Tulsi Gabbard

There is another hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for president, only this time it's a lei. Tulsi Gabbard, congresswoman from Hawaii, told CNN that she would be running for president and a formal announcement would come this week.

Gabbard is part of the younger generation of Democrats to hope to unseat Trump, in fact at 37 she's the youngest. She appeals mostly to progressives, as she doesn't take PAC money and made a statement when she quit the DNC by supporting Bernie Sanders in 2016. She is also a member of the National Guard, serving two terms in Iraq, and is an expert on foreign policy.

But of course once she announced the long knives came out, from both right and left. She does have issues that are troubling: she met with Bashar Al-Assad, dictator of Syria, and ran afoul of House Ethics rules. She is also receiving grief from both right and left for meeting with him in the first place and not condemning him strongly enough for gassing his own people. She does feel the U.S. should not be involved in regime-changing, and thus should not be trying to remove him from power. Gabbard, who practices Hinduism, also has ties to nationalist Hindi groups in India. If she gains any traction I'm sure we'll hear more about them than we can stand. She has praised Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who has been accused of having a hand in riots. I'm sure many voters would mistake Hinduism for Islam, but those people wouldn't vote for her anyway.

She checks most of the liberal boxes: firmly in favor of LGBT rights, although she didn't always, voting against same-sex marriage, legalizing marijuana, condemning Saudi Arabia for the atrocities in Yemen, opposed the Iraq war, and earns high marks from Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club.

I don't expect her to get very far in this election--it may be a strategy to introduce her to the country at large, and she will surely be the one to replace Senator Mazie Harano when she retires. But if Bernie Sanders does not run, she may be the progressive choice (if Sanders does run, what will she say separates them as candidates, other than gender and age?) and be accorded rock star status. And there's another factor that has never been explored in presidential candidacies: she is very attractive. Will sex appeal be a help, a hindrance, or no factor at all?

The odds are against her, though. No sitting congressman has been elected president since James Garfield, in 1880. But it would be cool to have a president who surfs.