I’m a bit late here, but wanted to share thoughts on the best passage by far from Ezra Klein’s controversial but excellent article this week:

“Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.

But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was?”

For years I’ve thought this was a huge part of Trump’s appeal to independents and people skeptical of politicians and the mainstream media, and that the key for Democrats to win this critical mass of voters was loosening up the settings on this software. Ordinary people are not informed on the wonky details of policymaking, but they can tell who’s speaking to them through a filter - who’s putting a vague, feel good gloss on difficult subjects, hiding from actual answers behind poll-tested buzzwords and fake smiles. It sounds fake, because it is fake.

I worry that Kamala Harris gives this vibe a lot, in part because of sexist expectations in our society that pressure women to be performatively smiley all the time. I worry that this problem is especially prominent on the left, in part because leftists are naturally more empathetic (and thus inhibited), and in part because cancel culture gives extra pressure to walk on eggshells with every sentence. And I worry that instead of finding and elevating people who speak more directly and normally with less of a filter, the party has tried to win these independent voters by moving to the center on policy issues - which isn’t necessarily where these independents are, insofar as they have coherent policy views at all.

If we lose in November, I hope we put some of the blame on the authenticity gap, instead of futilely trying to drift even further to the right of our voters on policy.