One week out from the midterm elections, I found myself back in Kansas for a family funeral in Wichita to celebrate an aunt whose life had a huge impact, and I got to visit with all sorts of people with different views.

What I am learning is that perspectives may in fact be shifting and now a conservative state, once at the center of Democratic ridicule, is proving to be one of the most important, if improbable, pickup opportunities for Democrats in a race to control the Senate.

The state’s political dynamics, which have generally skewed conservative, appear to be shifting, and it’s making for a fascinating case study in a midterm election that seems to be very much a state-by-state contest, even as it plays out on a national stage.

An Improbable Senate Battleground

In Kansas, Democrats have a preacherman on the ballot. And not just any preacherman. Rev. Adam Hamilton is the founder of a megachurch that boasts more than 22,000 congregants.

His church, United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, is literally the largest United Methodist church in the United States. A lot has been made of James Talarico’s faith in Texas but in Kansas, I feel like not enough has been written about a faith leader who could be Kansas’ next Senator. He has written more than 30 books on his faith, and faith is his major motivation to get in this race.

This Senate election is his first foray into politics. He was previously registered as a Republican, reportedly weighed a run as an independent, and is locked in a margin-of-error race with a deeply unpopular incumbent, GOP Sen. Roger Marshall.

Being on the ground in Wichita, I’ve long wondered when there would be a shift. This is a midsize city with generally conservative and modest values. It’s a place where religion often comes up and people talk a lot about their faith.

President Trump, as we know, likes to wrap himself in faith but it’s often in conflict with his behaviors. He’s talking about his faith while also living a playboy lifestyle. He’s talking about his faith while enacting fiercely anti-immigrant policies. He’s talking about his faith as a man in his third marriage, with a litany of publicly known dalliances and affairs.

In this vacuum, Hamilton, a man of deep faith, is stepping forward and has been calling Trump out, at a time where Trump policies haven’t delivered for the state. Inflation and tariffs are hitting here as much as anywhere else and polls show that many voters are associating Marshall with Trump’s policies.

Marshall, for his part, is not particularly charismatic (sort of the opposite of preacherman energy). One family member recounted how Marshall couldn’t even get people to talk to him at a ballgame. Marshall’s best and most frequent argument to voters is that they can’t give Chuck Schumer power.

I hate to tell him, but Adam Hamilton is clearly no Chuck Schumer. And many on the ground here in Kansas say a truly competitive race has been building.

A long time coming

Ashley All has been working in Democratic politics in this state for more than 20 years. We know each other back from when I worked with Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, at the beginning of my career. Ashley now serves as the President for Kansas Coalition for Common Sense.

A lot of people don’t see the groundwork that has been laid here, Ashley tells me. She worked on the 2018 race that brought Laura Kelly, a Democratic Governor to power, and the 2022 vote to protect abortion rights. Both were campaigns run on shared interests. And she sees a direct line from 2018 to 2022 to now. Kansas is being underestimated nationally, she believes. It’s also been the accomplishment of a lot of grassroots organizing and not a lot of national money.

Which means a lot of the Democratic success is uneven. In some of the same polls that have Adam Hamilton, the Senate candidate, running ahead of the Republican incumbent, the Democratic nominee for Governor is trailing.

In that race, two Kansas state senators are running against each other. Ty Masterson, who has been in Kansas politics for nearly two decades from the Wichita area and previously declared bankruptcy in the construction business, versus Cindy Holscher, who previously worked for Sprint in the Kansas City area and has been in elected office since 2017.

The race might be tight for other reasons. Holscher wasn’t the incumbent Governor’s original choice (although Kelly has now endorsed her). My more conservative family members tell me she has struggled to find a more centrist approach that appeals to a broad majority of the state. But some polls are within a margin of error so anything is possible.

A Split Ticket

A week out from Midterms, even as I can see the appeal of a Democratic newcomer like Hamilton, I worry we could be overconfident nationally. I keep hearing the national news media talk about the potential of a blue wave.

During the Obama campaign, Paul Tewes, the Iowa State Director beat it into us: Polls don’t vote, people do. And it’s clear many are still on the fence. Even in a culture that is quite braggadocious and loud, many voters are quiet on their views.

My father-in-law recently completed a cross-country trip, his second over the last few years. The last time he did it was also in an election year and he told me that he just doesn’t see the political signs he saw last time. People aren’t showing their allegiance on their sleeve, the ballot box is a quiet place of reflection, and yes, this last week matters.

Ashley knows this all too well. In a state that has been red for most of our lives, she believes she has to run like she’s losing until it changes.

But there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, she tells me (while doing the last hard work of the last week). Ashley is inherently skeptical but even she was moved when she went to see Adam Hamilton speak. He’s building from his own organizing and state organizing. And he’s drawing crowds. She told me about the large crowd he drew in Salina, Kansas just recently.

Salina, suffice it to say, is normally not Democratic territory.

Is it any coincidence then that Ashley tells me President Trump just announced a Saturday rally in the state. Guess where? Salina.

It's all going to come down to who turns out. Trump must know that when he's trying to get his people out in Salina.

*Apologies to those who normally listen to me read my post. Traveling today (solo with the 5+ month old) and sending from the road. There should be a listen button, just not my recording this week. So grateful for all of you; please send me your thoughts from where you are this midterm election.

I’m honestly surprised Katie Zacharia didn’t last a week.

There used to be two kinds of people in Washington politics: People who moved to DC right after graduation and worked their way up. Then there were people who worked their way up in state politics, and moved to DC to serve a principal.

I was one of the latter; President Obama actually had a lot of the latter on his team. So does President Trump. (His White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, is one of them, coming up through Florida politics).

Zacharia stands out, and maybe flamed out, because she was neither.

A One Week News Cycle

When she was first announced, a lot of the hot takes I saw were that CNN Republican pundit Scott Jennings must be sad. That didn’t really make sense to me. I don’t think he wants the job. He is a full-time political influencer, and he makes a lot of money using his position at CNN.

It’s a perch that lets him drop a new take to match the Republican position (which often differs from his previous take) and bring in contracts to his business, which leverages his power and platform to influence Washington lawmakers. The never ending gross cycle continues. It gets him more power and money. Why would he want to upend that to move to take a truly thankless job? (It didn’t go well for Dan Bongino.)

What was interesting about Zacharia’s appointment is that it was a fresh face. What is sad about it was that she didn’t have the credentials she presented.

I watched the press conference, trying to keep an open mind, and I was unimpressed. She mentioned at the top where the President would travel, then included where she would accompany him. Lots of staff travel. That’s not news. Worse, it suggested a type of starry-eyed self importance in the role.

As part of this, she did the more typical thing that President Trump’s press secretaries have done, roll off a list of accomplishments, half of which are true. She seemed inexperienced and insincere, perhaps because she was so obviously reading.

And then she took a few questions.

One question I hated: How was she going to deal with her husband and four children? That type of question that would never be asked of a man, specifically not a man like Scott Jennings (whose wife and four kids are in Kentucky).

She mentioned she had stayed home with her children, and I believe every parent should have the right to do that, and re-enter the traditional workforce at all levels when ready. But I wondered why this made its way into the briefing.

It seemed she was hired, like a lot of President Trump’s team, to serve as a sort of influencer spokesperson. To command a room, and serve only one: him.

She showed no ability to do so, almost from minute one, in her White House briefing. Her response to this question didn’t serve the White House (she accidentally called her husband her President), and honestly it didn’t particularly serve moms very well.

That probably didn’t end her tenure though. The question that came later most likely did.

She was with the President when he was boarding Marine One. It was a question about where she passed the bar. She said she didn’t hear the question over the whir of Marine One but she answered “China.”

China? That presented more questions than answers.

The End

For President Trump to turn on someone over credentials, it doesn’t happen a lot. An overriding sensation of this Presidency and the people around it is shamelessness when it comes to stuff like this. Many of the people who surround the President have thin resumes, but they have ferocious loyalty to him, and they show an ability to influence conversation.

Zacharia certainly had loyalty, by all accounts, but her swift departure shows the limits of building your political credentials on social media.

I’m still wondering what Ric Grenell’s “Fix California,” the outfit where Zacharia supposedly worked, has actually accomplished. According to her, Zacharia was the General Counsel of “Fix California.” I guess they were trying to put a school choice ballot initiative on the California ballot (not there), and to register more conservative voters in the state of California. (We’ll see how that worked out this next election.) It’s a thin organization with some questions.

How that led to Trump Media and then so swiftly to the White House with the appointment that announced she was a lawyer isn’t really clear. It’s not conventional credentials, but in the end, President Trump tends to keep them around until he’s done with them. Evidently he was done with Zacharia at the White House level pretty quickly.

What it says

I saw an article that defended her by Joel Pollak at The California Post. He said she wrote a popular piece for the news organization about how she fought to wear her MAGA hat at a California gym (is that really a credential now?).

The one part of Pollak’s article I’ll agree with: He mentions others who use titles he believed they didn’t earn. Sadly creating resumes out of thin air is a long art in Washington. George Santos very recently came to Washington, only to be found out for lying about his work history, his education. Heck even Joe Biden claimed he graduated top of his law class when he was closer to the bottom.

But Pollak included one line that I really hated. She “looked the part.”

Is that all it takes? I would think we would want more out of Washington than looking the part. I guess it’s good then that this was a very short show.

We are in year six (at least) of many Americans struggling with the cost of merely existing. Since the pandemic, the cost of food, gas, groceries, insurance, housing, utilities (you name it) have skyrocketed.

At the same time, the Trump administration has prioritized slashing social services, notably healthcare, while cutting taxes especially for the mega-rich. That’s created lots of anger and is among the reasons why pocketbook issues have defined midterm elections, with most major House and Senate races focused on the cost of living.

It’s natural, then, that many Americans are wondering who to blame, and many have landed on the mega-rich. At issue is what Warren Buffett has said for years: He’s paying a lower percentage of his income on taxes than his secretary. And that just isn’t fair.

In competitive House and Senate races, the oligarchs are cited by candidates as not paying their fair share, from Texas to Michigan to Georgia. In California, one of the states that allows direct citizens-to-ballot propositions, we’ll actually be able to see just how far Californians want to go in taxing the rich this November.

California’s Many Propositions

When I first moved to California, I was surprised at just how much we vote on each election. The voter guide for this midterm election is the length of a short novel — 175 pages. Some of this is mandated by California’s Constitution (which itself is about 10 times the length of the U.S. Constitution).

For example, if the state wants to borrow more than $300,000 for general funds taxpayers will cover, the California legislature is required to send the request to the ballot for a taxpayers’ vote.

Since 1911 — the same year the legislature sent a proposition to give the voters the right to decide if women could vote (it narrowly passed) — California citizens have had the right to put their own propositions on the ballot.

Sometimes these propositions are farcical or very specific but these propositions are often a proxy for pure public sentiment. California has changed its real estate tax policies (they are tied to purchase price instead of the market value) and added cancer warnings to vast numbers of products as a result of ballot initiatives.

Propositions don’t all pass and in fact, many don’t even make the ballot. (Billionaire Tim Draper has tried multiple times to get a proposition on the ballot to divide the state into smaller states, the California Supreme Court eventually stopped that).

This year, though, there is a massive fight over a trio of propositions on the ballot about taxing the rich. And the players and the sides aren’t all straightforward.

California’s Tax the Rich

The main proposition on this subject is Proposition 40, which addresses a gaping hole in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, and other healthcare costs. This mirrors issues other states are facing, but in California, after the Trump administration worked to curtail the program, there is a growing gap to pay for healthcare for lower-income Californians who qualify for healthcare subsidies.

This led SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West to write a proposition and collect enough signatures, for a state tax, they say, to fill the gap, and then some. It’s a one-time wealth tax of up to 5% on net worth of any California resident as of January 2026 with more than $1 billion in assets, whether in the state or not (including a business, art, or cryptocurrency).

Recent estimates say between 200-250 Californians will fall in that category, and the proposition backers suggest it would raise approximately $100 billion, which could fill an important gap.

But the state doesn’t even record the net worth of its residents. The system to collect that information would have to be built, it will be an arduous process to track down all the assets one holds to levy the tax, and there are exemptions in the bill, so it gets complicated quickly. It’s also obvious that those who want to get out of the tax will pursue all routes to do so. It’s not as easy or clean as advertised, and a handful of billionaires left the state at the end of last year, knowing that the deadline on leaving the state, to avoid the tax was the beginning of the year.

All of that has led to two competing propositions (41 and 42) designed in part to void Prop 40.

It’s also made for very interesting bedfellows. Congressman Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders, and the California Democratic Party support the tax. While Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Xavier Becerra, and the California’s Teachers Association join the Howard Jarvis anti-tax group opposing it.

Gov. Newsom went further and endorsed proposition 42, which would change the California Constitution to prohibit new taxes on the ownership of financial assets and other personal property (with a notable exception of real estate), which would have a much longer consequence, limiting tax policy for years to come.

What it Forecasts

I’ve been saying for some time that some form of a flat tax or tax simplification would be more fair than what we have now. With all the loopholes and deductions it’s very easy to see how one who has wealth, spends wealth to earn more wealth, could be paying a lower percentage of their income in tax than a manager at McDonald’s.

There’s something plainly not fair with that — and ultimately it’s why it’s so easy to blame the rich. Many of my friends who are in business, and risk it all to make lots of money, know it’s not right in America if they don’t set the next generation to be able to dream big too.

And yet, many of those who want to close that gap are against Prop 40. Because the other thing that complicates this is that states compete with each other, and there were plenty of states willing to take Elon Musk when we were done with him and vice versa.

Newsom claims the wealth tax would have to be enacted at the federal level. But then the business owner with a billion dollar valuation business could be forced to sell shares to pay a tax.

Maybe that’s what we want but there are a lot of details not exactly worked out.

The details aren’t what most read. (I mean who really is reading their 175-page voter guide?) It is, however, easy to read “tax the billionaires.” And generally we’ve seen an appetite to tax the rich. Voters just a few years ago passed a mansion tax in Los Angeles that was a tax targeting high-value property transactions.

That tax has inadvertently cost LA when it comes to building apartments, and Nithya Raman, running for mayor, was for it before she was saying we need to reform it.

I’m not sure this will pass. (Californians, like many other Americans, seem to always want to spend and never want to tax). But if it does pass, I’ll tell you one thing: Expect this idea to be a major issue in the next presidential race. The cost of living is not going down. And what happens in California is often a forecast of what’s to come.

My husband first showed me writer Annie Jacobsen’s tweet: “🚨Breaking. There’s been a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.🚨”

Our household pays attention to Jacobsen. My husband and I both read Nuclear War: A Scenario, in which she spoke with high level officials who plan for nuclear war, and sketched out a frighteningly plausible scenario based on the world we live in. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well.

My husband had just bought Jacobsen’s new book, Biological War: A Scenario, which begins with a lab accident in Siberia and a plague that spreads from there. The similarities to what might be unfolding are hard to miss.

So far we don’t know a lot. (Jacobsen’s book also echoes this. Lack of information in certain parts of the world is part of why this stuff spreads so fast.)

Independent Russian media reports that a 28-year old woman who worked as a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East broke a vial with bacteria, fell ill, and died about a week later. She may have traveled, that’s not as clear. Irkutsk, where she worked, is a city of approximately 600,000 people. Shelekhov, where she was hospitalized, is a town of about 40,000.

Russian authorities — who now claim the woman died of “pneumonia of an unknown entomology,” and deny any lab accident — supposedly initially followed the death with a rapid quarantine and then deleted posts warning of travel restrictions. The region is a suspected hotbed for Russian biological weapons research (which is also well detailed in Jacobsen’s new book).

If it’s all starting to sound a little Wuhan, China circa 2019, well, that may be what we are conditioned for these days. Our country hasn’t really recovered from the paranoia and fighting over Covid.

We first saw the reports Friday night when Jacobsen tweeted about it. Supposedly the death had just happened. By Sunday CNN had news alerted it, the White House said it was monitoring, and every Tom Dick and Harry on the internet had a take, many uneducated. We are a nation full of plague experts, apparently.

I would laugh, but, we are just a few years removed from watching people offer diagnoses live on TV. Our nation is still recovering, in a lot of ways, from a pandemic that shut down our schools, pitted us against each other with little reliable information, and destroyed trust. So I guess, as I said, here we go again.

Could this also be the beginning of an October surprise? (The October surprise, for all the non-politicals out there, is something that happens right before an election that could upend planning.)

Oh how many scenarios there could be.

No Predictions

I’m not going to use this space to predict a new global pandemic, nor am I going to tell you not to worry.

This is at least the second fear cycle we’ve been in over the last few months. Whatever happened to that rat poop cruise ship, the one that caused Americans to learn (many for the first time) about Hantavirus?

It turns out it quietly was declared contained. Three deaths were reported. The containment went massively under reported compared to the fear scenario that it would be the next virus to take us out.

The truth is: It could be nothing. It could also be a lab accident involving a biological weapons program Russia is known for. What a lovely thought to sleep with at night.

For now, what’s more interesting is what it says about the moment we are in. Covid destroyed trust in this country on a pandemic scale. Now we have little trust and in this particular incident there are precious few actors here who will be trusted if something did go wrong.

The Russian government, the same one that invaded its neighbor and kills anyone who goes rogue, is not known for truth telling.

The US government’s word seems to be good to only those who want to believe it at this moment. Departing the World Health Organization in a huff doesn’t help and we’re inclined to go to partisan corners and believe what we want to believe.

I suppose it’s not that unlike the last time we saw a new virus spread. Please let’s not talk about drinking bleach this time, if we do end up there again. Oh heaven forbid.

Some Perspective

The glimpse I saw working at the White House every day for six years is that a lot goes wrong every day, and that’s why it’s important to have leaders who get all of the information available, make tough calls, and communicate effectively.

I feel like it’s been a while since we hit that standard. It’s really where we should start.

Instead, our default is partisanship. If you are politically inclined to trust those in power, you’ll likely believe whatever they’re doing is sufficient. And if you’re not inclined to trust them, you will find the problems.

Whatever the case, the plague is far from the only scenario of something that could upend October. Trust in our elections is at an all-time low (there’s an assortment of reasons for this but namely it’s the President’s consistent insistence that he won an election he did not win). There’s a deficit of trust with the media, so when something we disagree with is reported, will we believe it?

And then what happens?

A Plague of Low Information

By Sunday night I was already seeing people on the left accusing the White House of politicizing the Russian outbreak (those I saw make those accusations had not served in government). There were also accusations that Jacobsen, an investigative reporter who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, was doing the bidding of the Russians, or just trying to sell a book.

As for the White House, I hope they’re monitoring. As for Jacobsen’s motivations, I don’t buy either one. She spent years interviewing the people whose job is to plan for this, and already has a bestselling book on the end of the world. So I don’t think her motivation is money. Nor do I think the Connecticut-born Angeleno is on the take for Putin.

But having lived in this world, I think she worries. I worry that all of the short-sighted politicians who continue to weaken our institutions set us up for these worries, and worse. I worry that we don’t have a trusted media we’ll need to guide us through.

But most of all I worry that after the last pandemic, and all the hate our kids watched us show each other, we’ve learned nothing.

And when you learn nothing you’re bound to repeat it.

Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton doesn’t seem so eager to debate his opponent, James Talarico, who proposed a Fox News debate. Gov. Katie Hobbs, an Arizona Democrat, is refusing to debate her opponent Republican Andy Biggs. She did the same in the last election and narrowly won.

In Alabama, GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville is running for Governor, and apparently has no interest in debating his Democratic opponent Doug Jones. ABC reports Tuberville told a local station: “I mean, there’s no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion.”

I guess that’s that then; when there’s a difference of opinion, our brave elected leaders, wannabe elected leaders (and evidently the former coaches) just decide not to debate.

Sadly not debating seems en vogue, another “trend” led by President Trump who sat out all the primary debates in 2024 before cruising to the GOP nomination. It probably didn’t help that former President Joe Biden offers a clear example of what can go wrong if you do debate. He will likely go to his grave wishing the first and last 2024 debate never happened.

So I guess I wasn’t surprised when I read an ABC News analysis, released Sept. 25, that found 21 of 35 Senate races still had no debate scheduled, while 21 of 36 Gubernatorial races had no debate scheduled.

The people who are losing here are voters. Just a month or so before the balance of power could shift dramatically in this country, some of the most important races don’t have a single debate scheduled. That’s an ominous sign in a country that, as I’ve written, gets more and more partisan, and in politics more and more driven by money.

Doing the math

When you’ve worked on campaigns, you know that it’s a math game.

You need enough of your voters to show up to outperform your opponent. Lots of variables exist, and what ultimately motivates voters can be pretty mundane. Something as simple as the weather forecast can dull turnout. But you only have so much time to close your number.

It used to be debates were a critical moment to juice those numbers. You could get in front of a large number of people, frame your ideas and contrast against your opponent. This was true even before television cameras. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were different, but legendary.

There is so much on the line this year. Many races have the potential for massive generational changes, policy differences. We’re dancing in and out of a war with Iran, President Trump is challenging every check and balance and we’re living in silos. And yet many candidates evidently feel like there’s still no need to debate.

The brave debaters

The only good news is we are seeing some important debates.

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will meet Republican candidate Mike Rogers to debate on Nexstar’s WOOD-TV October 8 (I hope it will be fair). Interestingly Rogers skipped a Sept. 15 debate accusing a Fox 2 Detroit moderator of being biased. They’re scheduled to meet again at a debate hosted by WXYZ October 21.

This Sunday there was also a Congressional debate so long it required a bathroom break in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional district. In it Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. and Democrat Rebecca Bennett were hosted by The New Jersey Globe and Rider University.

The district, home to President Trump’s New Jersey golf course, is a swingy district already. But this race is notable for a trend story, it has the old guard (Kean comes from a heavily political family) against a political newcomer (in this case Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot and mom of two).

The debate touched on experience, holding their own party accountable and how much government can actually bring down the cost for Americans.

It also has another layer: Congressman Kean was out 4 months, which he later disclosed was for treatment of depression. Debate moderators brought up that at the state level he had previously voted against paid sick leave and paid family leave.

But Bennett didn’t pounce. She said she was happy Kean sought treatment and pointed more to Kean’s stock trades, investments in oil and gas and support for President Trump in his war with Iran, which she argued is driving up costs for average Americans while making Kean money.

Bennett talked about the high price of gas, health insurance and groceries. She said she opposes the war in Iran, she wants to see a public option for healthcare and wants to end individual stock trading by members of Congress.

While she was strong in the debate there was one moment that seemed to catch her off guard. She was asked a fairly straightforward question about her net worth. She was asked the same question multiple times and didn’t give a number (though she did promise to follow up).

In California tomorrow we’ll have a high-stakes debate for Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton at 6 PM Pacific on CNN. The state is unlikely to vote for the Republican and Hilton has had trouble getting oxygen, so he obviously sees this platform as an opportunity. We’ll see whether he’s right.

Will they make a difference?

When you zoom out we’re at a pivotal moment. Voters have serious questions about the direction of the country, whether it’s healthcare, the regulation of artificial intelligence or data centers, the conflict in Iran or gas prices. Then there’s the questions of corruption and accountability.

I would think then we would want to demand more debates. Whether it’s with the local organizations or national news networks.

But we’re also at this moment where elections are still a math game, and media is siloed, so it’s getting harder and harder for debates to make the difference.

I certainly want a democracy where our candidates are forced to show up and answer questions. But we’re in such a partisan moment that the lean is already there for most voters. That’s why in so many cases the equation for candidates just doesn’t include a debate.

The equation only changes if we change it. Demand debates, or at least make candidates on all sides feel the heat. Otherwise I guess we’ll just have to trust what the attack ads say.

Trump had plenty he wanted to talk about. He had paved more of the White House grounds and wanted to speak.

Only problem: He’d banned part of the White House TV pool so there was no microphone operator to record him. That didn’t stop the President from speaking. He stood talking, with some television stations carrying the video, but there was no audio of what he was saying

Whether he recognizes it or not, Trump hit the mute button himself.

This has been a long time coming. His assault on the press organizations that make up the traditional White House travel pool has been unlike any other President, consistent and growing.

The saying goes: Big things can happen slowly and then all at once. I fear we could be watching the dissolution of the traditional White House press pool, an organization most Americans have both relied on and have very little knowledge of.

It’s easy to be hyperbolic, but the consequences of this shift, even if they’re lost on the average voter, can truly reshape what kind of government we have in this country.

White House TV Pool

The first time I met the White House TV pool operators was the morning after President Obama’s election.

We were hosting our first press conference. The team that had flown in was now more seasoned than the campaign team.

They walked me through what they needed, a center aisle for their microphone operator, video spots for a multi-channel switched feed, access. Lots of access.

It was honestly welcome. These pros come from the nation’s largest networks, ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS and CNN. They knew what they were doing and we wanted the President Elect’s words to travel far. It was a dance many administrations before me had done, a promise of access to a press that had no obligation to cover him a certain way, to make sure his words carried far and wide.

There was never a day where our team was happy about all of the coverage. That’s politics. There was, always, at least one news organization that would be a thorn in the side, sometimes implying the President I worked for could be a secret terrorist, or worse, with absolutely no evidence. And then there were the ones who simply took a different angle than we would have liked.

But every morning they called me in my role as Director of Press Advance, I gave the TV pool every detail we had thus far. I would tell them where to expect the President to travel, what he was expected to do, and who they could expect to see.

The White House TV pool accompanied us on pre-advances around the world, to trips we were planning, some we might not be able to take. They did all of this for planning purposes only, not reporting on the details that would lead to the live moments, to ensure Americans could witness history.

Having an independent media pool reporting on the President reassures other media that what happened is what we said happened. At a time of growing distrust that’s more important than ever.

When we planned an under the cover of darkness trip to Afghanistan, I called the White House TV pool and we met with the team in Afghanistan from the White House Situation Room.

Because of logistics, the organizations agreed to take the live military satellite feed, only if their operator controlled the camera on the ground. Done, we agreed.

Bipartisan Resistance

The TV pool was a key part of the press pool that traveled with the President. There were 13 seats aboard Air Force One for press, three seats were consistently reserved for TV. The news organizations decided on the rotation, not us.

We didn’t have any say in who traveled with us. Some of my colleagues viewed certain journalists with skepticism. They believed they weren’t smart, they had a point of view, they rubbed people the wrong way.

But the press defended each other; they certainly didn’t want the White House staff having the final say. So, often, we would be backed into a corner. Deal with the press you have, not the press you want, or don’t get your message out at all.

That’s a trade off that all Presidents need to manage and one that, if we are honest, is bedrock to a democratic system.

President Trump has taken his resistance far farther than any other President. After renaming the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America,’ he was mad at AP for not following suit. He banned them — one of the world’s largest, most relied upon news organizations — from coming into small session pool sprays.

I was surprised that the press didn’t band together right then and refuse coverage. All of them rely on AP, a wire service that operates across the world. The reality, though, is the press power is diminished, with new outlets popping up all the time, cable viewers decreasing and independent creator power increasing. The power dynamics are different at the same time that corrupt politicians on all sides would rather not deal with the press at all.

Lonely not free

With the ban on a key TV pool member newly in place, organizations seem to be walking eggshells a bit, both trying to support the pool effort to ensure long-term access and coverage of leaders of both parties. And they’re trying to do their job, covering the President. For now the ban is mostly holding. The UN speech this morning was different, covered by pool UN cameras. It’s also possible the courts will bring welcome relief.

But organizations are also preparing for an unknown future.

The President announced last night he would launch Trump TV. Just what we need, the President playing producer and director, while he’s managing a continuing war. In truth he’s likely using the military cameras that have long followed the President to record history for his Trump TV escapades, empowering staff for the feed instead of the free press.

But that’s exactly how some, more concerned with ratings than access, could start tuning in to the President’s remarks despite the pool boycott.

The reality is they are competitors as much as collaborators. The current alliance is fragile.

But I would warn that if they break and they take this coverage now, they set themselves up for failure and distrust for years to come.

I have written here before about my disappointment in NewsNation, which had billed itself as free and fair, and then I believed went too far to appease Trump.

I remember when an operator came to my home to pack up my live kit when I was no longer with the network, we were talking about the election and the free press.

He said, well if Trump wins, we may be the only free press left.

How naive, I thought. If you’re the only one left, you’re no longer free.

I hoped Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder would change something.

A year ago when the Turning Point USA Founder was assassinated, his murder livestreamed and replayed for days afterwards, I worried about how it would affect our children. I also hoped it was an inflection point, one where people began to reckon with the the sickness of political point scoring and meme culture.

I wrote about it here. I wanted my son to know violence is never ok, regardless of politics.

One year later I’m not so sure that’s what our youth, or frankly America, learned from Kirk’s tragic death. In fact, there’s more evidence that things are getting worse, that from the President on down we are getting dumber, less serious, more flippant with our rhetoric.

It was called the “Kirk-a-versary.” This was what I heard from many young men and some young women. Several news organizations wrote of this troubling trend, an anniversary of sorts at the one-year mark, and moreover how very bizarre the TikTok videos were promoting it.

Much like the song, ‘We are Charlie Kirk,’ an AI generated song (likely from a foreign source) that has now been in more than 50,000 TikTok videos and sung both reverently and irreverently, it seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

In Los Angeles it wasn’t just young men who were part of the trend, young women were equally involved. The videos, social media feeds, it’s all some weird stuff. From the guy who rented a truck to cart a statue of Charlie Kirk in Times Square leading to an altercation, to the conversations in the schools of Los Angeles.

Depending on the circles, it was like there was no room for this man to both have questionable views and be a human: someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s husband. It was all black or white; all good, all bad, all meme culture.

It all left me more worried frankly than I was a year ago.

Death Chants in Texas

While the spectacle of reliving Charlie Kirk’s death played out, President Trump hosted a rather bizarre midterm election convention in Texas.

He promised $5000 checks if he won the midterms (I hope people see through that, given how many times he’s promised cash hand outs, and how those cash hand outs would only cost our kids even more).

He spoke for hours. I honestly don’t know how a President has that much time to speak uninterrupted (I did work for one and a President’s plate is quite full). But this President has always made time for long, tangent-filled speeches. He’s fighting in court to throw out mail voting (thankfully with the Supreme Court rebuffing his efforts), he’s making the case for his DC renovations and continues to press for his deeply unpopular war with Iran, which simultaneously is somehow, according to his telling, close to over and already over every day for the last almost 200 days since it started. And he wants to talk about it all at length.

When you add it up — the ranting President, the Internet-coded response to a murder — you can’t help but think we’re at a deeply unserious moment in time.

What would Kirk make of this moment? Some of his allies have certainly turned on the President for the war in Iran. As I said last year, I do wish I had gotten to see that evolution.

But we don’t. And now a year later I’m deeply disturbed by the things I hear, not just from our youth, but by grown adults about murder.

At that same convention, Texas Senator Ted Cruz stood onstage belittling New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. From the crowd a voice very loud, certainly loud enough to be heard: “He should be shot.” Over and over the shout came to names of different Democrats.

A year after a searing American political murder, what was Ted Cruz’s response to this?

Silence.

It’s not just rhetoric, either. I should note there was already a foiled attack near Mamdani’s residence.

The ‘Kirkification’ of the Internet

Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, many deeply troubling trends have played out in social media around his likeness and his legacy. “Kirkification” evidently is when someone replaces someone’s face with Charlie Kirk’s face for memes.

It got so widespread and popular that literal websites sprouted up to “help.” Likely built from AI for searchable popular terms, these websites sold packages to users to generate AI images.

Sometime after his death another social media trend would claim Kirk was now the gatekeeper of “Agartha.” They would use edited pictures of Kirk, now turned blonde and blue-eyed, claiming he was in a magical realm. What most young people posting, repeating and verbalizing this fictional location didn’t know was that the idea of Agartha came from the Nazis. They were unwittingly spreading the gospel of a very dark history.

These things happen so quickly it’s almost uncontrollable, many parents don’t even know what their kids are talking about. I’m glad the AI guys are finally starting to see that what they’ve created is so very dangerous.

I don’t know how we’ve gotten here.

The murder of a father, an outspoken one who I disagreed with, became a culture of AI brain rot. The things people have done, using AI, to his widow, Erika Kirk, is somehow worse. AI videos of her dancing and smiling. I can’t imagine their children seeing these images.

I keep coming back to where I was a year ago. Sitting here typing, wondering how we as a nation would respond to something that was so searing, so public, so awful. Yes, Charlie Kirk’s politics were deeply polarizing. But couldn’t we all see this was an important moment to reassess? To get serious?

Apparently not.

And that’s why I’m so troubled. Money seems to be corrupting our politics, and memes seem to be corrupting our youth. It seems so little is actually getting done that could go a long way to save us.

I might laugh if it wasn’t so sad.

Note to readers: I’m sorry that this week isn’t more optimistic but I guess that’s just where I am on this particular subject. I always welcome your take.

By now, if your feed is anything like mine (and it may not be), you’ve seen hundreds of Gloria Steinem stories. This is mine.

I first met her in 2003, at the University of Kansas. I had just led a voter registration drive on campus, and it got a lot of attention. So the school’s Provost invited me to a private dinner before Gloria gave a much larger speech.

As it turns out, it was my 21st birthday. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the start of a 20 year span where I would be influenced by Gloria Steinem.

That night, my mom and my aunts were all in town. There wasn’t room for them in the dinner. So, naturally, I asked Gloria if she would go even further and meet us for a toast later that evening, after her speech. Sure, she told me, as long as she could bring her friends.

Over the years, I have learned that acts of kindness like this were pretty standard for Gloria. She was a feminist icon and yet she always made time. She was once asked if she would pass the torch. She responded with something to the effect that she didn’t need to pass it, because she used her torch to light up hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of women’s torches.

I was just one of them.

An Unforgettable Night

My crew met Gloria’s crew at the Eldridge Hotel in Lawrence, a fairly chi-chi bar by the standards of a college town. We had wine. I got to sit next to her and peppered her with questions. I had so many.

By then, she was in her late 60s. She’d spent more than 40 years of her life in the trenches of political and gender fights. She had traveled the world, witnessed injustice, written about it, spoke about it.

I wanted to know everything.

Her friends in Kansas turned out to be incredible writers, academics, women I would stay in touch with and follow. (And women who were involved in securing Kansas’ spot as the first state in a post Roe era to legalize abortion.)

It was so special to have a personal audience with this woman, but what I remember most from that evening was not a private moment, but something that happened during her speech. In the audience, there was a mom with a baby, and as babies tend to do, the baby started to cry. The mother got up to leave when Gloria stopped her.

Babies Cry, she said. Stay.

Gloria wanted this mother, who obviously tried so hard to be there, to get to stay. And she did.

I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about Gloria Steinem, mostly by people who have never experienced meeting her. Some believe that she, herself not a mother, and the movement she led was against motherhood, or traditional values. That’s the opposite of my experience. She was a woman who supported women. Who supported mothers. And wanted mothers to have the support they deserved, whether they found that in a traditional setting or needed to build it themselves.

Taking Flight

A few months later I got an invitation to join a leadership retreat Gloria was hosting in Washington, D.C. I was honored. For a girl from Galesburg, Illinois by way of Kansas, this invitation was a big deal.

I remember two things about the retreat: It was the most pleasant experience I’d had in Washington D.C. (and it’s stayed that way, long after the retreat), and the women I met were incredible. Gloria’s women came from every state across America. All with energy and drive to work on leveling the imbalance of power, a drive for women to be able to reach any level they wanted. All of us wanted to learn.

After that, I received a job offer of sorts. The request was to organize buses from Kansas and Missouri to a March on Washington. I agreed.

Friends who had helped with the voter registration drive, who were there with me to meet Gloria, stepped up to help again. We organized the largest contingent of buses. We sold more tickets than other regions, they redirected buses to our region, having not sold the tickets from other regions.

We drove hours from Kansas to Missouri, from Missouri to DC. We slept on the floor of the YMCA. I had to fight to get access to the showers for our large contingent.

The next day, we showed up at the mall and marched. We stayed for many of the speeches, but in order to get people back to Missouri and Kansas by the time we promised we needed to start driving earlier than the conclusion. Some were disappointed, angry, I think a few dropped off.

Trying to get seven buses of activists on the same page was definitely like herding cats.

I remember sitting there that night and reflecting, there has to be a more effective way to bring about change. But also grateful that my meeting with Gloria had put me here.

Little did I know five years later I would find myself, having won another campaign, in the White House working for Barack Obama.

A White House Reunion

I can trace the start of my career as a political activist to meeting Gloria. Years later, it included an incredible full-circle moment.

President Obama gave Gloria Steinem the Medal of Freedom. In my role, I rarely made my way over to these ceremonies. My job was to set the stage, not watch the product. I made an exception for this one, though. I wanted to see Gloria again, thank her for lighting my torch, so to speak.

It was 10 years later, 2013. I had just had my first son. She genuinely seemed to remember me. I talked to her and a friend who was with her. She was warm, incredibly grateful for the honor of the President, and, she made sure to point out, still on her journey for change. She never rested.

The medal wasn’t a finish line. It was like she knew we had so much further to go.

She continued hosting events, speaking at events, engaging people for years to come. I had one more opportunity to see her, in 2023, at an event in New York City. It was the last chance I had to spend time with her.

She had come so far: when Gloria started her activism, newspapers still ran separate “Help Wanted – Male” and “Help Wanted – Female” columns, so women couldn’t even apply for half the jobs in the paper. In 1972, the year she co-founded Ms. magazine, a woman running a major American corporation was rare enough to make the news. This year a record 55 women run Fortune 500 companies. Only 11 percent but 55 more than when Gloria got her start.

In 1969 there were 10 women in Congress. In 2023 when we met the last time there were 149 women in Congress.

Work To Do

One takeaway from 20 years of connection with Gloria Steinem is that the work is never done. She realized that in lighting so many others’ torches.

Some of that unfinished work is easy to name: we still haven’t passed the long awaited and very popular Equal Rights Amendment to enshrine women in the Constitution. We still don’t value a mother’s contribution nearly enough. And so many women still tell stories of being brushed aside, or worse.

I think about the changes that happened during Gloria Steinem’s lifetime, and I wonder what could happen in the lifetimes of everyone whose torch she lit. She built an army for a reason. So to me the question isn’t how we honor her memory, it’s how we continue the work of her life. I for one hope we could begin with putting the ERA in the Constitution where it belongs.

Tucked into Sierra Valley, along the northern edge of the Tahoe National Forest, this California town has remained remarkably affordable compared to its neighbors. Anti-government sentiment is common here. Signs like “Peeping Toms stay out,” and others express sympathy for the State of Jefferson, the anti-California separatist movement.

There is not a lot of talk about AI, the best way to use it or how to invest in it.

Yet tiny Loyalton, affectionately known by its own residents as the “loneliest town in America,” is about to pay the price for AI robber barons’ rapacious appetite for power.

The worst part: Many residents don’t even know.

Rapid Acceleration

There has been some media attention to a power grab. Basically Nevada, which has been blessing data centers at a rapid pace, has for decades supplied a significant amount of power to the Lake Tahoe region, including the California side.

Now, with new power needs expanding rapidly in the state, NV Energy, Nevada’s major electric supplier, has told Liberty Utilities, the California utility supplying the region, to find a new source of power.

So far most of the stories focus on the irony of Tahoe residents being affected. It’s a beautiful luxury area where Silicon Valley tycoons vacation, skiing in the winter, lake life in the summer. Among other oligarchs, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has a home in the very area that Liberty Utilities supplies. The story goes that those building AI will be affected in this transition.

That’s one part of the story. More important, to me, is the story of those who never asked for AI in the first place. This group — including Loyalton’s 700 or so residents — could now be priced out of energy, as data centers continue to consume more power. NV Energy estimates just 12 proposed data center projects could require almost three times the amount of energy the Hoover Dam can generate.

Little Information

If you drive into Loyalton, you might miss it. You’d drive past the Golden West Saloon, Leonard’s, a small grocery shop and a service center. Cattle roam free, the July 4th picnic brings everyone together and the handful of other restaurants in town are seasonal.

Towns like this dot the region, outside of the better known Lake Tahoe area. It’s a beautiful area and I’m lucky to have family there.

Having heard the story about Nevada pulling its power, I called a family member in Loyalton who is dependent on Liberty Utilities and asked if he knew whether it would affect him.

He hadn’t heard anything about it.

He is not an incurious person, either. He’s a retired journalist. He works in the hardware store in town. He went to the hardware store to ask if they had heard. No, he reported back to me, he was breaking the news.

Like most of America, as we transition into more tech, old school reporting has been harder to get. He says he knows the one woman who covers the town. He wasn’t sure if she knew.

But even if she had, few are reading the reporting. All of that’s to say, that like many others, the first sign of this “energy transition” they never asked for will most likely be in their power bill.

Drunk on Power

California regulators don’t have power over Nevada regulators, so there’s a predicament forming.

Nevada has been trying to attract more business. The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Storey County has become one of the largest industrial parks in the world, bigger than Denver. The state has attracted Switch, Microsoft, Google and Apple data centers and Tesla’s Gigafactory. The state has even sweetened the pot by offering tax incentives — all in the service of projects that could end up raising consumer prices.

Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, Republican, a former Sheriff, broke ground on a $4.6 billion, 2 million square foot data center that they claim will employ 1500 in construction jobs. Which is true but temporary. Long-term expectations are that the data centers would employ about 100.

The pull on resources though wouldn’t go away. Data centers are consuming vast amounts of energy, but many are also a suck on water, a precious resource especially considering the fire that swept through the area last week.

Reno’s own city council, for many of the above reasons, issued a moratorium on data centers, which Governor Lombardo has said he hopes they will lift.

Before the anti-data-center backlash, Republicans and Democrats were blessing data center investments as a sign of progress. President Trump just Monday said if communities don’t bless data centers they’ll end up “backwards and poor.”

The Price That Could be Paid

Loyalton has always been a town that’s worked to punch above its weight. It has fought with governments before. In 2013 the town pulled its employees out of CalPERs, the state’s retirement fund, because they couldn’t afford the payments. CalPERs responded with a $1.6 million termination fee, against a town with a budget of $1 million total. Loyalton refused to pay, so retirees ended up with pensions cut by more than half.

I remember an early visit to Loyalton. This one was treacherous, snow had blanketed the region. We had to put chains on our tires and still the drive was epic. (Coming from Illinois, I’ve always wondered why we can’t plow the highways in the region).

When we finally got into Loyalton and went to get the chains removed from the service center, the technician took one look at us. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

The town is mostly ranchers, farmers, retirees who like the quiet pace and low costs. Far from the AI creators and consumers, many who might gravitate to the Tahoe area.

But unless something changes, these farmers and ranchers and rural Americans, who are trapped sometimes unwittingly in this energy battle, will have to pay the price for this new technology they never asked for.

Why was it named after Monica? We wondered. She was an intern. I had been reflecting on the impeachment, the imbalance of power, how it was covered ceaselessly at the time, and about what I learned in high school from the coverage of the President of the United States (nothing good).

We were all around the same age and we agreed, from our perspectives, everything had been so wrong. All of it. I looked back at how President Clinton had used women in his defense, how he had lied and brazenly got away with taking advantage of a young woman’s admiration.

It’s happening again, they said.

The two women had both worked in the first Trump administration. They had the name of a young woman who was called on at odd hours, viewed with suspicion by other White House staffers, and viewed with concern by these women who hoped nothing untoward was happening.

The name of the young woman was NOT Natalie Harp.

Uncomfortable Questions

I was uncomfortable when I first saw people bringing up Natalie Harp’s name. First Sen. Jon Ossoff, then every news organization, then other candidates.

Not because Ossoff said anything wrong, per se. Somehow Ossoff seemed to dominate the news cycle by just mentioning that Harp flies with Trump on Air Force One. That’s really all he did, and it pales in comparison to what Republicans and grown men said about Monica Lewinsky, then just an intern in her early 20s.

I didn’t like the intonation, though. Anyone who has worked in politics knows there are power dynamics. I fear there are abuses of power again.

I’ve also worked with incredibly strong women who have been viewed with suspicion for merely having a job. There were implications that they got a job because of their looks, or because of the support of a man, when those women themselves were powerhouses.

I don’t know Natalie Harp, and I make no presumptions about her relationship with the President. I will only say the President is most certainly the more powerful person in this equation.

Protect the Boss

Most people I know from Trump’s orbit talk about a pressure to protect the boss, even if they question it later.

Among the women I got to know from the first Trump administration was former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham. She was not at the dinner described above. By the time I met her, she had moved to Kansas, living on a farm and taking care of animals in need. She was about as far away from politics as she could be.

By then, Stephanie had started telling her full truth. She had already written a book and later spoke at the Democratic National Convention. I wrote about how people turned on her for just telling her experience.

It’s like we all defend our teams, even when our team is wrong. Stephanie wasn’t in the position of defending a party or the people affiliated anymore. In fact, I wish more people had listened to her about Max Miller, now a Congressman, the former boyfriend Stephanie described in her book as abusive (I’ve never spoken to her about this; there’s now public litigation over an NDA, and Miller has denied the allegations). But years later Miller is under scrutiny after Bernie Moreno’s daughter, Emily Moreno, made domestic violence allegations against Miller, and tragically there’s now a toddler daughter involved.

On a podcast we did together, Stephanie did tell me about expectations in the first Trump White House, how she felt the need to wear high heels, to look a certain way, dress the part, look pretty. It’s all quite petty. And yet it’s so clear too little has changed for women (frankly of both parties).

Republican Hypocrisy

Do I think this President should come under investigation if he’s having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate? Yes — and we’ve seen that before.

For all the outrage about Ossoff mentioning Natalie, I think of how many Republicans had no hesitation talking about “Monica” many years ago. Some, like current CNN pundit, maybe next Press Secretary, Scott Jennings should know better. Jennings has been particularly outraged at Democrats bringing up the name of a White House staffer but it was Republicans who used the name of a young woman, a young intern, throughout the scandal that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

The problem is that these scandals rarely impact the person in power. If a scandal emerges it won’t be “the Trump Scandal,” it would be named after the woman. We’ve already seen it happening.

Would it change anything? President Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and still paid no real political price. I somehow doubt this would make him fall.

Call me old-fashioned but I hope that in this day and age we can have a more nuanced conversation about power, the balance of power, and the truth. One that’s frankly overdue.

I also wish our media cycles weren’t won in innuendo or ignorance. The news for the week included a reference to Natalie Harp, as well as South Carolina Senator Darline Graham not being able to answer a question about Taiwan. (Oh dear). Which is more important?

In that same debate with Graham’s Republican opponent, they were asked about Medicare. When the program’s hospital insurance trust fund runs out, there will be cuts. Both of them wanted to see Medicare preserved. Then how? Where will that money come from? That runoff election is today and I’m eager to see that debate continue with the Democratic nominee.

So I guess what I’d say about this whole Natalie thing is: if there’s anything there, sure, get to it. And name it after the one in power. But don’t turn a whole news cycle into waiting for a sex scandal instead of covering the real issues that affect Americans.

Evan is a former Democratic operative who has grown away from the party. I read a piece she had written on Substack and I invited her to a Live.

She felt being a Democrat had become too much vibes, not enough substance, and certainly not enough focus on core issues like healthcare and jobs for Americans. Like me she was from middle America and went to the University of Kansas. While I worked on the national campaign for Barack Obama, she worked at the local level, fueling her drive into politics.

Eventually she became a successful fundraiser in Democratic politics, specifically with the progressive, Bernie wing of the party. In her own telling, she was a true believer. Until she wasn’t.

Republicans have seized on this, with many right wing pundits inviting her on their shows. I haven’t seen the same enthusiasm on the left.

Her book takes readers on her journey, one that touches on personal health struggles and professional accomplishments. When I read it, I recognized so much of the story: fueled by hope, bruised over time, reignited by motherhood. I also recognized what Evan was doing. By “telling all” she undoubtedly burned bridges and I know how politics works. Sometimes your friends don’t stay your friends, even when you know you’re fighting for what’s right.

Though I don’t agree with the conclusion that she made to leave the party, I do believe Evan’s point of view is worthy of your time, and more specifically something Democrats should listen to.

Evan’s Breaking Point

The influencers broke Evan.

At the last Democratic Convention she had a role guiding influencers around the convention hall. To her, it was a demonstration of how laughable politics had become.

I didn’t know Evan then, but I wrote about how ridiculous the Convention was for coddling influencers (including a “Yacht Party”). It felt out of touch given the realities so many face. At the time a friend of mine called me with many of the same frustrations Evan articulates, which is why I wrote about it.

I remember the column because at the time I got back a note from a former colleague who worked with President Obama even earlier than I did. She told me while I was criticizing, she was out there winning the election. I remember thinking I hope she’s right. (I very clearly didn’t want Donald Trump to win.) But she wasn’t. Maybe Democrats should have been open to the criticism?

Democrats haven’t really done a transparent version of that. We all want to move past what happened in the last election, an embarrassing face plant from President Biden, who I worked with, whose picture was in my last article holding my first child. I respect him, but he had been in politics far too long, past his own capacity. I wish he had lived up to his promise of one term and retired in grace.

Instead there was a quick exit, followed by a coronation for Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats ignored the massive distrust this whole process created. I believe there should absolutely be more distrust for Donald Trump right now (remember when he said he would end the war in Ukraine on day one, remember when Iran was going to be a five-week conflict, remember when he would end inflation, and make America affordable again etc. …)

But relying on Trump’s serial failings doesn’t make us better. I don’t want to keep winning as the lesser of two evils. I want Democrats to rebuild trust by telling the truth.

The Ugly Money Part

In her role, Evan saw the ugliest part of politics up close, the money part. She sat with politicians seeking money, heard their phone calls, challenged them to make direct asks for even more money. By her telling, she was good at the job, and it certainly sounded like it. I always hated the money part, but it was always vital.

For a long time I’ve said there are two things that win campaigns: money and oxygen. They have to be used effectively, but you have to have them. Oxygen is of course the amount of attention you get, your messaging. But more and more, money has been overarching in politics. Frankly, money has corrupted politics on both sides of the aisle, and no one seems brave enough to really go after it (knowing they too will need it).

Evan makes the point that with the politicians she was working for, it was hard to believe they had time to serve constituents with how much time was spent raising money.

Many politicians say they’ll take on the moneyed interests and establishment. Evan correctly points out that it’s easy to pledge that you won’t take any big-money donations when big-money donors aren’t knocking on your door. But since the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling reversed campaign finance restrictions, money has permeated the Democratic landscape as much as it has the Republican landscape, at the expense of working Americans.

I remember the argument for the Obama campaign taking corporate money. If we were going to win the campaign, we couldn’t fight with one hand behind our back. We had to play by the rules as written. Well, the rules are seriously corrupt.

A Forced Version of Unity

Evan also writes about topics that are taboo in Democratic circles, particularly identity politics.

The last campaign had just about every special interest group you could think of: White Dudes for Harris, White Women: Answer the Call, Win with Black Women. So many groups. And I guess the goal was for us all to all steer in one direction.

We have much farther to go to create an equal society so I understand the goal, but I remember back to the Obama campaign and the method wasn’t to draw out our differences, it was to find our similarities, to unite unlikely allies to work together towards a society that could work better for all.

These days sometimes it seems like there’s a different version of unity. It’s a version of “unity” where you don’t criticize our own, even when we know something doesn’t feel right. Back to LBJ days, it’s something like it’s better to have one inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. I think that’s it.

Anyway, that brings me back to Evan. Democrats can be dismissive and cynical about people who articulate why they leave the party, and it’s been that way for a long time.

What she did was brave. She names names in the book and tells some of her hard truths. People won’t like that, but it is direct and honest. And for a girl from middle America who has to make her way up the political ladder, I know how hard that is. But I also know how important it is. We don’t stand on the shoulders of everyone who fought for our right to vote and to work in politics only to stay silent now. We need to use our voices.

To that end, I’m proud she’s using her voice. We won’t agree on everything but I really hope Democrats do read her book. We shouldn’t write off the criticism. Instead, we should embrace the criticism to make ourselves stronger.

We call it “leave” because we have no economic language for what parenting actually is. It is the most important labor in the country, the most necessary, and the least accounted for.

I didn’t “leave” when I had my second child in May. I embraced the opportunity to nurture new life, with all the work and sacrifice and joy that entails. That meant taking a short break from other duties, like writing, but also it meant real work that will last a lifetime.

As I return to writing I’m grateful to my readers for hanging with me through the months I paused. Babies need their mothers, their caregivers, for sustenance, for soothing, for survival, and this time I wanted to be there, fully. And while I was doing so, I watched the whole subject of motherhood get politicized yet again.

A different pregnancy
I had my first baby 14 years ago. The last time I welcomed a child, in March 2012, it was the middle of a Presidential reelection campaign. I was working for the White House, as Director of Press Advance, one of the few people who could legally work on the President’s political and official business. I felt like I had two missions at once.

Within a few weeks of my first son’s birth, I was back at the White House. He sat with me in the White House Situation Room and spit up on a senior colleague’s shoulder. Joe Biden joked that he was the youngest baby to have security clearance. Seven weeks after he was born, I was in Afghanistan overseeing the President’s live address to the nation, because the mission seemed critical.

“Leave” for a woman working at the White House at that time, 14 years ago, at my level, was relatively new and untested. First Lady Michelle Obama had helped ensure a leave policy was in place for Presidential staff during the first term. But no one really knew what that looked like.

Years later I look back at how quickly I went back on the road, the sacrifices I asked of my newborn — not least to tolerate his dad feeding him a bottle and having his mom gone on long trips — and I wonder about the sacrifices I asked of myself: not seeing the earliest moments of his life. Behind the scenes for new parents, there’s always the shuffling, figuring out who’s watching the child, the fear that something could happen to you or to them.

It’s not as glamorous as some White House selfies may make it seem. I wanted this time to be different, and in so many ways it has been.

Another debate about motherhood
With that background, and as I welcomed new life, I watched White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt navigate her return to the podium ten weeks after having her second child. It’s far more than the four days she took off to welcome the first, and I’m glad she had the time. But I also know the pressure she must have felt, returning with an upcoming midterm election, with a President who said he needed her.

I saw Second Lady Usha Vance welcome her fourth child this summer. She is the first wife of the Vice President to give birth in office in more than 150 years and was judged on everything from what she wore to what she said.

I watched Katie Miller, wife of senior White House aide Stephen Miller and now podcast host, spend months online urging women toward the same path: have babies, you can do it all.

I know that path and I’m not willing to tell another woman what’s right for her.

Then as I got ready to write this I saw that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted about freezing her eggs, tying it explicitly to this administration’s politics, which ignited another debate about motherhood, parenthood, and even the age at which it happens.

All of this politicization is so far from the point. We criticize mothers way too much and provide way too little support.

No price on motherhood
If moms were like venture capitalists, expecting a return on the investment they put into their children — the capital, the sleepless nights, the income sacrificed, the bodies and careers remade — they would be rich. Mothers would collectively own most of the capital on the planet.

Instead we’ve built an entire economy that fundamentally needs our products (our children) but serially undervalues the contributions of women. It treats parenting as a free investment, one that has an epic cost. And in this economy, it calls in debts later: By underpaying women. we create poverty cycles that follow.

I’m not presenting a new argument. Selma James has been making this argument since the 1970s, demanding wages for unpaid work women did raising children, running households. The demands have largely gone nowhere. What limited maternity “leave” we have is largely based on the wages women had before becoming pregnant, or the generosity of their employer. Meanwhile Oxfam estimates the work of homemakers is worth $10.8 trillion a year globally, more than three times the tech industry, using minimum wage as the baseline. That’s not what it’s actually worth, that’s the floor.

Some countries have tried to close the gap with limited “leave” or in some countries compensation in retirement. Germany, France, and Norway give parents pension credits for years spent raising children, quietly conceding decades later that there was labor unaccounted for.

So while this debate on what age to welcome a child rages on in America, or how many children to have, we’re not actually talking about the real benefits of motherhood to our society, how we should compensate for it. Instead we call welcoming a child, and that work associated with it, “leave” when it’s the most active, present part of a parent’s life.

I fear we’ve watched what happens to our children when that labor goes unsupported, when we only count women’s labor when they work outside of the home. For so long women’s labor in the home was taken for granted; and now it’s hard for any to raise children without two incomes, which requires outside employment.

In this new reality, we’ve seen the lack of value we place on child rearing manifest in problems in our schools, with mental health statistics, in headlines none of us want to keep reading. So maybe it’s time the conversation about motherhood stopped being about when to start, and instead be about how to value the most important job in our society: raising our next generation.

In the meantime, my readers, I’m so grateful for you. I guess this means I’m back from “leave,” though I never really felt like I left. But I am back to writing. And mothering: the best, most underpaid job in the world.

I keep turning that question over this Mother’s Day, because in the most unexpected and beautiful way, I feel like I’m getting to find out.

On May 4th, our son Rex Stanley came into the world. He is, by every measure, absolute perfection. And what surprised us most so far: He looks identical to our older son Hugh, just 14 years his junior. Same face. Same sideways glances. We had to do a double take.

The night before Rex was born I wrote Hugh a note telling him that I don’t know what it is about children, but it’s like you knew them before you knew them, when they come into the world. That’s exactly how we feel about Hugh, our oldest. That’s exactly how we feel about Rex.

Rex was a wonderful surprise. We had Hugh when I was working at the White House, extra busy running around, and we never put pressure on ourselves about whether we’d have another. We’d seen too many people exhaust themselves on that particular hope, and we wanted to let nature work. But for a long time, it didn’t.

Then I stepped back from most of the stress in my life and began a meditation practice, 20 minutes twice a day. It changed me in ways I didn’t expect. I started noticing small things: being more present, walking through the Huntington Gardens with my parents and actually taking it in, really listening when family and friends told their stories.

Lo and behold, almost a year later, I got a positive pregnancy test. I thought I was going through perimenopause (evidently I’m not alone, statistics show women over 40 are having more surprise children). When I told my mom early on, I told her not to get her hopes up. At my age, the risks were real. I doubted this pregnancy from the start. But when a scare sent me back to the doctor, there he was on the sonogram, waving at me. Rex has been telling me not to doubt since before he was born.

He came out, and I kid you not, this baby is the meditation itself. He is so chill. One week in and he’s already showing us his yoga-baby style. I was trying to get him to burp the other day, I sat him up and he’s just naturally sitting, legs crossed, hands resting at his sides, like he’s taking it all in. He does not let things bother him. He is my teacher already.

I want to say something about motherhood more broadly, because it’s Mother’s Day and I can’t help myself. I hate the debate in this country about what kind of mother to become, trad mom versus working mom, because I don’t know a single mother who doesn’t work. Some just aren’t paid outside the home, because they’re doing the most important job there is, raising the next generation. We take that for granted. We shouldn’t.

So back to that film, and that question. What would I do differently? The honest answer is not much. I’m pretty fond of the first one. But I would treasure it more. I am trying to be more present. I am trying to open my eyes wider to the absolute gift of it, even during those night shifts that all moms know too well.

Rex is our meditation baby, our second chance. Not to do it right, but to do it awake. And on this Mother’s Day, one week into his life and 14 years into Hugh’s, I can say with certainty: it is every bit as magical the second time. More, even, because now I know enough to know it.

As the ruling landed, though, I found myself with a lot of thoughts. Some about my days with Nexstar’s NewsNation, which I spoke with Slate’s Nitish Pahwa who covered the story today here, some as far back as the activism of my youth.

I’ll start with the activism of my youth: Galesburg, Illinois wasn’t the only town where this happened, but in the 90s, MTV was relatively controversial, and a few people in charge decided to listen to the voices that didn’t want to hear it. They pulled MTV off air locally. Too provocative. Too loud. Too much. I remember starting a petition, getting signatures, and in one rare moment of family political unity, even my brothers signed on.

I faxed in the petition (yes, I’m aging myself). I’m sure it wasn’t a result of my petition, but they did eventually bring it back. I just remember how much it angered me that a few voices could control what we all watched. Gatekeepers deciding what we needed to know.

That instinct has never left me.

And it’s exactly what’s at stake now, except the gatekeepers aren’t local officials responding to a handful of complaints. They’re billion-dollar media companies with political relationships to protect.

A Free Press Is the Thing That Holds Everyone Accountable

I launched a journalism partnership with the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom last Thursday alongside longtime conservative columnist Jay Nordlinger. In our first conversation, we kept coming back to the state of the press. A lived crisis we’ve both seen from different angles.

Eight years in the Obama campaign and White House taught me that a free and fair press is the one thing that holds everyone accountable. Politicians don’t like hard questions. But a good reporter doesn’t accept no comment, and neither should a functioning democracy.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, he promised no interference. We’ve watched that promise erode. An editorial page increasingly friendly to the current administration, layoffs gutting international desks at a moment when disinformation in conflict zones is more dangerous than ever. They’ve framed these decisions as business decisions. What they’ve actually made is a values decisions.

That’s the lens I bring to the Nexstar debate. And that’s also why media consolidation, such as it is, matters so much to our ideas of freedom.

I Used to Be One of Their Loudest Cheerleaders

Nexstar owns NewsNation, its national cable news network.

My first real experience with them was election night 2022, when a network executive asked me to join their coverage for nine hours. We called it straight on candidates from both parties. I was honest in ways I hadn’t always been able to be on television, and they didn’t stop me. Network executives were thrilled. They said they wanted me as a contributor. I believed I had found a place where I could tell the truth without retribution.

It didn’t last.

As we approached 2024, I felt the pressure shifting. The network seemed increasingly interested in positioning itself favorably with a potential Trump administration.

I lost my love for the network the night they hosted the last Republican debate without Trump. Chris Cuomo ran the pre and post show. The “Democrat” for the night was Geraldo Rivera. The only thing liberal I knew about Geraldo was the number of wives he had.

I found myself in a trailer with Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s former acting chief of staff, and Larry Hogan, a popular Republican Governor of a Democratic state, all of us off air at the time, three people with real political experience who truly cared, watching peacocks fluff their feathers for the camera, performing without substance.

I grew angry thinking about how hard I’d cheer-led for something becoming exactly what I hated. I wanted the real conversations with people who could call out all sides, from all sides, especially at critical moments. I was all too honest with network executives who knew I was angry. I made no attempts to conceal it.

It wasn’t long before I was on a panel where Jason Miller, a Trump aide, appeared. He has been forced to admit to hiring women for sex and lying to his wife. He impregnated a rising Latino Republican and somehow she lost her role in the Trump orbit, but he didn’t. He had proven, over and over, that he would lie. I had no reason to trust anything he said, and I said so, on air.

Network leadership was ticked. I got lit into in the hallway by the producer. I wasn’t allowed to criticize a guest, I was told. I’m quite sure that rule would not have applied if the guest had been Hunter Biden.

I was on less after that. When my agent called to say they’d opted to end my contract, I was fine. They had told me who they were. I hadn’t changed. But my trust in their marketing was rocked, this wasn’t news for all Americans, especially if we were expected to conceal the truth about a guest who had a documented history of lies.

What the Ruling Means, and What It Doesn’t

On Friday U.S. District Court Chief Judge Troy Nunley found that eight Democratic state attorneys general and DirecTV are likely to prevail on antitrust claims. That the merger would reduce competition, raise consumer costs, and weaken local journalism. Blocking it, he wrote, is in the public interest.

Nexstar will appeal. Trump publicly endorsed the deal, and his FCC chairman greenlit it weeks later. The administration’s fingerprints are all over this. But the ruling matters because the judge named what critics have been saying for months. Unchecked consolidation reduces competition, weakens local news, and costs communities something that can’t be easily replaced.

What we’ll be left with, if this continues, is a more ideologically managed version of local news, calibrated for access and political relationship, not public service. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s what I watched happen in real time at a network I once believed in.

Trust in institutions is at a historic low. The business model for reliable journalism is broken. Those two facts together are my biggest fear for this country.

While independent voices are finding audiences, and honest brokers are building new platforms, I still fear that what’s disappearing is real investigative journalism. The kind of journalism I know we need requires resources, time, and the courage to make powerful people (all powerful people regardless of party) uncomfortable. We cannot afford to lose it, and with these mergers that’s exactly what’s under threat.

***

One note: I’m expecting a baby boy any day now. I’ll send an update through the column when he arrives, and I’ll be stepping back briefly to be present with my family.

The last time my husband and I welcomed a child, I was immediately back at work. So much so I was in Afghanistan 7 weeks after I delivered my son in 2012. Looking back, I missed some of the earliest days of my son’s life and I don’t want to miss them this time. I so appreciate the community we’ve built and I am so grateful for your understanding. Please feel free to write and stay in touch. I will certainly write back as time allows.

Turns out, the FBI didn’t have to release a thing.

After a series of stories detailing unwanted sexual advances on staffers and young women, and an allegation of rape, Swalwell is out of the race. I’m frankly happy he’s out. I hope he takes the issues raised seriously. This weekend he filmed a video where he denied allegations.

The Swalwell story had me thinking deeply again about the kinds of people who run for office. And about the people in political circles, in both parties, who know things and just don’t say them.

One of the biggest issues we have in American politics right now is candidates themselves. The best among us don’t seem to be those running for office or driving changes we need or solutions. Time and again we are seeing flawed and troubling candidates seeking office. It’s corrosive.

There are longstanding rumors all over Washington. Blackmailable offenses. Open secrets. The rumors about the way Katie Porter, another California gubernatorial candidate, treats her staff are well-documented in those circles.

One of Swalwell’s earliest and most prominent endorsers was Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, one of Swalwell’s closest friends in Congress. Gallego publicly defended Swalwell on social media even after initial misconduct rumors emerged, writing “when you are in first place, is when they target you.” He ultimately retracted his endorsement when the reporting became impossible to ignore.

Gallego is himself being floated as a 2028 presidential contender, a man who walked out on his pregnant wife. Worth keeping in mind.

We don’t even need to wait a day between these types of scandals. Moments after Swalwell made his resignation announcement, Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales announced he was resigning, after previously admitting an affair with a staffer who died by suicide. He bailed with a House Ethics investigation pending.

All of it raises the same question. Why do we keep ending up here?

The Politics of the Jaded

I remember when politics felt like the most important thing in the world. I was in college during the 2000 Presidential contest, a student at the University of Kansas and I drove to Kansas City to see Al Gore on the trail, just to shake his hand. Still a student in 2004, I watched closely as John Kerry took the nomination, and as a loyal Democrat I rooted for him.

John Edwards was Kerry’s running mate. The man everyone said had the brightest future in Democratic politics. Edwards later proved them right about his ambition and wrong about everything else, conducting an affair with a campaign videographer while his wife battled terminal cancer, fathering a child he denied for years.

I dodged a bullet, never working for him. I threw myself into a gubernatorial office in Kansas, a gubernatorial campaign in Iowa, and then into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

I’ll be honest: President Obama never let me down. Whether I agreed with every decision the administration made, he was a good leader. He asked hard questions. He openly admitted he wasn’t perfect, neither were any of us, but challenged us to do better. Working directly with him, I came away proud.

Despite my enthusiasm for the President, I got jaded in Washington, maybe even before I even arrived in Washington, because so many people in politics are not there for the greater good. They’re there for themselves. The profession attracts the power-hungry and the petty in alarming numbers.

I still remember overhearing a conversation between a bag man and an advance staffer—the people whose job is literally to carry things for the candidate—talking about how they were going to “rule the world.” I thought, thank God neither of you will be ruling anything.

These days I watch a President who compares himself to Christ and picks fights with the Pope. A man whose history with Jeffrey Epstein, multiple accusers, and credibly documented misconduct requires its own archive.

President Trump is not an anomaly. He is the logical endpoint or the avatar of a culture that has decided winning is the only thing that matters.

A Revival Still Needed

This past Sunday, a friend hosted a small gathering to celebrate the coming of my second son. We’re in the final weeks now. Over the course of the afternoon, as these things go, the conversation turned to politics.

There was real frustration in the room about the candidates for Mayor of Los Angeles, the candidates for Governor of California, the options ahead.

And I’ll be honest. For those races, it’s too late. The slate is set. I hope whoever wins surprises us with their competence (I try to keep an open mind). I hope they deal seriously with California’s budget crisis, maintain the quality of public services people depend on, and haven’t been credibly accused of assaulting their staff. Somehow that last part still feels like a high bar.

We can do better. The question is whether we’re willing to.

When I left the White House I was exhausted and more cynical, ready to step back from a world increasingly dominated by people who wanted power for its own sake (a lot of them men, though not all). What I eventually realized is if everyone who finds that exhausting backs down, we’re left with only the power-hungry. The field doesn’t empty. It just fills with worse and worse people.

I know the network exists. People who want to do this right, who volunteer on their PTAs, who show up for their communities, who aren’t in it for themselves. I know money in politics creates structural barriers that are real and need changing. But the recruiting can start now. The connecting of dots can start now. In some places, I know it already has.

It is so frustrating to see yet more stories of candidate transgressions. One thing I will say, though, is that it does seem reassuring that we’re in a moment where it seems we’re very ready to throw out the bums.

The next step in solving this problem is making sure there are non-bums ready to take their place.

Quick announcement: This Thursday April 16, 3 PM Pacific / 5 PM Central, I’ll be joining fellow Substacker and , the new Substack by the Freedom Center at the University of Arizona, to kick off a series of conversations on freedom. Please join us if you can, right here on Substack.

At a press conference on Monday, President Trump declared an operation to save a servicemember who ejected from his aircraft and hid in the Iranian mountains as “straight out of central casting.” High stakes, impossible odds, a happy ending. The kind of scene that makes one tear up.

He wasn’t wrong. It was a harrowing mission. I felt it—I was raised to—and I’m sure a lot of Americans of both parties did, too.

My grandfather was a Colonel in the Air Force. When we visited him in Wichita, he took us on base. He tried to instill what excellence looks like, what service costs, and why it matters. I was routinely impressed by the bravery of our servicemen and women in missions near and far when I had the privilege of working in the White House.

The US military is extraordinary. This weekend proved it again. They executed their mission. The question isn’t military might; it’s leadership. I couldn’t get through that press conference without thinking: if we’re doing central casting, I want a different script.

Nobody Knows How This Ends

Anyone who tells you they know how this will end is bluffing. And each onramp toward the end of the conflict seems to end with President Trump upping the rhetoric.

The President says he isn’t sharing all the details. Maybe there’s a play here he’s planning that’s hard to see. Maybe, against serious odds, this ends with Iranian leadership that doesn’t chant “Death To America,” or hang its own people in the street.

I wish for that fairy tale. Across two presidential terms, though, I’m well past the point of believing that President Trump has mystical powers for subterfuge. More often than not, what you see is what you get. I don’t know how the current script gets us to that fairy tale ending of new and positive leadership in Iran (as it would seem a frustration with the US bombs will only grow discontent).

What I do know is that the President is threatening to bomb Iran back to the stone age.

Just this morning, he suggested that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” I know we’ve become inured to this rhetoric by this point, but no President in US history would speak or communicate this way, even if it is a bluff.

I listened to one Iranian woman say she wanted the President to know Iran is already living in the stone age. She doesn’t know how his actions right now gain women freedom. I’ve wondered about that myself, the whole of this war.

But as we all wonder what’s ahead, the costs of this war are adding up. And the destruction only asks for more patience and sacrifice on behalf of the American people, most of them tired of war long before this started.

The Tab That Keeps Running Up

Trump ran on no new foreign wars. Every tweet, bombing raid and escalation is a failed campaign promise, which is likely why his once allies are now calling to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip power from him. Who knew I would be listening to Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens, but then… Things are getting weird.

President Trump won this past election, in part, because Americans were angry with the US’s heavy involvement in Ukraine against Russia and in Israel against Hamas. Today, he’s presiding over a military campaign that makes both pale in comparison.

Americans were against wars that kept adding up while we ignored necessary investments in the US. And now we are in a war of choice with Iran, with a debt clock that has surged on this President’s watch, a proposed defense budget of $1.5 trillion, and cuts to the domestic programs that are supposed to hold communities together while the goal seems to be to project power abroad.

The Movie I Actually Want to See

In my hometown, patriotism is baked into our essence. People will root for the US military, because many are military families. They know the sacrifice in a way many on TV only pretend to. And they have been asked, again and again, to bear the costs of these entanglements, in a way those writing the script rarely do.

So when President Trump started talking about central casting I started thinking about the script I would want for them.

One where the core of this country isn’t rotting beneath a beautiful facade, distracted by a foreign war. Where we don’t turn against one another. Where we’re manufacturing our necessities here. Where good jobs and good wages keep families feeling full. Where our healthcare and retirement benefits are secure. Where we’re making structural investments in the next generation: education, opportunity, the conditions that produce brilliant Americans who solve hard problems and expand our reach around the world.

But instead our toll and our debts are piling up for bombs. This script leaves massive debt that our children will inherit, for bombs that we don’t quite know yet how they’ll explode.

The state is choosing the leader of the world’s fourth largest economy, in a race that could, if Democrats don’t consolidate, end with a Republican representing a majority Democratic state in Sacramento.

It’s a crowded race to say the least. The field of candidates stretches three pages on the Secretary of State’s certified list, though few candidates are truly viable.

Because there are so many Democrats and only 2 prominent Republicans, some polls show the two finalists from the June 2 jungle primary could both be Republicans. That would leave California voters in November with no Democrat on the ballot for the top slot at all.

One would think then there would be reason for organized, robust, fair debates to help voters consolidate around choices. What we got last week was a hasty cancellation of a USC hosted debate and more questions than answers.

A Field That Won’t Consolidate

Not long after the California Democratic Party suggested lower-polling candidates drop out to consolidate the field, I attended a party with well-connected political consultants and staffers.

I spoke with various folks working for campaigns, none on the record. All were enthusiastic about their candidates. When I raised the consolidation question, every answer was essentially the same: Won’t be us dropping out.

The irony is that the most qualified candidate — one who had already earned endorsements and would have made history as California’s first female governor — was among the first to leave the race. Eleni Kounalakis served as Lt. Governor under Gavin Newsom, as President Obama’s Ambassador to Hungary, and built a business her immigrant father moved to California to grow.

I’ve met her. I like her. I still don’t know why she dropped out. Toni Atkins, another high quality female candidate, dropped out early as well.

Kamala Harris, who likely would have won had she entered, declined to run. Senator Alex Padilla bowed out as well.

California is a uniquely powerful state, which is why it’s so surprising so many bowed out to run it.

I tried to go back and forth with Congressman Ro Khanna, who I admire, on X, encouraging him to go for the job. He declined publicly (and politely), saying he was focused on making a difference at the federal level, and subsequently endorsed Tom Steyer.

What remains is a field still too crowded to be coherent.

Congressman Eric Swalwell, a former prosecutor who served on Trump’s impeachment team, leads in several recent polls and is running on a platform of resisting the Trump administration. He’s the one the Polymarket is betting on though I’m not so sure I would make that bet quite yet. Swalwell is in a legal standoff with the FBI over the potential release of decade-old files from the Christine ‘Fang Fang’ investigation, a suspected Chinese spy who reportedly honey-trapped the Congressman and other US officials.

Katie Porter, despite her dropping poll numbers, remains in the race with a very similar anti-Trump message. She famously had her white boards in Congress, and certainly has her confidence in the race.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire activist, is running on a working-class platform, promising to tax fellow billionaires, build new housing, and and takes firm positions on issues ranging from youth access to social media to supporting single-payer health care and AI regulation. He’s got momentum and endorsements.

One recent poll actually had Tom Steyer and Republican Steve Hilton as the top two finishers. Hilton, a former Fox News host, is an immigrant from Britain and former adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron. Both Steyer and Hilton are said to have the highest net worth. Steyer, highest by a long shot, grew his wealth through the management of a hedge fund while Hilton grew his wealth in political technology, business, and most notably his wife’s prominent tech career.

What would it say about California if the top two candidates happen to hold the top two incomes in the race? Maybe a lot, but probably not the message it wants to send to the world.

The Debate That Wasn’t

The USC debate cancellation was swift. The controversy: their methodology for determining who made the debate stage appeared to weigh heavily in favor of white candidates over candidates of color.

Most notably San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a recent newcomer polling in the single digits, was invited because an advantage was built in for candidates who entered the race late. Some of his advisors have longtime USC ties.

Mahan made the cut over Xavier Becerra, who served as California’s Attorney General and then as Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. He also made it over Betty Yee, the former State Controller and the only remaining woman of color, who has made fiscal accountability key to her campaign. And Tony Thurmond, the current schools superintendent. And Antonio Villaraigosa, the former LA Mayor who came in third when he ran against Newsom in 2018 and who many serious Democrats in this state still admire.

Many were saying they deserved a chance to debate, especially this early. Despite lobbying, they wouldn’t get the chance. The debate was cancelled, and there was some irony.

On Sunday, Swalwell posted on X suggesting USC allow more candidates into its debate, writing that “debates are a fundamental part of our democratic process.” That same weekend, he declined an invitation to a forum at Fresno State on April 1, hosted by the Maddy Institute and 30 agricultural organizations, citing a scheduling conflict.

Steyer also cited a scheduling conflict with the April 1 event, though he had at the last minute tried to organize a forum in LA to replace the USC debate. Unfortunately the candidates who were lobbying to join the USC debate cited scheduling conflicts in why they couldn’t join Steyer. So many scheduling conflicts.

A Nexstar-hosted televised debate is scheduled for April 22, airing statewide across six California markets — Nexstar being the company that spent months courting the Trump administration to win approval for a $6.2 billion merger, a deal California’s own attorney general is now suing to block. Four of the five invited candidates have confirmed (Steyer, Swalwell, Hilton and Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco). The exception is Katie Porter.

Who Steps Up?

What’s particularly frustrating for California voters is that we live in a low-information state when it comes to our own elections. I can talk to many otherwise well-informed people and they don’t know who is running, what they stand for and what differentiates them.

There is limited organized coverage of this many candidates and their actual policies. (And we’ve seen this before in early presidential primaries, when dozens of candidates flood the field.) On top of that, the organizations that have scheduled debates have proactively compromised at the national level with the Trump administration to win recent approvals.

One of the organizations focusing on the race most closely has been CBS News California Investigates, the reporting initiative at what is now Paramount Skydance’s owned-and-operated station in Sacramento. They also have a scheduled debate on April 28 with Pomona College in what could be the most consequential debate of the cycle, just five days before ballots go out.

While it’s CBS local, their parent company settled a Trump lawsuit for $16 million to win federal merger approval and has certainly been under scrutiny for journalistic integrity. The candidate list for that debate has not yet been finalized.

Julie Watts, a veteran CBS California journalist and CBS News California Investigates correspondent, will be involved in the debate. It was Watts who sat down with Katie Porter and asked what she’d say to the 40 percent of California voters who voted for Trump. Porter shot back, “How would I need them in order to win?”

Porter went on to say she expected to win all non-Trump voters if she faced a Republican, and that she didn’t intend to face a Democrat at all (If she got in the final two she might get her chance). When Watts pressed her, Porter said the interview was getting unnecessarily argumentative and announced she was calling it. The clip went viral, Porter’s poll numbers fell, and the race reshuffled. That is what serious journalism and organized debate can do.

Governor Newsom has not endorsed. No other major institution has stepped up to fill the debate vacuum.

National Democrats should pay heed, too. What kind of message would it send if a state so deeply associated with opposition to President Trump doesn’t have a Democrat on the November ballot?

Mail-in voting begins May 4.

That is five weeks away. The voters of this state, and the future of its governance, deserve better than what we’ve seen so far. The question is whether anyone in a position to lead is going to actually do it in the limited time we have left. One would hope in this great Golden State that some might.

In California, our kids grow up learning about Cesar Chavez, the fight for farm workers’ rights, the movement that grew from a single idea into a national symbol. I read The New York Times’ extensive investigation on Wednesday morning as soon as it was published. I couldn’t sleep after I read it.

I’ve never believed any person is perfect. I’ve spent decades in politics and seen the flaws of great leaders and weak ones alike. But this story did something different. It took something long celebrated as a triumphant movement and revealed the darker truth underneath.

It made me think about early in the first Trump administration, when I attended an event at Rob Reiner’s home, may his soul rest in peace. He joked something along the lines, “No one in your administration grabbed them by the pussy.” I was holding a wine glass. I’m still surprised it didn’t crack from the grip, tightening with frustration. That we could be so naïve, that we could believe sexism, abuse, and worse only happened on one side of the aisle.

For those decades I’ve worked in politics and I’ve learned up close that there are good and bad on both sides of the aisle. And for the powerful, regardless of party, there has always seemed to be a different set of rules.

A Movement Built on a Secret

When I woke Wednesday night, tossing and turning — now myself eight months pregnant, cycling between the stories I’d read and dreams I couldn’t shake — I kept thinking about Dolores Huerta.

Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers alongside Chavez. For sixty years, she kept a secret. She told the Times that Chavez pressured her into sex and, in a second encounter, raped her. Both encounters led to pregnancies she hid, children she arranged to be raised by other families, because she believed that exposing the truth would destroy the farmworker movement she had spent her life building.

The Times investigation also revealed that two other women said Chavez began sexually abusing them when they were 12 and 13 years old. Barely teens. Girls around my son’s age. It sickened me.

I kept thinking about a friend of mine: a strong, justice-oriented woman, the granddaughter of the famed civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, and what it must feel like to learn something this devastating about a man whose legacy she’s carried. To stand for women’s rights, equal rights, justice and then discover this, or live through it becoming public.

Huerta herself described Chavez in The Times as “It’s kind of like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation I think.” I cannot imagine she’s the only one who felt it.

I cannot fathom disguising a pregnancy, giving birth, and placing your child in the hands of others to conceal the truth for another, someone who was supposed to be your partner. But I also cannot imagine believing that the fight for so many people’s freedom is so fragile that the whole movement would fall if its leader were exposed. That your secret if told could cause so much more struggle. When the cause feels that enormous, what decision do you make?

The Lion and the Predator

When the MeToo movement erupted, I remember thinking that there’s a thin line between a dog and a predator. I heard at the time that some of the accused had taken polygraph tests on whether they had raped the women who accused them. They passed. I wasn’t surprised. I honestly don’t think they believed it was rape. They thought everyone loved them.

MeToo only started a conversation we are still having. With the Epstein files, with decades of abuse by people who were supposed to be pious, whether the Catholic Church, or Presidents, or civil rights icons, it all connects.

The thing is, we have long had an imbalance of power, and that imbalance is genderless, really it’s amorphous. Whether it’s a young boy who is powerless and abused, or a woman perceived as powerful who feels she cannot speak because she is beholden to someone else’s legacy to make progress, the people at the bottom of that imbalance are rarely entirely free to make their own choices.

That is the deeper story underneath the Chavez headlines. And it is not unique to him.

Abuse of Power Has No Party, No Race, No Religion

I remember sitting at a dinner in DC with a group of conservative women, insiders from the first Trump administration. We were talking about the imbalance of power — I said how wrong it was that abuse happened, a political scandal of a President (Clinton) bore the name of a young woman (Lewinsky), and so many were willing to look the other way. They looked at me and said: “It’s happening again.” Everyone in their world is aware of indiscretions in their own ranks, but unable or unwilling to tarnish the legacy of a leader for fear that their objectives would not be achieved.

Is that how progress gets made, by burying indiscretions in real time?

This is not a partisan problem. It is not a problem of one race, one religion, one movement, one party. We have seen it in the Catholic Church and in the labor movement. We have seen it in Hollywood and in Washington. We have seen it from the left and the right, from the pious and the secular, from the celebrated and the obscure. The Epstein files touch figures across every ideological spectrum.

There are outstanding accusations against people in this current administration: Pete Hegseth, whose own mother’s anger came to light ahead of his confirmation hearing. Donald Trump, who Elon Musk posted would be named in the sealed Epstein files — and Musk’s own name has since surfaced in those same documents.

I know there are people who could tell the truth. I know of credible accusations involving people in previous administrations too.

The Chavez story forces us to hold two things at once. First, that a movement genuinely improved the lives of farm workers, and second that a man who led that movement used his power to violate the most vulnerable around him. That reckoning is not comfortable.

We need to learn that when we lionize an individual rather than a cause, we hand that individual enormous power to abuse; and we make the people around him or her feel that their silence is the price of the movement’s survival. That power creates an unhealthy imbalance.

Sunlight Is the Only Disinfectant

I was genuinely impressed by how swiftly the United Farm Workers acted publicly, though I imagine that behind the scenes, it was not swift at all. Stories like this are a long time coming as a general rule, and The Times had been working on this story for five years which is an exceptionally long time and shows a significant amount of diligence.

When faced with the imminent publication, the UFW removed themselves from Cesar Chavez Day celebrations. Family members did not deny the accusations; they said they had trouble reconciling them. The institution moved.

So what do we think we gain by staying silent? Is a movement only as strong as its leading lion, even when the lion is also a predator?

If we truly want to reconcile the imbalance of power, we have to remove the shroud of secrecy. We have to hold people accountable, regardless of which side of the aisle they stand on, which community they come from, which cause they champion. And perhaps we should stop lionizing individuals in the first place. In my experience, we are all capable of great sins.

As much as I tossed and turned thinking about the stories of suffering I read last week, I am glad people are telling them. I only wish more would. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant. And justice — for all of us and for the next generation — can only begin with the truth.

One thing I have learned in politics is the actual story doesn’t matter as much as the one people think they know.

That’s certainly the case with the currently defunded Department of Homeland Security. The story the Trump administration keeps telling is that Democrats shut down the critical department.

That’s not, strictly speaking, true. It’s just the one people believe, and without more accurate reporting, continues to be with limited nuance. This morning the only news that emerged is the Democrats sent a counterproposal that the White House reviewed.

In reality, Democrats put forward bills to fund every part of the Department of Homeland Security except ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Senate Republicans blocked them all. Five separate times in a single day.

Democrats were ready to fund the Transportation Security Administration, which screens you at the airport. They were ready to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which responds when disaster hits. And the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which guards our digital infrastructure. And the Coast Guard.

All of it, Democrats wanted to fund individually. All of it got voted down.

The core of Democrats’ demand isn’t complicated: They want immigration agents to stop wearing masks, carry body cameras, and use warrants before entering homes. These are the same standards applied to every other federal law enforcement agency in the country.

Republicans in Congress refused to vote on individual funding bills to fund the bulk of the agency, or lead the discussion with the Democrats on compromise, deferring to the White House.

And so now, about 3 weeks into a war with Iran, we are still without a functioning Department of Homeland Security.

Many Americans would never know Democrats made funding offers at all.

Democrats Have Something Bigger Than A Messaging Problem

If you open social media any morning you’ll see Republican influencers, politicians, and commentators—from wildly different backgrounds—all amplifying the exact same story.

The message discipline is honestly impressive. By the time most Americans encounter the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, the Republican frame has already been set: Democrats shut it down.

The counter-story gets almost no oxygen. And Democrats are once again the ones gasping for air. They’re failing to tell their own story, at a moment when the story is actually on their side.

This isn’t just a messaging problem.

There are real issues with freedom of the press that deserve attention. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively gutted the Pentagon press corps last fall, requiring journalists to sign a pledge that all Defense Department information must be approved for public release before being reported, even if unclassified. Nearly every major news organization refused and surrendered their credentials. The reporters who replaced them include Laura Loomer and James O’Keefe. This is not a press corps. These are right-wing influencers with badges.

This weekend, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested he would revoke broadcasters’ licenses over Iran war coverage, warning that those running what the administration believes is fake news must “correct course before their license renewals come up.” President Trump said he was thrilled by the move.

Then there is Tucker Carlson, a previous ally of the President, who has become an outspoken critic of the administration’s Iran war. He claimed this weekend, without providing any evidence, that the CIA is preparing a criminal referral to the Justice Department, accusing him of acting as a foreign agent. The irony is thick: Attorney General Pam Bondi was previously registered as a foreign agent for the government of Qatar. In one of her first acts as AG, she issued a directive limiting criminal enforcement of the very foreign agent law under which Carlson claims he is being targeted.

Press freedom is under assault. The machinery for silencing dissent is already being built. And it is the environment in which Democrats must get their message out.

Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene declared on CNN yesterday that Trump has turned MAGA into a “perverted, deranged version” of itself by waging an unprovoked foreign war. Republican cracks are showing. But while all of that gets coverage, the Democrats’ attempt to reopen the Department of Homeland Security is getting next to none.

If any counter-narrative is going to reach the American people, Democrats are going to have to stop behaving like cats, get on the same page, and work towards a new communications strategy.

Could One Small Bill at a Time Be the Answer to a Broken Congress?

The Department of Homeland Security shutdown raises a question worth asking honestly: Does everything have to come in one massive bill?

For nearly two centuries, Congress passed the federal budget as 12 separate appropriations bills, one for each area of government spending. That practice held until 1982. Since then, bills have grown longer and longer, enacted in fewer and fewer packages. What was once careful, line-by-line accountability has become a take-it-or-leave-it exercise that almost no one fully reads.

Democrats have done it. Republicans have done it. The logic is always the same: bundle everything together and you hold your caucus in line.

Democrats jammed through enormous packages under President Biden that frustrated even their own base. The Inflation Reduction Act dropped the expanded Child Tax Credit that had been sending monthly deposits directly into families' bank accounts — which cut child poverty in half — while keeping funding for wind energy.

Republicans passed what they called the One Big Beautiful Bill last year, a sprawling piece of legislation that many members admitted they never fully read. It included provisions cutting the tax deduction for charitable and church donations, a strange choice for a party that has long argued churches and charities, not government, should solve social problems.

What if Republicans who care about child poverty could vote on just the Child Tax Credit? And what if Democrats who care about charitable giving could vote just on that? Could we break this terrible cycle?

Ironically, on the Department of Homeland Security funding, that’s exactly what Democrats are already proposing: smaller bills. Pass funding for the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency now, while continuing to negotiate on immigration enforcement.

It’s transparent, accountable and common sense.

And yet I’m not hearing much about it. I think that’s a problem.

She fell, fired by President Trump last week, the first Cabinet secretary shown the door in his second term. It’s amazing it took this long given her questionable decisions, even more so that she’s been given a soft landing as a Special Envoy to something called the “Shield of America,” a role still within government, with a salary yet to be disclosed.

The last hearing seemed to call for a reckoning. So she was fired. But I don’t think it’s time for her political obituary. We’ve seen the comings and goings of some in politics who rise questionably and fall fast to fade.

But Noem hasn’t left yet. She’s still in the building, literally, until March 31. And the department she ran — the third largest in the federal government with around 260,000 employees — is currently closed, unable to get funded, while the people actually guarding our borders, patrolling our coasts, staffing our airports aren’t getting paid.

The political obituary can wait. The accountability shouldn’t.

The Numbers We Should Be Discussing

Here is what happened to DHS’s budget under Noem’s watch, and almost none of it has been properly examined.

In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, handing DHS more than $170 billion — the largest supplemental appropriation in the department’s history — with, as the Congressional Research Service noted, “limited specificity as to how the funding was to be divided.” Republicans handed over the money and trusted leadership to sort it out.

ICE’s budget tripled, from roughly $10 billion to nearly $29 billion. Meanwhile, FEMA was cut. CISA, the agency protecting American infrastructure from cyberattack, lost a third of its workforce. Noem proposed slashing intelligence analysts from 1,000 to 275. And she reportedly required her personal sign-off on every funding obligation over $100,000, creating backlogs in disaster relief programs.

She centralized the money, hobbled oversight, and gave the border the cameras. Everything else got cut.

Well, not the ad budget. On February 13, 2025 — nineteen days after she was sworn in — DHS awarded two no-bid contracts: $143 million to Safe America Media, and $77 million to People Who Think. Safe America then subcontracted to the Strategy Group, run by Benjamin Yoho, Noem’s 2022 campaign manager, whose wife was Noem’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs — the office that issued the contracts.

When Noem said Trump approved the ad campaign, he reportedly called allies and said he hadn’t. And while she’s out, questions about that spending linger, as does the priorities set forth.

Loyalty and Its Discontents

I saw a tweet recently by Pamela Hensley — a MAGA influencer with 217,000 followers — who argued that Gavin Newsom can’t be trusted in office because he once betrayed his marriage vows. “A man who betrays his faith and his marriage lacks the character to lead.”

I’ve had some questions about that for some time, so I replied: “Agree. Now apply the same theory to the current President and his Cabinet. Who’s left?”

JD Vance, maybe. There are some strange things happening in Washington these days. The Labor Secretary is under active inspector general investigation over alleged misconduct — drinking on the job, an alleged affair with a member of her security detail, misuse of taxpayer funds for personal travel — while her husband was barred from the building after at least two female staffers accused him of sexual assault.

Clearly there were some real questions about Kristi Noem’s marriage loyalty too. Those came out in the last hearing. But it feels like the firing was intended to brush everything under the rug.

And more than loyalty to one person I often think about loyalty to the job. Are we safer with the changes Kristi Noem made? I’m not so sure. Time will test that theory.

The Premature Obituary Problem

One of the things in Washington I get most frustrated with is our short memories. When a firing happens, we’re expected to move on. Even when the individual who was under question gets a still more ridiculous title, Shield of America or whatever.

But there are still lingering questions. The ad contract is only one of them. The private prison companies — look into GEO Group, for example — that are getting the ICE contracts after political donations, seeing record profits under this administration. Money paid for by taxpayers.

I sometimes get into debates with Republicans about things like this. “Finally seeing clearly,” they’ll say, implying I let the Biden team slide. But I remember being so frustrated with Pete Buttigieg when I found out that while running the Department of Transportation he was flying on private planes. That was absurd.

I think we have to be clear-eyed on it all, especially if we want the money to go to the places intended.

That brings us back to an important department, currently unfunded, that won’t get new leadership until the end of the month, during a war that Trump changes the timeframe on every few minutes.

Markwayne Mullin will soon take over, and I don’t know what to expect. It is worth noting — as almost no one has — that he will be the first Native American to lead DHS, a genuinely historic milestone that has received approximately zero coverage. That said, more important is that he’ll inherit all of their open ledgers. I’m guessing, because I’ve seen this before, that if there are issues, he’ll try to quietly fix them and move on (if he’s capable or competent which we’ll find out). All the while Kristi Noem will be doing whatever she’s doing at Shield of America.

But I think that isn’t enough. We deserve to know what happened, and we deserve to know how we’re keeping the country safe.

Demand the audit. The obituary can wait.