Borenstein: Ellen Tauscher taught Democrats about compromise

If anyone knew how to appeal to fickle political centrists, it was Ellen Tauscher.

In her first run for office, in 1996, she unseated an entrenched Republican congressman by appealing to the East Bay’s swing voters. In her last campaign, in 2018, she led a political action committee that was key to Democrats’ unseating of seven California GOP House members.

When it came to centrist voters, “she knew how to win them and how to represent them,” her longtime political strategist Katie Merrill said Tuesday morning.

Tauscher died Monday afternoon at Stanford University Medical Center from pneumonia exacerbated by unexpected complications from her esophageal cancer surgery in 2010. She was 67.

It was a shock because Tauscher was a fighter who believed she could — and would — prevail if she worked hard enough. Even when it came to her own health. She had just reassured friends three weeks ago that she would overcome her latest challenge.

“The one — and really there is only one — downside to living longer than you are supposed to with a deadly cancer is that sometimes the surgical fixes that are meant to keep you alive for five years need a little upgrading after 8 years and counting!” she wrote on Facebook on April 7.

“So I am on the mend; but they tell me it will be slow-going to get me back to 100%. And as you know, that’s the level at which I like to operate.”

It wasn’t to be. Not this time.

She had so many successes. Becoming the youngest and one of the first women to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Defeating Rep. Bill Baker in that East Bay district. Negotiating a major nuclear arms control treaty with Russia while serving as undersecretary of state in the Obama administration. Sitting on the University of California Board of Regents.

And, of course, there was her biggest success: Her daughter, Katherine.

Getting to parenthood was an ordeal for Tauscher. Her first baby died within moments of birth. Her second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage brought on by an infection from a pre-natal test.

Tauscher was 39 when Katherine was born, delivered by an emergency Caesarian section six months into the pregnancy. She weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces. Her condition was critical.

Katherine underwent five surgeries in the first 20 months of her life. She survived and she thrived. Nearly five years after her birth, she started kindergarten in Washington, D.C., the day before her mother was sworn into office for the first time.

To win that seat, Tauscher overcame district registration that tilted slightly Republican and an incumbent who had served six terms in the state Assembly and two terms in Congress.

Baker had seemed set for a long career in Washington. Until Tauscher came along. Then married to wealthy Computerland founder Bill Tauscher, she spent $1.7 million of their money and raised another $1 million.

She portrayed Baker, accurately, as a hard-core conservative. But the issue that made the difference was guns. Baker had voted to repeal the federal ban on assault weapons.

But one of his constituents, Steve Sposato, had lost his wife in San Francisco’s 101 California St. massacre, in which a gunman killed eight people and wounded six before taking his own life.

Sposato, a Republican who had previously voted for Baker but couldn’t get a meeting with him to discuss the assault-weapon ban, joined Tauscher’s campaign and was featured in television ads on her behalf.

Tauscher beat Baker 48.6 percent to 47.2 percent. Minor party candidates split the rest. She served 12 years in Congress before going to work for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

She understood that compromise was key — that she and her party would not prevail by firing salvos from the left wing of the party.

“On Wall Street,” the congresswoman-elect said in early January 1997, “you never get a deal done if you say, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless you come to me.’ There are lots of times when people walk away from deals. But it’s all about people moving. Compromise is not a dirty word.”

That lesson is as true today as it was back then. That’s the political legacy of Ellen Tauscher.