In the stunning aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, I remember a post-mortem conversation I had with former Governor Ed Rendell. He was crestfallen to the point that, over the next few months, he’d lift himself out of the doldrums by playing practical jokes on friends. (I know, because he enlisted me as a co-conspirator in one of them.) But, while the wound was fresh, part of his critique centered on the seeming prevent defense played by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
“There are so many consultants telling the candidate so many different things,” I remember him saying. “Candidates can get paralyzed by fear.”
I’ve been thinking of that particular nugget of Rendellian wisdom in this campaign’s waning days, because it seems to me that our most captivating candidates have been precisely those who seem most free to be themselves. Candidates who actually answer questions, who are relatable, and who at least seem to eschew calculation. Candidates, in other words, whose heads haven’t been filled with consultant-speak.
Might this not, on some level, explain the Trump resilience? He doesn’t sound like the overly-cautious, pre-packaged automaton who is trained to say as little as possible in the hopes of (barely) winning. He actually sounds like someone you might know — granted, someone who suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, but at least that’s real. All things considered, Kamala Harris has run a solid campaign — but couldn’t you just feel the fear and indecision in her response on The View to the very simple question of how she might differ from Joe Biden at a time when she was trying to claim the mantle of change? When a candidate — like a ballplayer — has to think too much, they’re screwed. Voters sniff out calculation and fear, like Philly sports fans can sense when a player (paging Ben Simmons) chokes rather than trusting muscle memory to meet the moment.
“There are so many consultants telling the candidate so many different things. Candidates can get paralyzed by fear.” — Ed Rendell
There’s a terrific documentary airing now about the legendary political consultant James Carville. He’s one of the greats, but might it be that he also helped birth a generation of consultants who quite unwittingly paralyzed future generations of candidates into indecision and weakness?
That was the thesis of Joe Klein’s 2006 book Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid. Klein, one of the great political writers and thinkers of our time, posits that the rise of the consultant class in our politics — the stardom and conventional wisdom-mongering attached to the likes of Carville, Shrum, Conway, Rove, you name ’em — hijacked something that was once unfiltered and real in our public life.
Klein heralds that impromptu speech during the 1968 presidential campaign when Senator Robert F. Kennedy broke the news to an all-Black crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. Critically, Kennedy had defied the advice of his consultants and spoke from his heart.
“Nearly 40 years later,” Klein writes, “Kennedy’s words stand as a sublime example of politics in its grandest form, for its highest purpose — to heal, to educate, to lead — but also sadly they represent the end of an era: the last moments before American political life was overwhelmed by marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters who, with the flaccid acquiescence of the politicians, have robbed public life of much of its romance and vigor.”
Why is it that, mostly, the moments of political romance left to us today are sparked by those who have nothing to lose? Candidates like the fictional Congressman Matt Santos in the final season of West Wing, who chose authenticity over being hawked like just another mass consumer product. A few times, such candidates jumped out at me these last months — with the caveat that, unlike Santos, it’s unlikely that most of them are about to be rewarded by winning.
Whatever the outcome, both parties would do well to acknowledge what voters have long been saying: You suffer from a trust and authenticity gap. Now what are you gonna do about it?
So let’s close this election season not with a Debbie Downer treatise on whether we’ll soon be looking at democracy in our rearview mirror and instead give some props to those who, though they must have suspected their fate, did what aging romantics like me and Klein would have political candidates do. They answered questions, they questioned answers, they proposed solutions, and they spoke in coherent sentences. Ah, the good old days.
Here’s a rundown:
Eric Settle, Forward Party candidate, PA Attorney General
At our Attorney General Ultimate Job Interview event in Pittsburgh last week in partnership with Spotlight PA, we opted to include Settle, because his resume seemed to match up with — if not surpass in breadth of experience — his Republican and Democratic opponents.
At the event’s conclusion, the 20 or so attendees of our Philly watch party were asked who most impressed them, and virtually every hand shot in the air for Settle. Why? It didn’t feel like you were being accosted by a pitchman. There was no desperation, no bumper sticker sloganeering. Just a real guy, willing to actually answer questions.
When asked about regrets in his career, he didn’t turn it into a humble brag; he instead turned introspective and talked about choosing to be a soccer dad 20 years ago rather than a candidate. And, on the issues, he smartly raised one that has received scant attention: the proliferation of hospital system mergers and the conversion of nonprofit healthcare systems into for-profit companies.
Watch Settle share his motivation for running in a way that feels like he’s an actual human being:
Curtis Bashaw, Republican U.S. Senate candidate, New Jersey
I wrote about Bashaw a few weeks ago, because if, like me, you think we’ll never get back to some sense of normalcy without a sane Republican party, here’s your guy: a pro-choice, pro-growth, gay (married 22 years), multimillionaire hotelier who, in his business and civic leadership roles, has been willing to work with anyone to get shit done. Bashaw is a student of the Constitution, an evangelist for bipartisanship and Enlightenment values, and he beat a Trump-endorsed candidate in the primary. Yet media coverage of his campaign has been scant, despite the fact that a poll as recently as a month ago showed him within striking distance of favorite Democrat Andy Kim.
Here he is, doing what so few Republicans do nowadays: staking a claim to center turf.
Dan Osborn, Independent U.S. Senate candidate, Nebraska
This guy actually has a chance to unseat incumbent Republican Deb Fischer. Osborn’s a first-time candidate, Navy veteran, former union president and auto mechanic who wouldn’t accept Nebraska Democrats’ endorsement because he blames both parties for what he calls our nation’s “two party doom loop.”
Osborn led a strike at Kellogg’s cereal plants in 2021, successfully winning higher wages for workers. Corporate greed, he said, opened his eyes. “If Nebraska does the right thing and elects a mechanic to the halls of power,” he told ABC News last weekend, “the rest of the country’s gonna say, Holy crap, did you see what Nebraska just did? … It’s gonna tell teachers, nurses, plumbers, carpenters, bus drivers, truck drivers, other mechanics, you don’t have to be a self-funding crypto-billionaire to run for office.”
Check out the rest of his first nationally televised interview, and here’s the stirring ad that woke Nebraskans up to this changemaker in their midst:
Rebecca Cooke, Democratic candidate for Congress in Wisconsin’s 3rd District
Cooke is a family farmer, a small business owner, and the founder of a nonprofit that helps female entrepreneurs in her rural Wisconsin town. As if that weren’t enough, she waitresses three nights a week. The 36-year-old is looking to take down a Republican incumbent who attended the Stop The Steal rally on January 6, 2021, and, according to polling, it’s a dead heat. Cooke sounds like a neighbor, with her flat Midwestern intonation and references to soda as “pop” — and her advertising has set her apart as not just another pol.
Check out this ad — when’s the last time a candidate paid for air time so you could see her in the act of listening?
Mark Cuban
The Shark Tank billionaire isn’t running for anything himself, but when you hear him make the case for Kamala Harris as a campaign surrogate you have to wonder why not. He’s the best explainer of economic issues since Bill Clinton in his prime:
You can also watch Cuban’s evisceration of Trump’s tariff policies in this conversation with Harris, his evocation of the American Dream here, and his moral outrage for how Trump actually treats (“short pays”) working people here.
Cuban gets a lot of attention for Shark Tank and his ownership stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, but he’s actually spent the last few years building Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, an online pharmacy that is disrupting the prescription drug industry with steep discounts, radical transparency, and, now, the manufacturing of its own drugs.
With millions of online customers and a goal to make life-saving medication affordable to all, it’s the first business Cuban has put his name on because he sees it as the “thing I want my kids to be proud of me for.” Now he’s staking out a unique cultural footprint: wildly successful businessman who’s not crazy (hello, Elon) and who embraces Everyman values like hard work and patriotism. He says he wants nothing in the way of a job from a Harris administration, but Secretary of Getting Shit Done might be too good a title to pass up.
Even if Cuban’s campaign stumping is an aberration, here’s hoping that the frankness, preparation and authenticity of all the outliers outlined above raises the level of our public discourse going forward. Whatever the outcome, both parties would do well to acknowledge what voters have long been saying: You suffer from a trust and authenticity gap. Now what are you gonna do about it? Will there be such a reckoning? One can hope, right? See you on the other side, fellow citizens.
