Elect Good Politicians, Not Good People

They have the skills that democracies need.

If you like Zohran Mamdani and want to see something charming, check out his video of his Hanukah visit with Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody. They show the mayor-elect how to make latkes, and light the candles, and then they all have a fun dinner. It’s nice.

Nevertheless, it made me a bit cranky. Of course Patinkin is a well-liked actor and entertainer, and I guess they’re a famous and beloved couple now, and I don’t mean any of this as a criticism of them personally. This is about the US political culture, not individuals who absorb it.

So: They’re asked in the video what they initially liked about Mamdani, and the answers are that he’s “human” and “not just a politician, but something far more important to me, which was a human-itician.”

Which annoyed me – and again, no offense to Grody (“human”) and Patinkin (“human-itician”).

Because what I like about Mamdani is that I suspect he’s a very good politician, and what’s more I think what New York really needs – what democracies really need – are very good politicians.

Sure, Mamdani’s campaign videos were excellent. But rather than concluding from them that he’s not a regular politician, it’s probably better to think of them as demonstrations of two skills: putting together a quality campaign team, and knowing how to project himself in a way people find appealing. Seth Masket had a good riff on that the other day on the topic of Bill Clinton and the 1992 debates: As Seth says, Clinton was good at “performed empathy.” We shouldn’t (and Seth was not implying) that this is some sort of hypocrisy where slimy politicians are fooling honest citizens; instead, what we’re seeing is political know-how, which is needed for democracy to work.¹

Nor is that all. Mamdani seems to be skilled at forming coalitions – and perhaps just as important, understanding the incentives of the campaign and translating that into appropriate coalition-building. Those are skills that often transfer into skill in governing once in office, where much of the challenge is figuring out which groups need to be organized for different sets of policy-making, and then acting on those insights.²

Governing, campaigning, representing constituents: All of these require skill.

Let’s talk representation, because that’s both central to democracy and because it may be harder to see how it’s a skill set, rather than (perhaps) a question of good intentions. So think, perhaps, about some of what Richard Fenno found from observing and listening to members of Congress. He learned that they typically saw their districts as a series of concentric circles, from the smallest – those who the politician had deep personal connections to – all the way up to the entire district. Representation, for them, required knowing how to form and strengthen relationships with each of these groups. It involves making promises, governing with those promises in mind and then explaining what has happened in the context of those promises, and then going out and making a new set of promises in the next re-election campaign, all while realizing that different promises are targeted at different constituencies within the district.

While that may sound straightforward, in real life it means that building and maintaining strong representative relationships involves constant trade-offs and shifting presentation styles – the Senate who talks one way to her strongest supporters may have to put on a very different persona when she’s speaking to the entire district, while somehow also being close enough to that “strongest supporters” version of herself that she’s still recognizable to those groups.

If that sounds confusing, just think about someone terrible at it. Trump is always the same Trump, speaking to the same audience, whether he’s at a campaign rally or, well, “mourning” the murder of American heroes he doesn’t especially like (whether it’s John McCain or Dick Cheney or Rob Reiner). That’s great for those who show up for his rallies, but it strikes everyone else, including lots of people who vote for him, as anything from jarring to despicable. Yes, Trump is surely a rotten person, but he’s not the only rotten person to have held political office. The actual problem here is that he’s also absolutely awful at representation.

If we take a step back, it’s no surprise that the consensus three greatest US presidents, Washington and Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, were all master politicians. And the three recent presidents who were very bad presidents – Carter, George W. Bush, and Trump – were all terrible politicians. It’s not a perfect predictor; Richard Nixon undermined himself despite having a good set of political skills. Lyndon Johnson, too. But overall? Being a good elected official is far more about having and using the best skills than it is about being a good person.

And we shouldn’t apologize for that. Democracies that have depended on good people have invariably failed. Democracies that depend on political skills have a fighting chance. And when we see skill, we should absolutely celebrate it.

1. Indeed, while I suspect the video is unscripted, it’s at the very least carefully edited, with Mamdani’s operation presumably choosing to highlight his (celebrity-perceived) non-politician “human” qualities. So if anyone is to be blamed for embracing the political culture it’s Mamdani, not Patinkin and Grody. But that’s the double-bind; even if Mamdani himself appreciates political skills, part of being a skilled politician is knowing what plays well, and by embracing it he reinforces the idea that politics is, in effect, sub-human.

2. One of the reasons that mayor of New York City is a dead-end job is that the particular coalitions involved in city politics are just very different from those in statewide, or national, politics.