A little over a year ago, I recounted “The Curious Case of Ilhan Omar” for City Journal readers. Omar had just won a primary victory over 22-term incumbent Phyllis Kahn to secure the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) endorsement to represent House District 60B in the state legislature. Minneapolis’s Star Tribune trumpeted Omar’s victory in a huge headline on its front page, proclaiming that the Somali immigrant’s victory had “made history.” The paper followed up with two more stories admiring Omar’s triumph.
Omar was elected in November to represent the heavily Democratic district in the state house of representatives. Given her status as a Somali Muslim woman and her devoutly orthodox left-wing politics, Omar has achieved instant celebrity on the left. As Ricardo Lopez and Faiza Mahamud aptly wrote in a postelection profile for the Star Tribune after Omar had been in office for just a month, she had “cultivated the kind of political star power that most state legislators don’t accumulate in an entire career.”
In its September 18 double issue, Time recognized Omar in its collection of women “Firsts” for being the “First Somali-American Muslim person to become a legislator.” As I noted last year, Omar is also probably the first state legislator to have taken out a marriage certificate naming her brother as her husband. ...
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