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I often wince at the insults traded during political debates, but Julián Castro’s intimation that Joe Biden had dementia actually made me cringe. It was a cruel and crude cut above — or, rather, below — the usual nastiness. I said so in my quickie post-debate analysis, and I feel that way still. I also feel that Castro’s attack was emblematic. We’ve entered an especially coarse chapter in American politics. We’ve also entered a spectacularly unsubtle one, in which what stands out and wins the day are big jokes, bold strokes and broad-brush moralizing. Tidy, intellectually facile dichotomies rule: good and evil; villain and victim; oppressor and oppressed. The least exalted real estate is the middle ground and, as I’ve written before, the most rapidly fading shade is gray. Over the days since the debate, as I reckoned with how unsatisfied it left me and as I thought more about why, I realized that the paucity of nuance was a big reason. Time and again, Kamala Harris swung for the emotional bleachers or lunged for a punch line. Beto O’Rourke wasn’t just fed up with legislative timidity regarding guns; he was coming for your weapons! (And he just might curse a whole bunch en route.) Andrew Yang was . . . raffling off money or something? And Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were going to wave a big, fantastically expensive federal wand and make your worries go away. Sanders and Warren also paint a world as morally stark as the one that Donald Trump does. Theirs has different antagonists and a much stronger tether to the truth, but it too relies on oversimplification and the assignment of an array of ills to just a few sources. Warren has evolved toward this emotionally satisfying take, as my colleague David Brooks noted in a recent column analyzing a 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap,” that she wrote with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. According to David, “The original book described a complex world in which people navigate trade-offs and unintended consequences often happen. The new introduction describes a comic book world, in which everything bad can be blamed on greedy bankers.” “This is the problem with politics in a dogmatic age,” David continued. “Everything conforms to rigid ideology.” Last week’s Democratic debate was the third round; the second, in late July, involved 20 candidates divided into groups of 10 on successive nights. Sanders and Warren ended up onstage together then and were deemed by many pundits to have essentially won both nights, including the one when they weren’t even around, because their arguments were so emphatic and lucid. But that had less to do with the wisdom and plausibility of what they were saying than with how much more passionately and easily it could be explained. All-or-nothing proposals have fewer wrinkles than incremental ones, Manichaean worldviews quicken the pulse faster than complicated takes and this is the age of inveighing, not equivocating. Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet are on the wrong side of the Zeitgeist. Twitter of course has a heavy hand in this. And Donald Trump has his own big fat role, having benefited from and modeled an approach to politics that’s beyond crass and painfully reductive. Almost everything he says and tweets is a cymbal crash. Almost everything is the border wall, in the sense that it’s the most cartoonish expression of, and answer to, the problem at hand. And the din of the Internet and the competition for attention have put a premium on gimmicks, overstatement and downright shock. I think of a recent monologue by Bill Maher, whose nerve I usually appreciate and admire, in which he said, of David Koch’s death from prostate cancer, “I’m going to have to re-evaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.” “I’m glad he’s dead,” Maher also said. “I hope the end was painful.” There are so many other, better ways to register disgust with Koch’s politics and rancor over his legacy, just as there are so many other, better ways than Castro’s to joust with Biden. Those ways would be subtler, though, and thus out of sync with the times. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. The Elizabeth Warren Reality Check
There’s an emerging consensus — which could well be wrong! — that if Joe Biden falters, his place at the head of the Democratic pack will likely be taken by Elizabeth Warren. In fact an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday showed that her support had risen and that 25 percent of Democratic primary voters nationally wanted her to be the Democratic presidential nominee, putting her in second place behind Biden at 31 percent. Bernie Sanders was third at 14, followed by Pete Buttigieg at 7. So this is probably the right time to examine some of the assumptions about her and question some of the impressions that people have. Many analysts interpret her rising poll numbers as indisputable proof that the Democratic electorate embraces her remarkably progressive proposals. Maybe. But her ascent could have just as much to do with what a professional, sophisticated campaign she’s running, including her decision to get into the race early. We in the media write less about such mechanics, which aren’t as sexy as supposedly huge cultural and political shifts. She was ahead of her rivals in hiring and placing staff in early-contest states. She outpaces many of them in terms of voter contact, one yardstick of which is that she’s fast approaching 50,000 campaign-trail “selfies,” or pictures taken with supporters who come to her events. She spent four hours after a speech in Manhattan on Monday night posing for such shots. Many of the candidates who did or are doing much less well than the initial expectations for them trailed their rivals in formally commencing their campaigns: John Hickenlooper, Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock. Warren announced her exploratory committee on Dec. 31, 2018, and officially kicked off her campaign less than a month and a half later. Should the prospect of her presidency worry Republicans — or, for that matter, independents — who are disgusted by Trump but almost as alarmed by the Democratic Party’s leftward drift? Should they deny someone like her their anti-Trump protest vote? I don’t think so, because what we in the media frequently fail to point out is that most of her plans have almost no chance of passing Congress as is. They’re value statements. Markers. Even if Democrats captured the Senate as well as the House, their majority in both chambers would include many moderates from purple states and districts whose voters would send them packing if they moved in too liberal a direction. And a Warren presidency — or, for that matter, any Democratic presidency — would suddenly reacquaint Republican lawmakers with the fiscal conservatism that they often trumpet but utterly jettisoned under Trump. They’d work mightily to block the Warren agenda. I say none of that as an endorsement of her; I’m just tracing the lay of the land. As I’ve written, I worry about the success of a candidate as progressive as she or Bernie Sanders in a general election. I also wonder if her descriptions of her own biography will hold up solidly. Her Democratic rivals haven’t for the most part challenged her carefully molded image; you can be sure that, in the general election, Trump would. And when I compare her autobiographical flourishes on the debate stage to some of what has been written about her, I sense that she’s telling a remarkably selective personal narrative. For example, she has said repeatedly that she was able to get a college degree only because the University of Houston was $50 a semester, which she could afford thanks to a waitressing job. She leaves out that she previously attended George Washington University on a full-ride scholarship, according to George Packer’s award-winning book “The Unwinding,” among other sources. She left G.W.U. well before graduation to marry her high school sweetheart, who was working as a NASA engineer during the University of Houston years. She doesn’t say that, either. For the Love of Sentences
I can’t thank those of you who read this newsletter enough for the delicious prose nuggets from The Times that you reliably send me. By all means, keep them coming. In order to accommodate more of them, I’m simply going to acknowledge, in space-saving parentheses, who nominated the passage in question. But when three or more of you flag something, I’ll leave out specific credit, in the interests of concision. And that’s the case with today’s first two sentences, each of which was cited by more than a half dozen of you. One appeared in David Brooks’s recent column about the differences between Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, and the president: “Trump is a man who has been progressively hollowed out by the acid of his own self-regard.” The other appeared in Maureen Dowd’s column last weekend about the way in which Trump’s overlooked fakery somehow puts a spotlight on his Democratic challengers’ less extravagant phoniness. “It’s a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron about a moron: Trump’s faux-thenticity somehow makes the Democratic candidates seem more packaged, more stuck in politician-speak,” she wrote. Another Opinion-section columnist, Roger Cohen, described the “vertigo” he feels on the anniversary of 9/11: “It stems from the enormity of what that moment wrought — America’s forever wars, the creeping encroachment of fear, the fracture between those who fought and those who shopped, the loss of life and of treasure, the disorientation of a nation no longer a sanctuary, the collapse of middle ground, the frustration and anger and dislocation that would, in time, produce a president who rages, in his evident smallness, about the restoration of American greatness.” (Robert Leaverton, Absarokee, Mont.). I’d like to single out a sentence earlier in the same column, when Roger recalled that people jumped to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center. “Think about that, the choice of people caught, on a clear New York morning, in the early promise of the 21st century, between inferno and vortex,” he wrote. There were many sentences to adore in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s recent profile of Marianne Williamson, including one about the magic of a winning self-help message, which is that it’s “a spoken thing that rings inside your blood like the truth, a thing you knew all along, like ruby slippers you were wearing the whole time.” (Chris Tillman, Wellington, New Zealand) Ditto for James Poniewozikʼs reflection on Trump as a TV character. “If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation,” he wrote, “it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want? It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.” (Alexander Henke, Madrid) Finally, A.O. Scott declared the standard dictionary inadequate for a just appraisal of Jennifer Lopez’s performance in the new movie “Hustlers.” “You need made-up adjectives to convey the fusion of craft, nerve and energy that she pulls off: She’s Denzelian, Pacinoesque, downright Anna-Magnanimous,” he wrote. (Jennifer Cegielski, Manhattan) On a Personal Note
Robin Young, a host of the NPR and WBUR (Boston) show “Here & Now,” was kind enough recently to invite me into the studio for a conversation about my imperiled and diminished vision. It aired yesterday and you can listen to it here. Part of what we talked about is the resilience and cunning of the human brain. It has an astonishing ability to adapt, to adjust, to fill in the blanks. I’ve experienced this myself to a small but fascinating degree since I lost much of the sight in my right eye nearly two years ago. I’ve also learned about it from others whom I’ve come to know in that time frame. The other day I met a young man bound for his first year at one of the country’s most revered universities. He has had night blindness, double vision and other problems with his eyes since birth. But his parents didn’t realize anything was wrong right away, because as an infant and a toddler, he did such an excellent job of compensating for these challenges that they weren’t fully reflected in his behavior. By the age of 3, for example, he had memorized the physical layout and details of his home so well that at night, without light, he could navigate it nearly as well as someone whose vision was perfect. He plays tennis well despite serious deficiencies in spatial perception by focusing on the contrast between the color of the ball and of its background and by reading his opponent’s posture and tiny body movements to anticipate what he or she will do next. His brain, in other words, maximizes the information available to it in order to lessen the impact of the information it can’t get. My right eye was my better eye, and my left now carries the load. But I realized just recently that I “see” certain things better than I used to. If someone’s coming to visit and I look out my apartment door’s peephole, I can track the progress of their ascent in the elevator by carefully studying the glowing digital display beside it. I couldn’t before. Or, rather, I could, but never pressed myself to, never realized that I didn’t need a direct, truly clear look at the numbers to glean just enough about them to guess correctly. My brain is making better, more confident use of the details in its grasp. I noticed the exact same thing when I was running with my dog, Regan, in Central Park after dark earlier this week. I had a newly acute sense of dips, rises, bumps and craters in the trail because I was paying a whole new kind of attention to them. I wish that translated to book reading and to computer work; it doesn’t. In these areas I remain diminished and still struggle through periods when the text tilts or starts to swim or I just feel fuzzy in a way I never did before. But I’ve learned that such periods pass. There’s always a far side — a less blurry and woozy one. And perhaps the brain’s greatest trick — and greatest mercy — is its steering of thoughts and emotions to that easier, happier place. I apologize for an error in last week’s newsletter. I referred to one of Renée Zellweger’s movies, “Miss Potter,” by the incorrect title of “Mrs. Potter.” To nominate favorite bits of writing from The Times to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence. Have feedback? If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at bruni-newsletter@nytimes.com. Read the full Opinion report here.
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