One day in the fall of 2022, while media hype seemed to be placing the fate of the free world on his shoulders, candidate Josh Shapiro helped Lori, his wife of 27 years, get the kids off to school. Shapiro was running against the extreme Christian Nationalist/ insurrectionist/ election denier Doug Mastriano in a critical swing state. The pressure was on.

Moments like this one, though, were sacred: He and Lori, sweethearts since the ninth grade at Akiba Hebrew Academy, sipping coffee together in their kitchen. Shapiro was about to embark on a grueling four-day campaign swing. He thought they’d just sit together over a cup or two of Joe and — borrowing from Seinfeld, his favorite sitcom — talk about nothing. That’s when Lori started what the Governor now recalls as something of a rant.

“The other side,” she said, referring to her husband’s political opponents, “keeps talking about freedom. It’s not freedom to tell me what to do with my body. It’s not freedom to tell parents what books their kids can read. Someone’s got to tell them that! You’ve got to tell them that!”

Governing Magazine reports that Shapiro’s rhetoric is catching on. The New Democrat Coalition in Congress and NewDEAL, a national network of state and local elected officials, released a joint “freedom agenda” last fall.

As his wife vented, he realized he’d been thinking almost the exact same thing. He’d been bristling at the hypocrisy of those who would deny the vote to others and who would tell women what medical procedures they were entitled to … while draping themselves in core American values like freedom and liberty. He grabbed a pen and paper. And, there, in an Abington kitchen, an idea was born that has now traveled the country and just may become the defining argument in this political year.

The lost art of Democrats’ patriotism

Once upon a time, Democrats owned values like freedom and patriotism. From FDR’s “Four Freedoms” to JFK’s “Ask Not” to Bill Clinton’s “You Can’t Love Your Country and Hate Your Government,” Shapiro’s party seemed less willing to flinch when it came to communitarian positions like faith, family and country. Somehow, these last decades, Republicans have co-opted those themes. Part of it was just more skillful messaging — but Democrats retreated, too. From Bernie Sanders’ grievance-driven rallies to the valuing of identity over once-liberal priorities like civil rights and free speech, the left’s critique was suddenly informed not by a patriotic call to finally live up to our founding creed so much as a rejection of MLK’s faith that the “arc of justice is long, but bends toward justice.”

More than any politician I’ve covered, Shapiro thinks in big terms, delighting in rolling around ideas. When he was Attorney General and kicking Donald Trump’s considerable ass in court, he rhetorically justified such activism by co-opting an old Right Wing trope: states’ rights.

JFK once said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Arguably, that was an era when politics was more about convincing folks rather than pandering to them. Shapiro is something of a throwback. “I’m always thinking about the power of my words,” he told me when we caught up last week. “Always thinking about what the argument is and the best way to frame it. You mentioned JFK, obviously no one was better at communicating. I lived through Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. I’ve learned that words matter a lot when you’re in the business of persuasion.”

That four-day campaign swing in 2022? It was time for some persuasion, as Shapiro saw it. He’d become fed up with Doug Mastriano’s “Walk as Free People” rhetoric, phraseology used to justify a slate of Christian Nationalism policies that would actually threaten freedom, as New Yorker reporter Eliza Griswold’s stellar reporting had made so clear. Just before his speech to a packed room of Erie County Democrats, Shapiro told his team: “Let’s try it out.” And, without notes, he went about reclaiming freedom and patriotism — and engendered a fired-up standing ovation.

“It’s not freedom to tell women what to do with their bodies. It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. It’s not freedom when he gets to decide who you’re allowed to marry … And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say, you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner.” — Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro

In short order, at a Temple University rally, Shapiro stole the spotlight from a couple of guys named Obama and Biden with a stemwinder on the same theme — despite the nervousness of his campaign consultants. Too high concept, they fretted. Shapiro went ahead anyway and, the next day, the speech went viral; suddenly, MSNBC hosts were talking about Shapiro as a presidential candidate in waiting.

“It’s not freedom to tell women what to do with their bodies,” he preached to the crowd at Temple that day. “That’s not freedom. It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. It’s not freedom when he gets to decide who you’re allowed to marry — I say love is love. It’s not freedom to say you can work a 40-hour workweek but you can’t be a member of a union. That’s not freedom. And it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say, You can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner. That’s not freedom. But you know what we’re for? We’re for real freedom.”

(Watch the speech here, as Shapiro goes on to define his version of real freedom — investing in real people’s safety and jobs — and the crowd roars.)

As he’s governed, Shapiro has filtered much of his platform — and his public explanations of it — through this lens of advancing real freedom in Pennsylvania. And other Democrats have taken note. A piece in Governing Magazine reports that Shapiro’s rhetoric is catching on. Candidates throughout the nation are borrowing the formulation.The New Democrat Coalition in Congress and NewDEAL, a national network of state and local elected officials, released a joint “freedom agenda” last fall.

Does Shapiro have the secret sauce for the floundering Biden campaign? It’s not enough, after all, to just be against something — even if that happens to be an orange-haired, law-flouting autocrat. Defending freedom and liberty could be the ticket, because just think of all the policies the theme can accommodate. Yes, abortion rights fall under it, but so do school vouchers — both are about the freedom to choose. The freedom for a living wage, for more housing, for pathways to the middle class and beyond. The freedom for health care that doesn’t bankrupt a household.

Why support those brave civilians on the frontlines in Ukraine? Freedom. Why eradicate a death cult jihadi terrorist sect like Hamas? Because Israelis and Palestinians both deserve to live free of an autocratic terror group. And speech — the right to offend! — that’s a core freedom too, no? After all: “Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently,” said the great 19th and 20th Century revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

“This election is not just about Trump and Biden. It’s really about what kind of country we want to be and whether we’ll protect our freedoms and, in the process, still be a beacon of hope across the globe.” — Shapiro

When I ask Shapiro if his freedom theme ought to be applied at the national level, he demurs. “I’m not a pundit,” he says. “You’ll opine on that. But I did just say on one of the Sunday morning shows that this election is not just about Trump and Biden. It’s really about what kind of country we want to be and whether we’ll protect our freedoms and, in the process, still be a beacon of hope across the globe.”

No doubt, Shapiro’s messaging is smart politics. He’s keenly aware of trends. Last year, one state representative bemoaned to me that the Governor was “asking us to cross a third rail” with his support for school vouchers. But that’s only a third rail in the short term because it would mean crossing the teacher’s union. Shapiro was taking in the longer view. He saw that, in polls, 70 percent of African Americans wanted the freedom to choose where their kids can go to school, and he saw that Trump is performing beyond expectations among Black voters.

Moreover, Shapiro gets that two-thirds of the electorate this year will be voters without college degrees. One of the ways to rescue the Democratic party from the wine cellar-dwelling, avocado toast-eating progressive crowd is to meet the majority where their values are.

You do that, as Shapiro is demonstrating, by defiantly recapturing patriotism from a party that, in its utter capitulation to Trumpism, has debased it. “I have worn the same American flag lapel pin on my chest since 9/11,” Shapiro told me. “It was given to me by a veteran in my legislative district. That’s two decades ago, now.”

How you win

For too long, Democrats have thought they could win by issuing smart policy papers. Shapiro knows you win by connecting emotionally on shared values — and then you shape your policy to meet them. When done right — as Bobby Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 campaign hinted — you can build a coalition of working-class Blacks and Whites, good government reformers, private sector patriots, 20-something activists, and New Deal veterans to form “a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism,” in the words of author Richard Kahlenberg.

But Shapiro’s freedom riff is more than political, whether intended or not. We used to have serious men and women filling our public square with serious ideas. Turn on the news and you can’t help but wonder nowadays: Where are the adults in the room? It’s all finger-pointing and anger and denial and calculation and stasis. At least Shapiro is expressing an idea; by just raising the issue of freedom, he’s implicitly acknowledging just how in jeopardy ours is.

In the late 70s, the Nobel Prize-winning writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a Harvard commencement address in which he challenged America to walk its own talk, at a time when Soviet expansionism threatened free peoples everywhere.

“Facing such a danger,” he said, “with such historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and apparently of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?”

Okay, okay. Josh Shapiro is no Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in a Soviet Gulag. But if, like me, you’re worrying about the teetering future of this 247-year experiment in self-rule, at least, like the great Russian crusader, Shapiro is not in denial. He’s aware of the stakes, and he’s making an argument. He’s doing what he can, in other words. Now, how about the rest of us?

MORE ON PA GOVERNOR JOSH SHAPIRO