NYT - Nightly Applause Is Nice, but Some Doctors Think Votes Would Be Nicer
Amanda Lucier for The New York Times
Excerpt: Written by Emma Goldberg for the New York Times, 5/9/20
“Maxine Dexter, an intensive care physician, remembers exactly where she was sitting the Thursday morning her political ambitions were born. She was looking out her bedroom window toward northwest Portland — the snow-capped peak of Mount Adams winking at her from across the valley. She clutched a coffee her husband had brought upstairs in her favorite mug, the one that read: “Well yes, I’m overqualified.”
She turned on NPR. Christine Blasey Ford was testifying in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, describing what she alleged he did to her when they were teenagers. Dr. Blasey’s language was empirical, precise. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” the research psychologist recalled.
Dr. Dexter, inhaled sharply. As a clinician, and as a sexual assault survivor, she would have used those exact words to describe her own experience. She began to fill with rage listening to the questions being put to Dr. Blasey. Three hours later she called a friend involved with Emerge Oregon, a program that recruits and trains Democratic women to enter politics. “I want to run for office,” Dr. Dexter announced.
Now the pulmonologist is moonlighting as a Democratic candidate for Oregon’s state legislature — while spending her days treating Covid-19 patients in the I.C.U….
The pandemic has given front-line physicians like Dr. Dexter a clear view of the life-or-death stakes of government decision making, whether on social distancing or contact tracing. At work, Dr. Dexter has seen how even healthy, young patients can rapidly devolve, some spending enough time on a ventilator to cause lifelong physical damage.
“People who aren’t in health care wouldn’t necessarily understand what we’re seeing in the same way,” Dr. Dexter said. The recoveries that she has witnessed in the I.C.U. have given her added inspiration, she said, as she stares down a May 19 primary, with recent endorsements from The Portland Tribune and former Gov. Barbara Roberts of Oregon.
She has found that her medical work unexpectedly prepared her for campaigning. “I knock on the doors of strangers every day,” she said, “when I knock on the door of an exam room and need to establish trust.” (Since the pandemic hit, her door knocking has turned to phone and Zoom calls.) If she wins, she plans to decrease her clinical work by 50 percent and take a steep pay cut; Oregon state legislators make under $25,000 a year.”
