all to hang out and eat my delicious food and drink my delicious drinks). If you can’t make it to Detroit, by all means join us on Zoom; we’ll have a camera in my living room for you all to see us (and each other), though if you’re zooming in, I can’t give you my delicious refreshments. (Address given out after you’ve bought your tickets.)

I want a senator who’s good and fucking mad, and who understands how good and fucking mad we are, and who won’t shit on progressives (or centrists, or libs) to make herself look better to some Democratic consultant in the sky.

Let’s fucking gooooooo!

(She did not say fucking.)