Matt Flegenheimer

He sleeps soundly — nine hours a night, he ballparks — and organizes the self-described “unemployed celebrity” chapter of his life around a series of workaday goals. “One of my goals has been to get to 10 consecutive pullups,” Comey said in an interview, legs crossed on the back porch of his stately Virginia home. “I’m at nine now. So, I’ve been doing a lot of pullups.”

He writes and thinks and reads and worries from a tidy downstairs office surrounded by the trinkets of his past: the White House place card from the night President Donald Trump asked for his “loyalty” as FBI director; a book by Nate Silver, the political data whiz who believes Comey’s explosively ambiguous letter in October 2016 about the Hillary Clinton email investigation probably handed Trump the election; a page from a quote-of-the-day calendar, saved for its resonance: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

“It reminds me so much of the FBI,” Comey said.

But then, a lot of things have lately. Another Trump-branded election interference scandal is upon us. Institutions are wobbling. And Comey, as ever, cannot fight a nagging conviction about it all: James Comey can help. He must help.

“I feel stuck,” he said. “Like I can’t do something else. And I couldn’t look myself in the mirror if I went and did something easy.”

What he is doing, exactly, is not entirely clear even to him. Rather than proceed with the standard arc of an erstwhile intelligence leader — think tanks, corporate boards, studied political silence — Comey has pledged to spend the next 13 months working to drive Trump from power.

The former FBI director, a lover of order, sees little of it in a norm-smashing president spiraling toward impeachment, riffing on “sick and deranged” Democrats at a recent rally and playacting the dialogue of FBI officials like an insult comic. In this concern, Comey has ample company. In this company, he carries a kind of customized psychic baggage.

Who can know how it feels to wonder, to have everyone you meet wonder, if the president is standing behind that seal because of you?

“Thanks for giving us Donald Trump,” an older woman heckled recently, adding an expletive as Comey strolled through a Yale Law School building, where he had come for a talk that focused largely on his fateful 2016 decisions and attendant personal anguish.

“Thank you for the feedback,” he told her.

Divorced from its singular context, Comey’s condition is somewhat typical of the wandering urgency with which many presidential critics are approaching the 2020 election. Last year’s season of midterm activism has given way to a long electoral winter of Democratic primary skirmishes and an emphasis on just a few early-voting states, leaving Trump opponents to wrestle with how to contribute amid a gush of executive outrages they feel powerless to counteract.

Lawmakers can impeach. Whistleblowers whistle-blow. What of the private citizen, determined to live publicly?

“It’s hard for people who’ve had a lot of power to come to terms with the fact that there’s actually very little you can do when you’re not a candidate,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a former top aide to Clinton. “Or the FBI director.”

While short on formal authority, Comey has suffered no deficiency of platforms. He says he has signed a contract to write opinion pieces for The Washington Post. He is the subject of an upcoming miniseries, starring Jeff Daniels as Comey, based on his best-selling memoir. He travels the country giving speeches on ethical leadership, mixing pro bono appearances on college campuses with paid bookings that command a six-figure fee. (“It’s a lot!” Comey enthused, while declining to name his precise rate. “Seriously, it’s crazy.”)

Over nearly two hours last month at his Northern Virginia home, whose coordinates he prefers not to publicize given the president’s affection for lathering up supporters with tales of “Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey,” the former FBI director could register as a spindly contradiction. He is at once a just-the-facts lawman and a prodigious feeler of feelings, introspective about the size of his ego and incapable of suppressing it entirely.

He says he is “not that important in the great sweep of American history” but believes his firsthand view into the president’s psyche can offer uncommon value to the anti-Trump movement. He can hold forth in one breath on the humbling task of bird-feeder maintenance and in another invoke the teachings of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He says “dude” a lot.

At times, Comey can sound as if he is suggesting that the Twitter account from which he slings grave warnings and measured hope (“This country is so much better than this president”) is yoked to the health of the nation.

“I have a fantasy about on January 21, 2021, deleting my Twitter and moving on to something else,” he said. “But until then, I can’t.”

Closure has eluded some of his audiences, too. They lard Comey’s public events with skeptical questions about his choices in 2016. The Justice Department’s inspector general has lashed Comey for “insubordinate” conduct during that period, accusing him of breaking with longstanding policy by publicly discussing an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, including in a letter to Congress less than two weeks before the election.

Comey has conceded that he may have allowed himself to be influenced subconsciously by the political consensus that Clinton would win. But he has betrayed no major regrets, defending his chosen course as the best among bad options. “I wish like hell we hadn’t been involved,” he said. He predicted that history would judge him kindly for prizing disclosure over concealment (not, as some Clinton allies see it, opting for spectacle over discretion).

Asked if he cared about how he would be remembered for the ages, Comey, 58, said, “I was going to say I don’t care. I’m sure I care a little,” adding, “It frustrates me in general that millions of people have a false impression of me. I wish they knew I was funnier.”

Asked if helping to defeat Trump would provide a measure of catharsis given his role in 2016, Comey paused. “Hmm,” he said. “I don’t think so. At least in my own conscious mind, I don’t connect those things.”

There is little template for a modern FBI chief pursuing a prominent perch in political advocacy. Comey has performatively bristled at the observation that he is the bureau’s most consequential leader since its first, affecting a grimace recently when a forum moderator introduced him as “the first FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover to be a household name.”

“There’s no precedent,” Tim Weiner, author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” said of Comey’s present ambitions. “But then, there’s never been a president who’s been perceived as a threat to American national security.”

A former registered Republican who planned to complete his 10-year FBI term in 2023, Comey has urged Democrats against charging to “the socialist left.” He is open to appearing with presidential candidates at campaign functions or even at a nominating convention, if they will have him, though he vowed never to seek office himself.

Comey donated money earlier this year to Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a former law school classmate, but in the interview volunteered few opinions on the rest of the 2020 Democratic field, save for a compliment about the thoughtfulness of the South Bend, Indiana, mayor whose name he seemed unsure of (“Is it Pete Boot-ed-edge?”).

Some veterans of law enforcement have questioned the value, and the propriety, of Comey’s new phase, mocking the emotive turn that has found him posting images of nature and open road on social media.

Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general whose 2017 memo about Comey was cited to rationalize the firing of the FBI director that May, has been particularly cutting. At a speech last spring, Rosenstein taunted the former director for “selling books and earning speaking fees while speculating about the strength of my character and the fate of my immortal soul.”

“I kid you not,” Rosenstein said. “And that is disappointing. Speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors.”

Those who know Comey concede that he is often the hero of his own anecdotes, and it is in these moments that he can most resemble a politician.

“I’ve probably now had dozens — and maybe dozens isn’t enough — of encounters with uniformed military, intelligence community people and FBI people in grocery stores, in airports, in hardware stores,” Comey said. “They’ll just come up and touch my arm and say, ‘Please keep speaking. Please keep speaking.’”

While his crowds are self-selecting, Comey has plainly retained a constituency, dispensing hugs and autographs and frozen selfie smiles wherever he goes.

Charles Grady, a community outreach specialist at the FBI’s New Haven office who came to see Comey speak at Yale, wrapped him in a bearhug afterward, saying Comey was the man who first recruited him. “I joined the FBI because of him,” Grady said. “And I stay because of the work he started.”

The next evening, hours after encountering the heckler at the law school, Comey was briefly exultant when a young woman on the street praised his subsequent conversation with student Democrats.

“At least three of those for every ‘douchebag,’” he estimated as he walked away.

In the interview at his home, Comey imagined it was “darkly funny” to Clinton that he had been recast as “the leader of a cabal” to destroy the president after testifying in Congress against Trump’s conduct and character — and less funny to Comey’s wife, Patrice, who had been a devoted Clinton supporter herself.

“We’re very protective of him,” Patrice Comey said. “It’s not OK the way the Republicans and the president and politicians in Congress — I mean, it’s just not OK.”

James Comey has found comfort in a longer view. In speeches and writings, he can appear almost preternaturally convinced of his capacity to sort right from wrong, and to be recognized for having done so eventually.

His public career — in self-idealization and, often enough, in reality — has been an exercise in telling powerful people what they did not wish to hear, in accordance with Comey’s own professional compass. As deputy attorney general under George W. Bush, he famously confronted presidential aides over a surveillance program he found legally dubious.

On the road, Comey speaks often of being left to “take the hit” in service of the institutions he reveres, saying he knew full well that his actions in 2016 would be “disastrous for me as a human being.”

There is a story he likes to tell audiences about his grandfather, William Comey, a former leader of the Yonkers Police Department whose picture hangs in Comey’s private work space. During Prohibition, the elder Comey caught wind of a bootlegging scheme to funnel beer through fire hoses between Yonkers and the Bronx.

He loved beer. He knew that didn’t matter. His order came swiftly: Ax the hoses, and let the alcohol fill the sewers.

“It made a lot of people angry,” Comey told students recently. But did that make it wrong?

“Pop did the right thing,” Comey instructed them.

And then once more, a little firmer: “He did the right thing.”

This article originally appeared in

From Sidelines, Comey Offers Insight and Angst

James Comey slumps strategically in restaurants — all 6-foot-8 of him, drooping faux-furtively with his back to the room — and daydreams about deleting the civic-minded Twitter feed where a bipartisan coalition pronounces him a national disgrace.

SAN FRANCISCO — The rebuttal sounded something like a threat. That seemed to be Kamala Harris’ point.

It was December 2003, a final debate in the final days before the runoff election in Kamala Harris’ race for San Francisco district attorney against her onetime boss, Terence Hallinan. And Hallinan, the crusading progressive incumbent, was going low: Harris could not be trusted to prosecute city corruption, he suggested, because of her relationship with Willie Brown — the outgoing mayor, peerless local kingmaker and Harris supporter whom she had dated years earlier. “He has an interest,” Hallinan speculated, “in having a friend in the district attorney’s office.”

Harris conjured a different hypothetical. She would take on crooked actors of all kinds, she said. In fact, she already had a prospective target in mind.

“I will set up a public integrity desk,” she vowed, building to the velocity of a TV lawyer in full riff, “dedicated to dealing with investigating and prosecuting cases involving corruption by any public official — be it Terence Hallinan or anyone else.”

Hallinan seemed to wobble. “That really takes the breath away,” he said. Eight days later, Harris took his job away.

Sixteen years on, as a California senator seeking the Democratic nomination for president, Harris is not, by her own admission, the candidate of structural upheaval, like Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She is not an old-guard centrist, like former Vice President Joe Biden. But in a party weighing how best to counter President Donald Trump’s boundless capacity for brawling, Harris is the one who knows how to hit hardest, friends said, because that is how you win in San Francisco.

The 2003 race, the first of her career, is where she learned.

“San Francisco is the bluest of blue,” said Tony West, her brother-in-law and longtime informal adviser. “All political wars there are civil wars. And so it’s like a family fight. And those are often the worst.”

For Harris, who was 38 when she ran for district attorney, the campaign arrived at an inflection point — a period of restlessness, according to former colleagues, in the career of a hard-charging deputy accustomed to straddling disparate orbits. After a decade of unglamorous work for local prosecutors and a studied induction into San Francisco’s social elite, Harris was by turns a society-page veteran and a prolific loiterer at supermarket parking lots, unfurling an ironing board from her back seat as a canvas for campaign literature. She began her evenings at fundraisers in ritzy Pacific Heights and ended them at the modest apartment where she lived alone in the city’s SoMa neighborhood, stretching across her living room floor to compose longhand thank-you notes to donors.

“She was always the candidate who was like, ‘I got everything done on my list. Did you get everything done on your list?’” said Jim Stearns, a top consultant to Harris in 2003.

Often enough, those lists included the kinds of strategic choices that seemed endemic to success in San Francisco politics, particularly against someone like Hallinan, known locally as “Kayo” (as in “KO,” for knockout) since his boxing youth.

When her pledge to obey a voluntary campaign-spending cap proved nettlesome, Harris did not hesitate to reverse herself, earning a hefty ethics fine.

Eager to extract information about her opponent’s operation, a senior Harris aide once posed as a Hallinan volunteer over email under an assumed name, before being found out and told to attend a nonexistent rally at 10 p.m. on a Sunday.

And subjected to gendered insinuations that Brown, three decades her senior, had facilitated Harris’ rise by introducing her to the city’s ruling class, the candidate was quick to flag her rival’s own sensational baggage, accusing Hallinan of fostering a debauched workplace where prosecutors had sex in the office.

It is no coincidence that some of Harris’ sharpest moments as a national voice have come in political combat. As a senator, she has won viral recognition for her lacerating questioning during hearings. In June, she flattened Biden in a debate exchange over his warm remembrances of segregationist senators. After some polling stumbles since then, she turned her attention to Trump from the Houston debate stage Thursday, comparing the president to the “really small dude” behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Yet if her 2003 run proved that Harris could thrive in campaign conflict, it was also an early lesson in the challenges of negotiating the party’s base, particularly for a politician more inclined toward within-the-system reform than simmering revolution.

In many ways, no 2020 candidate has faced a hometown electorate more analogous to today’s Democratic primary conditions than Harris has. Then, as now, she was a self-described progressive, introducing herself as a potentially history-making pick in a multicultural city of vanguard liberalism, parochial neighborhood factions and often staggering income inequality.

But Harris also ran unambiguously to Hallinan’s right in a place that prided itself on showing offenders compassion. “She was the moderate,” said Nathan Ballard, a friend who worked with her as a deputy city attorney. “She was somebody who wanted to prosecute criminals.”

Getting that chance meant subjecting herself to an unpalatable fate: confronting the two men who had helped her, to a point, and were now threatening to stand in her way.

“I mean, I know how to fight,” Harris said in an interview. “But most people like to avoid a fight if you can.”

The Ex-Boss

For a short while, the office was big enough for them both.

After several years across the bay in Alameda County, Harris joined Hallinan’s team in 1998 as an assistant district attorney overseeing the career criminal unit.

Friends said Harris initially admired his instinct for empathetic prosecution, which prized diversion over jail for many nonviolent lawbreakers. She spent off-hours helping his 1999 reelection and took a particular interest the next year in trying to defeat a state ballot measure, also opposed by Hallinan, that effectively shifted many young offenders into the adult justice system.

This, it seems, is where some of the tensions began. Fred Gardner, an office spokesman at the time, said that Hallinan became concerned as Harris assumed a public-facing role in the ballot debate, growing suspicious that Harris might run against him. (Hallinan’s son, Brendan, said his father, now 82, was not able to give an interview.)

In Harris’ telling, the office, which Hallinan had steered since 1996, was tumbling into disarray — epitomized one afternoon, she said, by a mass firing of lawyers who returned from lunch to find pink slips on their chairs. “The place was falling apart,” Harris said in the interview. “People were urging me to run.”

She left in 2000 for the city attorney’s office. Hallinan did not attend the send-off. Some other lawyers stayed away, too, Gardner said, fearing that they would “get reported back to the boss as disloyal.” He estimated that half the office attended anyway.

No longer under Hallinan’s purview, Harris began considering a campaign to replace him in earnest. She produced a low-tech bio page, pressing a photograph of herself against the sheet and making multiple copies. “I think we went to, like, Kinko’s,” Harris said. “Very high-level, professional operation.”

Stearns, her consultant, cautioned that Harris was occupying a dangerous political space: the center — wedged between Hallinan and a more conservative challenger named Bill Fazio.

“He kind of scratched his head and said, ‘OK, this is going to be difficult because you’re running up the middle,’” Harris said. “I have this saying, which is: ‘No good public policy ends with an exclamation point.’”

Harris, who has strained at times as a presidential candidate to convince progressives of her convictions, was asked if this tension felt familiar lately. “There probably are some parallels,” she said. “There’s an appetite for statements that end with an exclamation point. And it’s really challenging.”

Hallinan’s supporters believe his punctuation, as it were, was commendable for a district attorney, praising his commitment to rehabilitating drug users in the throes of the tough-on-crime era. Kenneth Wine, a longtime law partner of Hallinan’s brother, said that while Harris was “a good, honest, straightforward prosecutor,” she won the job in part by questioning the kind of progressivism that Hallinan championed.

“He shocked a lot of people with his progressive ideas,” Wine said. “Kamala Harris became the DA sort of backtracking on those to some extent.”

Harris liked to say there was nothing progressive about being “soft on crime.” Volunteers furnished doorknobs with flyers stuffed with muscular adjectives (“Tough. Fair. Effective.”), trumpeting her support from law enforcement groups. Headshots of local elected endorsers specked her campaign materials.

And about five or so faces into that roster — not so prominent as to draw immediate attention, not so buried as to suggest deliberate camouflage — voters were greeted by a smiling mayor.

The Ex-Boyfriend

The thing was, it could feel as though everyone who hit it big here owed a debt to Willie Brown — the showman power broker enamored of Brioni suits, well-directed patronage and his own legend.

The current California governor, Gavin Newsom, was a young businessman when Brown elevated him to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission and, soon after, to the Board of Supervisors — placing Newsom on the fast track to succeed him at City Hall. The current mayor, London Breed, was once an intern in Brown’s administration.

Harris’ example is more complicated. She began dating Brown, now 85, around 1994, when she was working in Alameda County and he was speaker of the California Assembly. He appointed her to two well-compensated state posts. He gave her a BMW. He introduced her to people worth knowing.

“When I first met her, she was Willie’s girlfriend,” said John Burton, a former congressman and chairman of the California Democratic Party. “Everybody gets their start through somebody else. Jack Kennedy got his start through his father. Bobby got his start through Jack.”

Harris’ allies have bristled at any suggestion that Brown powered her ascent, dismissing the charge as sexist and making clear that she was plenty capable of impressing on her own. Few could argue that Harris, hovering around 5% in early polling, entered the 2003 race at much of an advantage, even as her fundraising drew on an ungainly Filofax full of high-end contacts. (Eventually, friends insisted she transfer to a Palm Pilot.)

Fair or not, Harris understood quickly that Brown would shadow the campaign. “No woman likes to be judged by who she dates,” said Rebecca Prozan, a top 2003 campaign aide. “Was it something that we wanted to address? No. Was it something we had to address? Yes.”

Harris hoped to maintain distance without alienating his supporters. An internal memo suggested hiring Stearns as a consultant in part because he was associated with “the anti-Willie Brown camp which may be helpful.” Harris told SF Weekly in 2003 that she was so independent of Brown that he “would probably right now express some fright about the fact that he cannot control me.

“His career is over,” she said, as Brown’s second mayoral term wound down. “I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years.”

But Harris also promoted Brown’s support on her flyers. And his barely hidden hand helped propel her precedent-busting fundraising. “He was instrumental behind the scenes,” said Mark Buell, a major Democratic donor who served as Harris’ finance chairman. “Willie Brown told me — and I didn’t want to believe him — you have to raise $1 million to win this race. And we did.”

Brown, who now writes political columns, cheekily declined to be interviewed, on the grounds that he could not assist a rival publication. “I write for the Chronicle,” he said, quickly ending a phone call. (In one of those columns in January, he wrote: “Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career.”)

Harris, in the interview, called her 2003 opponents’ references to Brown “frustrating” and “designed to degrade, frankly, the conversation about why we needed a new DA.”

Asked if Brown was a factor in the race — either as a boogeyman deployed by her rivals or as a sitting mayor with an interest in the outcome — Harris said: “Um, I’d — you know. You can ask the pundits. I — yeah.”

Asked if she found the attacks misogynistic, she said, “I think most people think that that’s the case.”

The Next District Attorney

Just before the election, the campaign of Hallinan’s other challenger, Fazio, circulated a mailer quoting a woman critical of Harris: “I don’t care if Willie Brown is Kamala Harris’ ex-boyfriend,” it read. “What bothers me is that Kamala accepted two appointments from Willie Brown to high-paying, part-time state boards.”

The approach backfired. Former Harris aides credit public disgust over the mailer with helping to push her into the two-person runoff at the expense of Fazio, who had been polling ahead of Harris throughout the race. (Reached by phone, Fazio said he did not remember the mailer, but suggested it sounded like “some desperation on my campaign’s part.” He said he supported Harris’ presidential run.)

Perhaps more relevant, Harris proved to be a relentless and versatile campaigner, parking herself at transit stops, gay bars and senior-center bingo sessions where she worried her hot streak one night might upset the regulars. She established her headquarters in the predominantly nonwhite Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, posing for photographs beneath an indoor graffiti mural that read “Justice” and watching her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, instruct supporters on proper envelope-stuffing form.

Harris also excelled in more exclusive company. She held events with musician Boz Scaggs and Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues.” She persuaded the party’s powerful central committee to withhold an endorsement before the first round of voting, a major setback for Hallinan.

On the night of the runoff, Harris entered her victory party to chants of “DA! DA!” as “We Are the Champions” blared, relatives gathered beside the “Justice” mural, and Brown held court with reporters.

Hallinan was terse in conceding defeat. “It’s a tough job,” he said, wishing Harris luck.

More recently, Harris has likewise found that the city’s politics can be fickle. Many of San Francisco’s progressive activists prefer Warren or Sanders. Buell, her 2003 finance chairman, remains a supporter but has also raised money for Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. “I think she’s a little miffed,” Buell said.

And in the city’s latest district attorney’s race, to be decided in November, Stearns has taken on a new client: Chesa Boudin, a public defender running on reducing mass incarceration.

“He is actively criticizing Kamala’s record,” Stearns said. “2003 has never seemed so much like yesterday.”

Kamala Harris Was Ready to Brawl From the Beginning

(The Long Run)

“I want to hear from you about what it’s like in Iowa,” Beto O’Rourke said, standing on a chair minutes into his first event as a presidential candidate, on his first-ever visit to the state. “Let me share with you what I learned in Texas.”

It was a little after 8 a.m. Thursday. By 8:30, he had removed his sweater to answer a question on federal marijuana legalization. (He’s for it.) By 8:39, he had perspired enough that his temples glowed a bit. By 8:45, he was recommending music to the locals.

“Blaze Foley!” he told one woman who approached for a photograph, name-checking the late country singer from Austin.

O’Rourke, 46, learned quite a lot from his failed-but-star-making Senate run last year: how to go viral; how to draw in a volunteer army; how to drive himself from stop to stop, well north of the speed limit, without attracting too much police attention.

And on the first day of his quest for a mega-promotion, as he ferried his team in a rented minivan with Illinois plates, O’Rourke made plain his intention to transpose his Texas blueprint onto the national stage.

He peppered his remarks with Spanish before almost exclusively Caucasian audiences — swearing sporadically in both languages. He described life in El Paso, where his wife is raising their three kids — “sometimes with my help,” O’Rourke joked. He told the tale of a West Texas pecan grower when asked about trade policy.

“Our states have something in common, Texas and Iowa,” O’Rourke concluded a few hours into his trip, comparing the two states’ progress on sustainable energy.

There is likely no better place for this approach than Iowa, whose residents prize face-to-face interaction with candidates and cheer those who visit all 99 counties. (O’Rourke touched down in all 254 of Texas’s counties during his Senate run.)

Yet Thursday’s travels also highlighted O’Rourke’s already considerable following outside his home state, with phone-waving crowds waiting to greet him even for gatherings that had not been advertised widely.

Ivy Boddicker, 18, arrived at his first event with a “Betomania” button, featuring O’Rourke with a guitar, and a “Beto 2020” shirt that had been a custom-made Christmas present.

“He seems really nice and really cool,” she said.

Boddicker hailed his support for immigrants. “And one time,” she added, “he was skateboarding across the stage.”

At Sub Arena in Fort Madison, home to well-stacked deli sandwiches and a $3 cottage cheese potato salad, several guests recalled warming to O’Rourke as they followed his Senate campaign or in his recent appearance with Oprah Winfrey.

“Have you considered being on the talk show ‘The View’?” one woman asked, suggesting another venue for exposure.

“Folks down with ‘The View’?” O’Rourke asked the room, coming around without much prodding. “I don’t know that I’m in the business of turning anyone away.”

By midday, he was sitting down with Gayle King of CBS.

In other encounters, O’Rourke, whose public remarks often lean heavily on stories from voters he meets, seemed to be prospecting for fresh anecdotes in real time.

On a tour of Fort Madison High School, he found a muse in the welding shop leader who was guiding students into durable careers.

“We need to take the lead of Mr. King, who I just met,” O’Rourke said a short while later in another classroom, where a sign near the door included simple instructions for where to migrate in an emergency: “TORNADO,” with an arrow pointing left, and “FIRE,” with an arrow pointing right.

“I’m so psyched,” Julie Yurko, a math coach for the district, said afterward, wearing a top and earrings with the pi symbol for March 14, National Pi Day. “Fan girl.”

Some students were less animated, barely looking up from their lockers as O’Rourke passed them. When O’Rourke informed a Spanish class that he was seeking the presidency, the teacher reacted (“Ay caramba”) more theatrically than his charges.

A few minutes later, O’Rourke was led into Classroom 310 to make an introduction. “We’ll be back,” he promised the students.

Exactly one of them clapped. O’Rourke smiled.

“Thanks for clapping,” he said softly.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/us/politics/beto-orourke-iowa-president.html" id="259b5d52-c9d5-3a8f-a7b4-1bf535333302">The New York Times</a>.

KEOKUK, Iowa — For a moment, he seemed almost tentative, ducking into a coffeehouse between a tattoo parlor and an American Legion hall — speaking mostly of Texas because it was not clear where else to start.

Beto O'Rourke Imports a Texas Campaign Strategy to His First Day in Iowa

“Medicare for All is comprehensive,” he insisted, swatting away concerns that his health care plan might imperil benefits for union members. “It covers all health care needs,” he said.

Older Americans, he enthused, would be covered for dental care, hearing aids, eyeglasses.

“You don’t know that,” Rep. Tim Ryan, a union-country congressman from northeast Ohio, interjected, later reasoning that Sanders “does not know all of the union contracts in the United States.” “You don’t know that, Bernie.”

Ryan turned to face him. For a moment, Sanders appeared inclined to ignore the interruption.

“Second of all, second of all,” he said, waving off Ryan.

Then the Vermont senator reconsidered.

“I do know it,” he said. “I wrote the damn bill!”

For months, Sanders, 77 and familiar by now, has often strained to stand out in an oversize field stocked with fresher faces. He has appealed to voters’ memories of his insurgent challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, barely changing his stump speech for the 2020 race. He has reminded audiences that he was at the leading edge of the Democrats’ leftward lurch: free college, Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy. And while few can summon the rumpled zeal of Sanders in full riff, some in the party have appeared to view Sanders as a less essential vessel, welcoming a new voice if it sounds enough like his.

But in his blithe dismissal of Ryan on Tuesday and other exchanges like it — with several candidates nipping at him and a team of CNN moderators goading the contenders into open conflict — Sanders made this much clear: For better or worse for the party, he can still own the Democratic debate. And, on this night, the Democratic debate stage.

The questions were about him. The answers were about him. The acoustics were about him. (“You don’t have to yell,” Ryan said at one point.) A viewer with the sound off would have had no trouble guessing which candidate many rivals were aiming at. “Do you believe Sen. Sanders is too extreme to beat President Trump?” a CNN chyron read.

Many Democrats fear not only that the answer is yes but also that merely entertaining the kinds of policies Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are pushing jeopardizes the party’s electoral fortunes. On health care in particular, moderates both inside and outside the two-dozen-strong presidential field have sounded alarms about how voters will respond to promises of dismantling private insurance.

“We can go down the road that Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected,” former Rep. John Delaney predicted Tuesday night, before ticking off the surnames of past Democratic presidential losers. “That’s what happened with (George) McGovern, that’s what happened with (Walter) Mondale, that’s what happened with (Michael) Dukakis.”

After an exchange over immigration, Ryan warned that the unyielding progressive tilt of the night’s debate was dangerous politics.

“Now, in this discussion already tonight, we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care,” he said. “I quite frankly don’t think that that is an agenda that we can move forward on and win.”

From their centrally located lecterns, Sanders and Warren, sharing the debate stage for the first time, formed a persistent tag team, quickly dispelling any notion that they might snipe at each other.

Although either’s path to the nomination probably depends on consolidating progressive support, neither has seen much upside in attacking, sustaining a peace born of broadly shared policy goals and a friendship that aides describe as genuine.

“Giant corporations and billionaires are going to pay more,” Warren said of the health care vision she shares with Sanders, in a line either could have uttered. “Middle-class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their health care.”

Their mutual nonaggression was notable, if unsurprising. Sanders’ poll numbers of late have been middling, with Warren appearing to siphon support among some of the party’s most liberal voters, even if their coalitions do not always overlap. (Warren’s base tends to be older, more female and more educated, while Sanders remains especially popular with younger voters.)

Still, the two can be contrasts in style and substance. Sanders speaks of wide-scale revolution; Warren has self-branded as the candidate with a plan for everything. Sanders’ best-known campaign medium is the megarally; Warren has often subsisted on smaller events, defined by personal voter interactions and winding lines for photographs. Sanders aligns himself with democratic socialism; Warren says she is “a capitalist to my bones.”

On Tuesday, Warren declined a moderator’s invitation to label herself “the safer choice” when asked if she was calling herself a capitalist to make a point.

“It’s my way of talking about I know how to fight, and I know how to win,” she said.

In another exchange, as Warren tried to respond to Delaney’s criticism of her trade plan, Sanders briefly jumped in, before being told to wait his turn.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, deferring to his Senate peer.

Soon after, he planted himself firmly on Warren’s side.

“Elizabeth is absolutely right,” he said.

Yet if Warren’s steady rise in recent months has threatened Sanders’ hold on the hearts and minds of some progressives, he demonstrated repeatedly Tuesday that his political brand is to be underestimated at his detractors’ peril, regularly earning ovations from the crowd in Detroit.

After another more moderate rival, former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, suggested that the Sanders agenda would effectively “FedEx the election to Donald Trump,” Sanders reminded viewers that he is polling well against the president.

“If we’re going to force Americans to make these radical changes, they’re not going to go along,” Hickenlooper said.

He spotted Sanders stewing at the implication that those radical changes were not what people wanted. The senator began to lift his arms in protest.

“Throw your hands up!” Hickenlooper said, urging on the reaction.

And Sanders did just that, and the people roared.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/politics/bernie-sanders-debate.html" id="e3505585-14dc-385f-a655-afb1d95046d8">The New York Times</a>.

Sanders 'Wrote the Damn Bill.' Everyone Else Is Just Fighting About It

Bernie Sanders was at it again — center stage, his baritone building to something — right hand raised and restless, as if he were scribbling his words on an invisible chalkboard.

“Medicare for All is comprehensive,” he insisted, swatting away concerns that his health care plan might imperil benefits for union members. “It covers all health care needs,” he said. Older Americans, he enthused, would be covered for dental care, hearing aids, eyeglasses.

Ryan turned to face him. For a moment, Sanders appeared inclined to ignore the interruption. “Second of all, second of all,” he said, waving off Ryan. Then the Vermont senator reconsidered.

After an exchange over immigration, Ryan warned that the unyielding progressive tilt of the night’s debate was dangerous politics. “Now, in this discussion already tonight, we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care,” he said. “I quite frankly don’t think that that is an agenda that we can move forward on and win.”

Though either’s path to the nomination probably depends on consolidating progressive support, neither has seen much upside in attacking, sustaining a peace born of broadly shared policy goals and a friendship that aides describe as genuine. “Giant corporations and billionaires are going to pay more,” Warren said of the health care vision she shares with Sanders, in a line either could have uttered. “Middle class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their health care.”

On Tuesday, Warren declined a moderator’s invitation to label herself “the safer choice” when asked if she was calling herself a capitalist to make a point. “It’s my way of talking about I know how to fight, and I know how to win,” she said.

In another exchange, as Warren tried to respond to Delaney’s criticism of her trade plan, Sanders briefly jumped in, before being told to wait his turn. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, deferring to his Senate peer. Soon after, he planted himself firmly on Warren’s side. “Elizabeth is absolutely right,” he said.

“If we’re going to force Americans to make these radical changes, they’re not going to go along,” Hickenlooper said. He spotted Sanders stewing a bit. The senator began to lift his arms in protest.

Bernie Sanders 'Wrote the Damn Bill.' Everyone Else Is Just Fighting About It

“What’s the opposite of woe?” Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor and still-presidential-candidate, asked inside a hotel reception room last week, testing a favorite equine comedy bit before tens of listeners. “Giddy up!” A few people giggled cooperatively.

All right, how about some biography?

“Time magazine called me one of the top-five big-city mayors in America,” he boasted, recalling his time leading Denver, as a couple of Dartmouth College students peeked at their phones.

OK, OK, why don’t we open it up for questions?

“Why not enter the 2020 Senate race?” asked Daisy Hagen, a 16-year-old visiting from Oregon for a debate camp.

“All right. Heh, heh,” Hickenlooper said, swimming a bit in a baggy blue-checkered button-down. “A fair question. You’re not the first person to ask.”

Hickenlooper, 67, will have one more — and quite possibly final — chance to break through on a national stage at the debate next week, though if his June performance is instructive, he is unlikely to see a definitive jump in fundraising or polling. By September, the Democratic National Committee will impose far stricter bench marks to qualify for the debates, and the historically large field will face a mathematically inevitable fate: Not everyone can catch fire.

The challenge Hickenlooper faces is, to some degree, the struggle of the majority of the 2020 candidates. Perhaps five out of two dozen Democrats can credibly claim to be resonating widely at this point.

President Donald Trump’s unlikely rise has only encouraged runaway ambition in elected leaders, fueling a not-unreasonable belief that the volatility of today’s politics favors the bold — or, at least, that there is often little downside to giving a national campaign a try, and hanging on as long as possible.

Yet there is also a kind of Tolstoyan principle of presidential contests: All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Trump.

Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.

“I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, New Hampshire, leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.

A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.

“No,” Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”

Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.

It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.

On the campaign trail, he has leaned on business analogies to explain himself. Asked in an interview about a recent staff exodus that saw his campaign manager, finance director and communications director leave, Hickenlooper recalled his personnel turnover once at an underperforming restaurant in Kentucky. “If you’re having trouble getting momentum,” he explained, “you have to adjust everything you can to achieve momentum.”

Asked by a voter how he might overcome the intractability of Mitch McConnell as president, Hickenlooper appeared to liken the Senate majority leader to a moody patron. “One of the basic rules in restaurants is when someone’s really angry, you repeat back to them what they said,” he said. “And in hearing their own words, they feel validated.”

“I’m not saying this will work with Mitch McConnell,” Hickenlooper added. Then again, he did not propose an alternative tack.

On policy, Hickenlooper has moved to establish himself as the sensible antidote to leftist overcorrection. In June, he earned cascading boos at the California state party convention with a speech rejecting socialism. “Did it catapult me into the lead?” Hickenlooper said in the interview. “Not yet.”

On personality, he has reached often for whimsy. He recounted during a CNN forum the time he accidentally went to an X-rated movie with his mother. (“So, I took my mother to see ‘Deep Throat.’”) He punched back playfully at a parody article from The Onion about his “ambitious $250 fundraising goal.” (“Since you published, we’ve already met our goal and we are on track to do more,” Hickenlooper tweeted. He raised $1.1 million last quarter, placing him near the back of the 2020 pack.)

He turns down no opportunity to fetch a banjo and strum.

Matt Flegenheimer

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