Most politicians are charming and persuasive in person

Plus some Maine takes, Biden’s failure to prioritize, and speculation about Republican Spain

Hillary Clinton charms a supporter while taking a selfie. (Photo via CNN)

I’m heading to the United Kingdom next week for a family vacation (never fear, content will continue), so of course I was thinking about the British economy. Apparently in London, the starting salary for a police officer is £42,210 (or a bit less than $57,000), rising to £59,994 after five years of service. If you make sergeant, “you can earn over £63,000,” which is a bit under $85,000.

In Washington, D.C., the starting salary is $75,433, which rises to $82,529 after an 18-month probationary period. After five years of service, you’re at $95,535. You can apply for sergeant after four years, and if you make it, you get bumped up to $98,269 base pay rising to $125,420.

Now who knows, maybe no British cops would want to come police over here in the United States where the criminals are carrying guns. But I think it’s worth exploring!

Our police department keeps adding new officers, but not at a fast enough rate to compensate for the huge cohort of people hired in the 1990s who are now retiring. More broadly, it’s frustrating to me that conservatives are not more interested in exploring ways to secure some of the economic upsides of immigration in ways that are consistent with MAGA concerns.

Are there big cultural objections to British police officers? Beyond the narrow trolling of bringing white South Africans in as refugees, there’s just very little creative thinking taking place on the right.

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Esang Wu: You’ve mentioned that you’ve met James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett in person. Which other plausible 2028 contenders have you met face-to-face?

More broadly, when you meet politicians, what are you actually trying to gauge? People often say Hillary Clinton was warmer and more personable in person than she came across on TV, do you think that was true of her? Relatedly, Ezra has said he’s met Mamdani in person, have you? I was amused by John Catsimatidis saying after meeting him that what people on TV don’t see is that his “eyes shine and sparkle when he smiles.” What else do you think people are actually noticing when they come away impressed or underwhelmed by a politician in person?

I have not met Mamdani. Of the currently serving American mayors, I think the ones I have met are Muriel Bowser (my mayor in D.C.), Dan Lurie (San Francisco), Aftab Pureval (Cincinnati), Justin Bibb (Cleveland), and Andy Schor (Lansing). Matt Mahan (San Jose) and I lived in Kirkland House together for a year in college, so I probably met him back then, but unlike Jared Kushner, who was also in that dorm, I don’t really remember him. He was right about the dorm-party-hours issue, though.

Of the 2026 Senate candidates, I have met Talarico, Graham Platner, Sherrod Brown (but that was many cycles ago), and Zach Wahls (but I’m supporting Josh Turek). I’ve also met a few of my favorite 2026 House candidates, notably Rebecca Cooke, Bobby Pulido, Paige Cognetti, and Bob Brooks. I also know Colorado gubernatorial candidate Michael Bennet. In terms of 2028 contenders, I’ve known Ruben Gallego a little since college, I’ve talked to Pete Buttigieg a bunch of times over the years going back to his run for Democratic National Committee chair, and I’ve spoken to both Elissa Slotkin and Andy Beshear once.

Hillary Clinton I met all the way back in the summer of 2001, and I can confirm that she is warm and funny in person, just like people say.

In a lot of ways, though, I think this is a low bar that proves less than the “Hillary is warm and funny in person” people think that it does.

I sat next to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey at a dinner once and she was incredibly charismatic and charming. I’ve also sat next to New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and, again, very charismatic and charming. But they’re not on anybody’s 2028 shortlist. All the House and Senate candidates I named earlier are charismatic and charming in person.

Politics is a hard job. The 12th guy on an N.B.A. roster who only plays during garbage time is incredibly good at basketball compared to the guys playing at the local gym. Members of Congress and senators and governors are almost all wildly charismatic extroverts compared to the average person.

If they fall short and don’t impress, it’s usually for some reason other than that.

I talked to a politician once whose record on energy I liked but who clearly didn’t know anything about me and assumed I was a much more orthodox progressive when I asked him about it, so he gave me a total nonsense answer. I told him I think that’s probably a good line to give national donors who care a lot about climate change who you’re trying to hide the ball from, but that’s not what I’m about. He then smiled, pivoted, and gave me a great answer.

I came away impressed with his political skills, but less impressed than I would have been if he’d been better-briefed and just given me the pandering-to-Yglesias answer in the first place.

And that’s kind of the problem with talking to politicians.

I’ve spoken to Chuck Schumer many times over the past 25 years, and if my only information about him was things he’d said directly to me, I’d be telling you that he’s the greatest genius in the history of American politics. But he is clearly saying somewhat different things to other people. And what he’s actually doing is somewhat betwixt and between all the different things that he’s saying. That’s politics for you.

I think it’s always useful to hear people in leadership out, and you can glean information from these conversations. But it’s a mistake to take things politicians say too seriously — or to be unduly impressed by the ones who are just well-briefed about what things I think.

Conversely, I really enjoy chatting now and again with backbench House members. They all have their districts and their issues and their committee assignments and the stuff that they’re working on. But part of the magic and mystery of the House is that the members are also spending a lot of time trying to figure out what’s actually going on, because the machinations of party leadership are no more transparent to them than they are to me or to anyone else. They share gossip and theories and ask questions and are generally trying to figure out what the hell is happening.

At this point, there are a disturbing number of members who are younger than I am. But even beyond age, there are only 44 House members whose service dates back to before I moved to D.C. A majority of House members were inaugurated in 2019 or more recently. Hakeem Jeffries was first elected to Congress in 2012. I sound like Grampa Simpson talking to these people about Six for ’06 or priority-setting in advance of the 2009 health-care push! But it’s interesting to get the perspective of people who came up in the here and now and hear what they see as the challenges to doing things that worked in the past.

George: I’d appreciate Matt’s thoughts on what is going on in the Maine Senate election now. As an outside observer without any ties to Maine, I’m surprised that polls are showing Platner not only trouncing Mills (who I understand is an old, but popular, moderate governor) in the Dem primary but also clearly ahead of Collins in the general while Mills is roughly tied with Collins. Is this an accurate read of how things are going or is Collins being underestimated as she was in 2020 polls?

Bottom line, I will believe Susan Collins has lost the election when I see the votes. After the polling error from 2020 and her surviving the genuine Democratic landslide of 2008, I simply refuse to count her out, whatever the polling says.

In terms of Graham Platner vs. Janet Mills, a few points people may miss:

• Mills is not Roy Cooper; her approval rating is relatively weak for an incumbent governor.

• In an era of “affordability”-mania, Maine has some of the highest and fastest-rising electricity prices in the country. This is not Mills’s fault, but it’s not helping her case.

• I think it speaks well of Mills that Maine under her watch has attracted a lot of net domestic migration — it’s a rare blue state that Americans are moving to rather than away from. But it’s not clear to me that this is perceived by longtime Mainers as a good thing.

• One consequence of the big inflow of people is that Maine has become a lot more liberal. In 2016, Maine leaned one point more to the Democrats than the national average. In 2024, it was seven points bluer.

• Rank-and-file Maine Democrats who I have spoken to are really spooked about the age thing after what they saw happen with Biden.

The irony here is that Maine has a very crowded gubernatorial primary full of age-appropriate mainstream Democrats, of which only one can win. But everyone was scared off of the Senate race by Collins’s historic strength.

Mills, too, initially didn’t want to run for Senate and got talked into it late as a kind of “stop Platner” gambit that doesn’t seem to be working. Mostly, though, despite the working-class atmospherics around Platner’s campaign, I think you have to see it as fundamentally boosted by the large influx of new educated liberals into the state — people like Platner’s dad, a lawyer who moved to Maine because he liked the lifestyle.

Jeff: On a recent Politix episode, you and Beutler seemed to agree that the Biden administration didn’t accomplish much to advance progressive goals. But my recollection is that Biden passed roughly $3 trillion in new spending via the Americam Recovery Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS, and the IRA. How can it be that so much spending produced so little value? (It’s a genuine question, I was surprised that you and Beutler seemed to agree on that point. Your podcast is terrific, btw.)

The podcast is terrific, thank you.

But, yes, this is the incredibly sour legacy of the Biden administration. They spent a very large sum of money and ended up with very little of note to show for it.

Some of that is because a lot of their spending was temporary stimulus in the American Rescue Plan. Of course, stimulating the economy enough to avoid a steep depression is an achievement in its own right, even if it doesn’t create lasting new programs.

But while people continue to disagree as to how much A.R.P. spending contributed to inflation, I think you can’t really doubt that we didn’t need quite so much money to avert depression. The overall macroeconomic situation turned out to be totally different from the one of the Obama years — rather than below-target inflation and interest rates stuck at the zero bound, we had above-target inflation and the Fed raising interest rates.

Compounding the problem with the A.R.P. strategy is that a hefty chunk of the money wasn’t really even intended as an emergency relief measure.

Instead, the expansion of the Child Tax Credit was intended to be so popular that Congress would make it permanent later or at least repeatedly extend it. I think that this was a serious misread of the relevant literature.

Because it is generally hard in America to pass bills, there’s a tendency for a new program that is enacted to be difficult to repeal once it has an established set of beneficiaries. But by the same token, it’s hard to pass bills! So while extending an existing temporary program is easier than creating a brand new one out of whole cloth, it’s not exactly easy. And while the Biden Child Tax Credit polled fine, it wasn’t overwhelmingly popular.

This then took us into the Inflation Reduction Act, where again a bunch of money was spent on temporary programs. This time it was the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were the subject of so much wrangling last year. We saw that Republicans faced a lot of pressure to extend those, and if they’d been enacted as permanent programs, I think they would have been difficult to cut.

But Democrats chose to prioritize climate spending over health care, so, given limited fiscal space, they made green tax credits permanent and more popular health-care programs temporary. The green tax credits got mostly (though not entirely) repealed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the expiration of the health-care tax credit ended up being a helpful issue for Democrats, but the credits still went away.

So the Biden legacy ends up being mostly the big infrastructure and semiconductor investments.

I think the semiconductor stuff will end up having real legs, especially given how central A.I. and data centers and advanced chips have come to be to the whole economy in the years since it passed. But while the infrastructure bill is a solid piece of legislation, I don’t think it’s really proven to be much of a game-changer for American transportation, in part because inflation drove up project costs so much.

A big problem here is that while progressives broadly recognized that Biden-era Democrats ended up achieving less than they intended to, the strategizing around this hasn’t amounted to much beyond getting mad at Joe Manchin for not saying yes to the full Build Back Better package.

But Manchin was correct to warn that inflation was becoming a political crisis for Democrats, and he was also correct that Build Back Better as passed by the House would have added fuel to the inflationary fires. Kamala Harris lost the election, but at the end of the day it was pretty close, and you could imagine her winning based on relatively small tweaks. If Manchin had just rubber-stamped what House Democrats passed, inflation and interest rates would have been meaningfully higher and the whole political situation would have been much worse.

What Democrats desperately need next time is a clearer set of priorities.

Nobody can know in advance what the congressional math will look like, what the macroeconomic situation will be, or how much revenue will be available to spend.

What is knowable is that the amount of revenue will not be infinitely high. It would be really useful for Democrats to have some sense of what is the “absolute must-do” stuff and what is the “maybe we’ll get to it” stuff. Because trying to do everything at once induces paralysis, overreliance on temporary programs, an inability to take the macroeconomic circumstances seriously, and other major problems.

Evan: What issues would make the most sense for AOC to moderate on if she ran for president? She’s clearly become more rhetorically disciplined, but unlike Mamdani, has she actually moderated substantively on anything at all, or even backed away from “defund the police”? And what, specifically, should she learn from Mamdani’s example on how to thread the needle on reaching out to moderates while maintaining excitement among the base?

The political science says that the biggest vote-moving issues for Democrats to moderate on are things like affirmative action in college admissions and racial targeting of small business assistance.

In many ways, people with clear leftist identities are the best people to lead a charge to the center on these issues because I think a democratic socialist can credibly say that they have an ambitious vision of broad-based race-neutral uplift and that racial targeting is a kind of establishmentarian scheme to undermine working-class solidarity.

These are also great issues for politicians of color to personally lead on. A Latina member of Congress can say, credibly, that while clearly Hispanics on average have lower incomes and more social needs than white people, it does not make sense to arbitrarily say that a successful Hispanic politician is more in need of a hand up from the government than a low-income white person.

Obviously it would be extremely controversial for any Democrat to take on these sacred cows of American progressive politics, but I think A.O.C. could do it very credibly and in a way that is consistent with the things that she is known for advocating for. I think that for a white moderate, this topic might just be too hot to handle. But it’s perfect for her.

The other thing is that Bernie Sanders, who used to be a prominent critic of open borders, needs to lead his whole flock back to a politically sustainable posture on this. People are going to worry that the next Democratic administration will open up the floodgates to a chaotic flow of new asylum claims. They are going to understand that Democrats don’t like to be mean to sympathetic people, but that realistically the only way to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control is — yes — to frankly and unapologetically turn away people who are in fact not rapists or murderers or terrorists but just basically normal people who simply don’t have permission to move to the United States.

This is going to be a tough issue for any Democrat, because the credibility problem after Biden is so severe, and because Democrats (myself included!) are really quite sincere in shying away from cruelty to people who really are just seeking a better life for themselves. But we do have immigration laws and we need to enforce them, and again I think moderating here is consistent with leftists’ core message.

In my most ambitious pitch to the left, I would encourage people who do things like run a nationwide anti-oligarchy tour to really take that seriously as a lens for setting policy priorities.

Does banning plastic straws help fight oligarchy? Not really. Does banning assault weapons? Does banning liquified-natural-gas exports? No and no.

Right now, the whole oligarchy thing serves as a leftist in-group identifier. But it could be a real organizing principle for politics. Fighting oligarchy is about raising taxes and imposing a targeted set of specific economic regulations and then finding the biggest tent possible to do those things.

Wandering Llama: A couple of weeks ago Meta and Alphabet were found guilty of making their platforms addictive and forced to pay a fine. Tiktok and Snap were also sued but settled out of court. How do you think about the features that make social media addictive like infinite scroll, auto play videos, and constant notifications? Do you think they’re a problem? And if so, how do you solve it? Relatedly, how do you feel about the U16 bans on social media more and more countries are implementing?

That kind of regulation by jury trial is pretty silly in my opinion and, at the end of the day, these companies are not going to be seriously curtailed through those means.

But here’s an idea I want to toss out briefly and then explore later in a column: Maybe there should be an escalating consumption tax on bandwidth. Each person would get a certain number of gigabytes per month free, then there’s a small fee on the next several gigs. Then a higher fee on the gigs beyond that. And so forth.

If we think — as seems very plausible to me — that the typical person would benefit from being marginally less online, then a tax on heavy bandwidth consumption seems like the appropriate remedy.

DWD: Alternate history question: what if the Republicans had won the Spanish Civil War? What would the effect on WWII be? Would there still have been a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Franco defenders like to say Spain would have been a Soviet client state but that seems unlikely since the Soviet couldn’t maintain clients they did share a border they could send tank through with. Still a neutral Iberian Peninsula wasn’t a bad outcome for the Allies.

As you say, I don’t think the Soviets could have maintained a true client state in Spain in the sense of the Warsaw Pact. But you could certainly have had a leftist regime under Soviet influence, à la Castro’s Cuba or Sandinista Nicaragua.

These are actually very different cases, though.

We know from history that Eastern Bloc regimes tried to break away from Soviet influence — think Hungary in 1956 — only to be crushed by invaders. And you had the different case of Poland in 1981 where opposition activity was too strong for the regime to crush on its own so they called in Warsaw Pact assistance to impose martial law. Cuba by contrast was under Soviet influence primarily because Castro was relying on their help because he was at odds with the United States. That’s similar to how Nasser’s Egypt was aligned with the Soviet Union because they were helping him against Israel and pro-Western Arab regimes. But when Anwar Sadat decided to switch sides in the Cold War, the Soviets had no means of coercively stopping him the way they crushed the Prague Spring. If Castro had wanted to make a deal with the Yankees, nobody could have stopped him.

This is relevant to the Spanish case because I don’t see why it would have changed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Would a Republican Spain have been prepared to go along with such an agreement?

To some extent, sure. It would be a government stacked with pro-Soviet figures who’d ascended to power in the context of a civil war in which the Soviets were their main allies. There would be Soviet agents around in the country, and a strong inclination to follow the Moscow line.

But follow it how far?

For all the basic reasons that Franco didn’t want to join the war against France, it seems very unlikely that this version of Spain would have wanted to actually throw in with Hitler and join the invasion of France. So you’d have the beginnings of a split with Moscow right there. But then after Operation Barbarossa they also wouldn’t want to go to war with the Axis. That said, a leftist Spain would be a natural haven for French resistance figures and the like and maybe that would generate enough friction to draw them into military conflict with Germany.

Behind door number one, Spain is refusing to join the Soviets in the war, which would be a clear signal of a rupture in relations between the regimes.

Behind door number two, Spain is participating in the war. But given the geography and the military logistics, there would naturally be a lot more practical wartime cooperation between Spain and Britain than between Spain and the Soviet Union. Spain would either end up conquered or end up being one of the Western allies.

So however it pans out, I think Spain ends up not being durably in the Soviet sphere.

Dan: You’ve done some excellent writing on declining standards and achievement scores in the American education system. As a public high school teacher, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how you would separate the impacts of the end of Ed reform and accountability measures versus smart phones and screens. If both started around the same time, how can we separate the impact of each on teaching and learning?

I think you have to treat these not as competing explanations that we need to allocate responsibility for, but as different levels of analysis.

To just sort of pivot to a question where I rank higher as a subject matter expert, the question “Why are American mass-transit projects so expensive?” can be answered in a lot of different ways. You can look, specifically, at what it is that New York spent so much money on when digging the Second Avenue Subway. You can ask, like, are they grossly overpaying for materials? No, not really. Are they grossly overpaying for labor? Well, they are paying more for labor than the Italians are but that’s probably correct because wages are higher. Are they overstaffing? It looks like, yes, they are. Despite America’s higher pay, we are wastefully consuming more labor per unit of work.

At the end of the day, though, “prices paid” is a relatively small share of the gap. The main reason we pay so much more than the Italians or Spanish or the Nordics is the actual scope of the projects. The stations are unnecessarily large, for example.

But you might want a different sort of answer than this. Not what accounts for the high spending, but why are they doing this?

There I think the answers mostly relate to the way the federal grant-making is set up, which simply does very little to reward state governments for making tough-minded choices.

By the same token, the reason I keep trying to drag these conversations about smartphones and ed tech and phonics and even critical race theory back to the older debate about accountability is that I think the background conditions are really important.

Schools are complicated ecosystems that involve a lot of different individual human beings inside the building, as well as a broader set of stakeholders like parents. Whole school systems are even more complicated. There are dozens of decisions being made, lots of different pressures to do this or do that and tons of links in the implementation chain where things can fail. A state legislature can, with really good motives, decree that henceforth literacy instruction will follow the science of reading. But what actually happens at the level of school boards and superintendents and principals and second grade teachers?

If you have a system that is seriously trying to measure “Is our children learning?” and create an incentive structure with benefits and consequences depending on the answer, it becomes that much more likely that each decision made along the chain will point in the right direction.

When you relax accountability, the reverse happens. It’s not that suddenly great teachers become mediocre or that good curricula become bad. But you’ve taken a thumb off the scale of every single decision — from whether to close schools in the snow to what technology products to buy to how to handle parental complaints — that said “We need to care about the results here.” And as a result, bad things start happening, especially for kids whose families are themselves less educated and less focused on education.