Sen. Ron Wyden says the Democrats need ‘chutzpah’ to return to power

By Andrew Silow-Carroll
February 2, 2025

(JTA) — Sen. Ron Wyden wrote his new memoir before the re-election of Donald Trump, and at times it reads like a dispatch from a distant era that ended on, well, Jan. 20.

The Jewish Oregon Democrat’s book recalls fierce battles over his signature issues — healthcare reform, climate change, consumer protection —  and his success in attracting bipartisan partners.

“I routinely team up with deeply conservative Republicans to pass legislation, without sacrificing my equally embedded progressive principles,” he writes in “It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change.”

When I asked him Thursday if that is still possible when the Republicans hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, a conservative supermajority sits on the Supreme Court, and the president is issuing a flurry of executive orders that have challenged the separation of powers and norms of government, he insisted it was.

He sees hope in the frenzied response to Trump’s executive order freezing hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans. The outcry from service providers, courts and politicians — including a few Republicans — pushed Trump to rescind the order.

“I think now we’re starting to get people to come, we’re going to mobilize, we’re going to make a difference,” said Wyden. “We’re going to be heard.”

As his book’s title suggests, Wyden draws heavily on his Jewish background to explain his approach to life and governing. The son of two Jewish parents who fled the Nazis for safe harbor in the United States, he takes personally Trump’s order to end asylum entirely on the southern border.

He writes that his career in politics has been guided by two principles, chutzpah and tikkun olam. His take on tikkun olam — to “repair the world” – is a fairly standard version of a kabalistic concept that has come to mean social action in support of progressive causes.

His definition of chutzpah is a little less traditional: Rather than describing an audacious and even shameless act of gall, his version of chutzpah is closer to moral courage. He writes that chutzpah is “shorthand for the individual’s self-confident, against-the-odds embrace of the possible.”

“Chutzpah is inherently good, and people who don’t subscribe to that are essentially warping it,” said Wyden, drawing on an interpretation by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, a Canadian contributor to Chabad.org. In the book, Wyden offers 12 ”Rules of Chutzpah,” ranging from “If you want to make change, you’ve got to make noise” to “There are two equally important paths to progress: Start good things and stop bad things.”

Chutzpah, he said, was behind his staff’s decision to gather and publicize the intel that 50 states were essentially having their Medicaid portals blocked due to the president’s spending freeze, and within a few hours, “we were on our way to being able to push back successfully and get it thrown out.” He calls it an example, “admittedly a modest one,” of traditional politics acting as a check on the executive.

Wyden, who said political change almost always starts with the grassroots, believes a “great deal” more pushback is necessary, from his colleagues and everyday citizens.

Wyden also calls on readers “to engage in serious political action to stop the United States from falling into the abyss of fascism” — at a time when activists have yet to take to the streets in large numbers to protest President Trump’s policies, and Democrats disagree about how aggressive they should be in fighting back against Trump’s nominees and agenda.

“I think it’s starting to come back,” he said of the activist “resistance” that greeted Trump’s first term. “I mean, we went through the election, and certainly it was very different than when Trump won the first time, and people said, ‘My God, you know, we worked hard, but 77 million people voted for him. What can we do?’

“I’ve got town meetings coming up at home, and my colleagues are saying they’re starting to hear” more examples of people starting to mobilize.

As Oregon’s senior senator, who’s served a total of 44 years in Congress, Wyden, 75, is the second-most senior Democrat in the Senate after Washington’s Patty Murray. When his party held the chamber, he chaired the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which oversees taxes, trade and tariffs, Social Security, Medicare and health policy. His seniority gives him status even in the minority: On Wednesday, as the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, a visibly angry Wyden grilled Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about his longstanding opposition to vaccines, saying that Trump’s nominee for health secretary was “both untrustworthy and unprepared.”

Wyden entered politics in law school as a campaign aide to former U.S. Senator Wayne Morse. Later, he was an advocate for seniors as co-founder of the Portland branch of the Gray Panthers advocacy group. (“By 27, I was among the nation’s youngest authorities on Medicare,” he writes.)

After serving in Congress from 1981 to 1996, he was elected to the Senate in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Bob Packwood, a powerful Republican undone by a sexual harassment scandal. In doing so Wyden became the fourth Jewish senator from the state, following Richard L. Neuberger (1955 to 1960), his wife and successor Maurine Neuberger (1960 to 1967) and Joseph Simon, who served a partial term from 1898 to 1903.

Wyden says a tiny Jewish community flourished in Oregon due to the state’s iconoclasm. The same insular state that passed laws hounding Black people, Chinese immigrants and Catholics is also home to the arch-liberal Reed College and is a hotbed of progressivism, environmentalism and entrepreneurism, from Nike to the Harry & David fruit company, founded by Jewish brothers.

Wyden said Oregon’s small Jewish community has also made a big impact because “Jewish values are Oregon values.” When I asked him for an example, he mentioned the environment. “A good example would be the way we treat the land. We constantly try to find a way to work together. You know, we want to protect our treasures. We want to have jobs. We don’t have some of the fighting and bickering that you see in other parts of the country, because we claim that both are of the soul” — that is, putting the land to use and protecting the environment.

Wyden was a relative newcomer to Oregon when he was first elected to Congress. His mother, after divorcing his father in 1959 when Wyden was 10 and his brother Jeff was 8, left Chicago for Palo Alto, California, where the six-foot, four-inch Wyden would star as a high school basketball player.

Both his father, born Peter Weidenreich, and mother, Edith Rosenow, fled the Nazis with their parents in the 1930s. Peter’s family were upper-middle-class, assimilated German Jews; Wyden’s maternal grandfather was a prominent hematologist in Berlin and Königsberg.

After immigrating to the United States, Wyden’s mother and father both served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II: his father as a member of the legendary Ritchie Boys, which enlisted German-speaking refugees for intelligence work, and his mother as a member of the Women’s Army Corps.

Peter Wyden, who moved east, would go on to become a well-known journalist and the author of more than a dozen books, including ”Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story,” and a memoir about his son Jeffrey’s struggles with schizophrenia. Wyden’s mother worked at various defense contractors before getting a research job at Stanford University, where the future senator would get his bachelor’s degree.

Wyden dedicates the book to his mother, whom he described to me as “one of that small group of Jewish women in Germany, in Berlin in particular, who basically woke up all the men who didn’t fully understand what a dangerous threat Hitler was.” Still a teen, Edith convinced her father that Hitler was more than a “crackpot and a nut.” While other family members were killed by the Nazis, Wyden’s grandfather managed to get his family to New York. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the courage of my mother, in terms of stepping up to antisemitism,” said Wyden.

He invoked his parents in 2023 when he and Senate colleagues reintroduced a bill to smooth obstacles to naturalization for immigrants and refugees. (The bill stalled in committee.)  “I think that we are better and stronger for having values that helped my family — and many others who want to work hard, play by the rules and are suffering under really oppressive, immoral conditions around the world” — seek to immigrate as asylum-seekers and refugees, he told me.

And yet he criticizes fellow Democrats for failing to grasp the political potency of Trump’s anti-immigrant message.

“There’s no question that Democrats have been too slow in terms of fleshing out an actual immigration plan that could compete with Trump’s,” he said. “We tried to do one in the six months before the election, we had a bipartisan bill with [Sens.] Chris Murphy [D-Connecticut] and James Lankford [R-Oklahoma], and essentially Trump barked and everybody gave up. And that would have been an opportunity to keep pushing it, get it on the floor, start adding elements that would have made it more attractive to young people, for example, coverage for the DACA youngsters, that sort of thing, and I think Democrats were too slow.”

The day before we spoke, Trump issued another order, this one on antisemitism that included a threat that non-citizen college students could be deported for activism seen as abetting terrorism. Like many of Trump’s orders, Wyden thinks this is another example of the president acting on a “whim” rather than a carefully thought-out proposal.

“There’s serious  antisemitism on the far right, and it’s also on the left. But when I think about the biggest challenge, the intellectual antisemitism on the left is not as serious as the Holocaust-denying, Seig-Heiling antisemitism of the right,” said Wyden. “I think that’s the biggest threat right now to our families and our communities, and we ought to say so. This Trump proposal deserves a lot more work and a lot more preparation.”

Wyden has two grown children from his first marriage and three younger children with his second wife, Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York’s legendary bookstore, the Strand. The couple were married in 2005 in a ceremony performed by Rabbi Ariel Stone of Portland’s independent Congregation Shir Tikvah.

Wyden said the other Jewish leaders he turns to for guidance include “my rabbi,” Michael Cahana of Portland’s Reform Congregation Beth Israel; Keenan Wolens, a developer and Jewish nonprofit leader in Los Angeles; and Janice Shorenstein, the executive director and CEO of Hadassah.

For a political memoir, the book is surprisingly honest in talking about the compromises Wyden made and the disappointments he’s epxerienced on the way to bringing even incremental change. (Among his 12 Rules of Chutzpah: “Compromise isn’t about horse-trading bad ideas for  each other; it’s about blending good ideas together into a whole that’s better than the sum of its parts.”)

The 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, act was seen as a negotiating victory for the outgoing Trump administration, although Wyden remains proud that his provisions for unemployment were ultimately included in the final legislation.

He feels President Obama could have done a better job in selling his health care reforms in red as well as blue states, but is gratified that the Affordable Care Act extended insurance coverage to 20 million Americans and included ideas — a health insurance exchange, a ban on insurers’ discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions — Wyden had championed years before.

Despite the public’s cynicism about government and the appeal of a strongman president who promises to cut through the gridlock, Wyden is optimistic that the institutions he has been a part of for over four decades will hold.

“Lots of people feel that the government can’t run a two-car parade, and I get that,” he said. “And there’s no question that Donald Trump thinks that he is a presence above all of these matters like federal rules and statutes and the like. And I think he’s going to be due for an awakening… [because] Republicans are going to give us some opportunities to do it. They’re going to make a lot of mistakes.”

If Democrats are going to win back Congress or in four years the presidency, said Wyden, they’ll need to show the ways Trump fails to deliver on his own promises about the economy.

“We’ve got to show that Trump is talking about economic change for his friends at the top, and a big way he goes about paying for his friends at the top is by making sure that Medicaid, hunger assistance, assistance for housing, all of the essentials for the working families, are slashed.

“We’re going to call him on that, and win it back. With chutzpah, we can achieve dramatic things.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

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