Frank Bruni

<h1>One of the funniest stories I ever heard about the college admissions madness came from an independent consultant who was paid handsomely to guide families through it and increase the odds that Harvard or Yale said yes.</h1>

He recounted the involvement of one father and mother in their son’s personal (hah!) essay, which they didn’t trust him to ace himself. They drafted it, focusing of course on the hardship that he had overcome. But when they showed it to him, he spotted a minor problem. What they’d described — his mom’s difficult pregnancy, a sequence of visits to medical specialists, so much fear, so much suspense — predated his arrival in this world. Poignant as it was, he could take zero credit for it.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the indictments of dozens of wealthy parents, including Emmy-winning actress Felicity Huffman, for employing various forms of bribery and fraud to get their kids into highly selective schools. Some allegedly paid college coaches, including at Yale and Stanford, to lie and say their children were special recruits for sports the kids didn’t even play. Others allegedly paid exam administrators to let someone smarter take tests for their children. Millions of dollars changed hands.

It’s a galling exposé of widespread cheating by families who are already well-to-do and well-connected, but it’s not really a surprising one. Anyone who knows anything about the cutthroat competition for precious spots at top-tier schools realizes how ugly and unfair it can be: how many corners are cut, how many schemes are hatched, how big a role money plays, how many advantages privilege can buy.

The wrinkle here is that the schemes were actually criminal and will apparently be prosecuted, and for once the colleges’ administrators were in the dark about them. But they’re versions of routine favor trading and favoritism that have long corrupted the admissions process, leeching merit from the equation.

It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment. Both are ways of cutting in line.

It may be legal to give $50,000 to a private consultant who massages your child’s transcript and perfumes your child’s essays, and illegal to pay someone for a patently fictive test score, but aren’t both exercises in deception reserved for those who can afford them?

And while ghostwriting, whether by consultants or parents, may not be detectable or at least provable, it happens all the time and contributes to applications as bogus as the ones that came to federal prosecutors’ attention.

What a message it sends to the children: You’re not good enough to do this on your own. You needn’t be. Your parents and your counselors know the rules, and when and how to break them. Just sit back and let entitlement run its course.

The Jared Kushner story was uncovered more than a decade ago by Daniel Golden, who showcased it in his 2006 book, “The Price of Admission,” a definitive account of the strings pulled by rich families like Kushner’s. Jared did get into Harvard, despite grades and test scores that were, according to Golden’s reporting, well below what Harvard typically wants.

I spoke with Golden just after the Justice Department detailed the bribery and fraud scam, which he characterized as “an extreme outgrowth of what I wrote about.”

“I had a chapter about how the wealthy benefit from athletic preference because there are so many white patrician sports that most kids never get a chance to play,” he said. Inner-city schools aren’t sending as many rowers or water polo players to the Ivy League as the storied boarding schools of New England.

Golden added that the affluent kids in the just-revealed scam seized an edge beyond that. “They didn’t even bother to get on the team,” he said.

They got away with it, the Justice Department charges, because coaches went along with it, accepting bribes. The people indicted by federal prosecutors or implicated in what happened worked at Wake Forest, the University of Southern California, Georgetown, UCLA and other prestigious schools. According to court documents, the former head coach of the women’s soccer team at Yale pleaded guilty almost a year ago and became a cooperating witness who helped federal prosecutors gather evidence against others.

There are many takeaways from this appalling story. One is how crassly hypocritical parents can be. I bet that more than a few of those charged are proud liberals who talked about the importance of equal opportunity and an even playing field, then went out and did whatever it took to push their kids into the winner’s circle. In this case, they doomed them, imparting garbage values and mortifying them along the way.

While colleges pledge fairer admissions and more diverse student bodies, they don’t patrol what’s going on with nearly enough earnestness and energy to honor that promise. They’re ripe to be gamed because the admissions process is a game.

The spell that some of these colleges cast over applicants and their families — and the magic attributed to them — are absurd. But they are indeed part of an infrastructure of perks and packaging that isn’t uniformly accessible.

When struggling Americans seethe at “the elite,” they mean parents who exploit their station to try to guarantee it for their kids. They mean the self-regarding colleges that allow that to happen.

When they say the system is rigged, they have this kind of wrongdoing — and the widely accepted and entirely legal shenanigans that are none too far from it — in mind. Our country’s best schools are supposed to be engines of social mobility and the gateways to dreams. Sometimes they’re just another sour deal.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7116d6cd-897f-49f7-b5ed-f9fcd65809c1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opinion/college-bribery-admissions.html">The New York Times</a>.

Bribes to get into Yale and Stanford? What else is new?

He recounted the involvement of one father and mother in their son’s personal (hah!) essay, which they didn’t trust him to ace himself. They drafted it, focusing of course on the hardship that he had overcome.

John Hickenlooper’s boots weren’t made for hiking.

Were they even boots? We couldn’t decide. They occupied some limbo between boots and shoes and were all wrong for the trek that our group of six was taking: seven hours, about 10 miles, over a 12,500-foot-high pass in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Just a few hours in, he briefly took them off. Dear God. Blisters, blood: Just looking at his feet hurt. But he waved away our concerns, did some crude bandaging, switched into a pair of ordinary sneakers that he happened to have in his backpack and insisted that we press on. He walked more slowly, sure. But he smiled to the end.

That episode, from August 2015, captured Hickenlooper at his best: upbeat, affable and allergic to drama. For November 2020, could that kind of disposition be the ticket?

So much analysis of the Democratic presidential hopefuls characterizes them in ideological terms: left versus center, idealism or pragmatism, the revolutionaries and the incrementalists. So much is about gender, race and age.

But we should also look at these candidates in terms of the fierceness of their rhetoric and the sharpness of their edges. Do we want a livid warrior or a happy one? Someone eager to name and shame enemies, the way Donald Trump does, or someone with a less Manichaean outlook? Someone poised to reciprocate Trump’s nastiness or someone incapable of it?

I’m not entirely sure which type is more likely to defeat him. But I know which gives us a better chance at healing America — if that’s even possible — and moving us past a juncture of crippling animosity. It’s the type that Hickenlooper represents and maybe even exemplifies.

He jumped into the race on Monday as a long shot with limited name recognition. But he has a biography and a résumé that warrant attention. He didn’t enter politics until his early 50s, after a hugely successful career in beer — in brew pubs, to be exact. And he talks, persuasively, about what a customer-service business like that taught him about courting people rather than confronting them, about pacifying instead of inflaming.

As the mayor of Denver from 2003 to 2011 and then the governor of Colorado from 2011 until the start of this year, when he left office because of term limits, he was known for swearing off negative political ads, for gravitating away from divisive issues and toward whatever common ground he could find, and for a style with substantial measures of goofiness and geekiness but barely a pinch of truculence. That said, he marshaled toughness and persistence — as he did on that hike — to build a light rail system in Denver, expand Medicaid in Colorado, enact gun control and tug the state from recession to boom times that were the envy of other governors.

He has detractors, who say that he can be more self-consumed and prickly in private than in public. And it’s unclear whether he can project the authority and sense of purpose on the national stage that are crucial for a successful presidential campaign and presidency. It’s unclear, too, whether a Democrat with a record as moderate as his has a chance in the party’s primaries.

I’ve known him since late 2010, when I traveled to Denver to do an in-depth profile of him for The Times Magazine. Afterward we became friendly, which isn’t surprising. In contrast to Trump’s demonization of the media as the “enemy of the people,” Hickenlooper usually takes the view that if he’s open to and trusting of journalists, he’ll be treated fairly more often than burned. There’s an endearing generosity of spirit in that.

Hickenlooper and his first wife, journalist Helen Thorpe, divorced during his first term as governor, but did so with such grace and good will that she dedicated her 2014 book, “Soldier Girls,” to him. At her big Denver reading, he sat in the front row.

And I remember a dinner years later at the Denver home belonging to him and his second wife, Robin Pringle, when he happened to spike a fever shortly before we eight guests arrived. He nonetheless hung in there, bantering with us for hours as if nothing was wrong.

Optimism, warmth and joy matter. They propelled Ronald Reagan to the presidency. I think they’re even a small part of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon — the part that leavens the stridency and purity tests. She has a wide, dazzling smile. In a video that went viral, she dances.

Some of the Democrats who are pursuing or seriously considering presidential bids are better at dancing, metaphorically speaking, than others. It doesn’t come easily to Bernie Sanders, which is why he added all that poignant family history to his big speech on Saturday, or to Elizabeth Warren, which is why she sipped a beer in an Instagram video that was part of her rollout. It’s effortless for Beto O’Rourke. It’s present in Cory Booker. It comes and goes with Kamala Harris, who’s still calibrating her temperature.

Hickenlooper sees a sunny approach — one that emphasizes aspirations over grievances — as the necessary balm for a grossly divided country and the most potent antidote to Trump. In a phone conversation on Tuesday morning, he said that when the president pursues “these relentless accusations against all manner of people, he’s not just attacking those individuals. He’s also attacking all the people who admire those individuals and feel those individuals represent them.”

“It’s early in the campaign, so it’s hard to assess whether it’s going to be something that I have to work around or something that really attracts people — the fact that I focus on trying to create a context that’s less adversarial,” he told me. “I’m not trying to prove why I’m right or the other side is wrong. I’m trying to really listen to people.”

I’ll dance to that, whether I have the right footwear or not.

This article originally appeared in <a id="17d75109-f893-48a4-b6ae-4951ebc05976" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/john-hickenlooper-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

That episode, from August 2015, captured Hickenlooper at his best: upbeat, affable and allergic to drama. For November 2020, could that kind of disposition be the ticket?

Can nice guys finish Trump?

<h1>Dianne Feinstein doesn’t get it. How could she? She’s 85. Ancient. She has had too many decades to resign herself to the status quo, and she won’t be around to watch the fires rage and the oceans boil. Step aside, Granny. Sturdier legs will lead the way.</h1>

That was the subtext — actually, that was the text — of the California senator’s clash with schoolchildren in her San Francisco office last week, as they lamented her coolness to the Green New Deal and she pushed back that she knows a thing or two. She’s right. She does. And while that’s largely a function of smarts, it’s also a function of age. The building blocks of wisdom are experiences, which come only with the passage of time.

Nancy Pelosi is 78. There was a lot of hand-wringing about that in the buildup to the midterms. I participated in it, joining many younger Democrats who questioned her determination to become House speaker. How about some fresh energy and new blood?

Thank heaven she swatted us away, because she smacks down Donald Trump more effectively than any other politician, and the reasons include her poise and steel, the kind forged by many battles over many years. They accrue as wrinkles do, with prolonged exposure to the elements.

Is the Democratic Party too long in the tooth and gray at the temples? You bet. The leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination include Bernie Sanders, 77, Elizabeth Warren, 69, and — if he runs — Joe Biden, 76. That’s worrisome. In the past century, the country has never elected a first-term Democratic president over the age of 52. Plenty of pundits have noted that.

The No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats in the House — Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn — are 79 and 78. That concentrates one generation’s sensibility and perspective at the summit, and, strategically speaking, the optics aren’t optimal.

So it’s good that the party recently seeded the stratum just below them with younger lawmakers and that many newly elected Democrats are well under 50. With age as well as gender and race, diversity matters.

But the attention to age can go too far. It degrades the virtues of oldsters. It romanticizes the dewiness of youngsters.

Sure, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s youth (she’s 29) is crucial to the passion in her voice, the ambition of her ideas and her ability to rouse a contingent of young voters who too often go missing from politics. But it probably also contributes to her heedlessness — to how cavalier she can be with facts. (Not that we don’t have a 72-year-old president who surpasses her in this regard.)

At 37, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the youngest of the candidates to jump into the 2020 presidential race, and he is trying to turn his age to his advantage, arguing that he grew up with mass shootings in schools and that his generation will inherit the full consequences of climate change.

But there was gun violence galore before Columbine, Newtown and Parkland. Feinstein can attest to that. She was at San Francisco City Hall on the November 1978 day when Mayor George Moscone and her fellow city supervisor Harvey Milk were fatally shot. She reached Milk’s body first, one of her fingers slipping into a bullet hole in his neck when she checked for a pulse. And during her quarter-century in the Senate, almost no lawmaker of any age has been a more insistent crusader for restrictions on firearms.

As for the notion that young voters and politicians care more about the future because they have more skin in the game: Show me even one decent parent who doesn’t vote with his or her kids in mind. Show me one decent grandparent. I can’t see how anyone would invest so much time, money and heart in a child’s tomorrow only to ignore that future in the political realm.

Characterizations of Congress as a gerontocracy are often accompanied by complaints about the ruinous gluttony of the baby boom generation, which encompasses people from about Donald Trump’s age down to mine, 54. We’re rightly charged with befouling the environment, running up the debt and letting the American dream slip away from the middle class.

But you know what else baby boomers did? Helped bring an end to the Vietnam War. Advanced the causes of equality for women, for black people and for LGBT Americans. Engineered the digital revolution. If we’re not the dynamos we once were, maybe it’s not because we’re sanguine or jaded. We could just be pooped.

Or we could just be seasoned, because part of what you discover on the far side of 50 is that aspirations and ardor carry you only so far. (“The Green Dream,” Pelosi dismissively called it.) Progress ultimately comes from a deep understanding of systems and a thorough familiarity with the most tedious details. That’s what Pelosi has, and it’s what she had nearly a decade ago, at 69, when she last served as House speaker and pulled Obamacare across the finish line. Could she have done that at 49?

It’s best to have plenty of younger politicians in the mix: It’s only from a multiplicity of perspectives that some problems — and some solutions — come clearly into view. And older generations need younger ones to reconnect them with their idealism.

But younger generations need older ones to turn that idealism into more than pretty words. They need the moral authority reserved for people who’ve done so much loving, so much losing and so much figuring out how to press on. They need the life lessons, which have grown from a pamphlet to an encyclopedia. What a waste not to read every last syllable of it.

This article originally appeared in <a id="bce191b6-904c-4dda-8ebb-d4d4467d5b7d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/older-politicians.html">The New York Times</a>.

That was the subtext — actually, that was the text — of the California senator’s clash with schoolchildren in her San Francisco office last week, as they lamented her coolness to the Green New Deal and she pushed back that she knows a thing or two.

In defense of the gerontocracy

<h1>Pat Fitzgerald, 67, has long loved being a Catholic, and the part he loved maybe most of all, for the past quarter-century, was his role as a spiritual mentor at retreats for students at a church-affiliated high school in Indianapolis, where he lives.</h1>

But he has been told that he’s not wanted anymore. His crime? He publicly supported his daughter, a guidance counselor at the school, after its administrators moved to get rid of her because she’s married to a woman.

The school’s treatment of Shelly Fitzgerald, 45, was a big local story last summer that went national; she ended up on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in September. It was one of many examples of Catholic institutions deciding almost whimsically to exile longtime employees — not priests or nuns but coaches, teachers, counselors — who had long been known to be gay but were suddenly regarded as liabilities.

Maybe they had quietly married their partners, formalizing those relationships and inadvertently drawing attention to themselves. Maybe some homophobic parent or congregant had belatedly learned about them and lodged a complaint. That’s what happened to Shelly Fitzgerald, and her 14 years of fine work at Roncalli High School no longer mattered. Only her 2015 marriage to her longtime partner did. She was told that she could stay on if she dissolved the union. She said no thanks and was kicked off school grounds in August.

The aftershocks still complicate the lives — and faith — of people around her: her students, their parents, her dad. On Facebook last month she posted a letter from him to the Roncalli community in which he explained that he’d just been disinvited from future retreats but thanked everyone for being such supportive friends over the years.

“Today my heart is broken,” he wrote, adding that the retreats he’d participated in — more than 40 in all — were “the most beautiful and holy settings I have ever witnessed.” He alluded only vaguely to his daughter’s case. “To people on both sides of this ongoing issue,” he wrote, “I hope you can find peace.”

But there’s no peace for the Catholic Church here. It’s too mired in its own hypocrisy. The tension between its official teaching and unofficial practice — between the ignorance of the past and the illumination of the present — grows tauter all the time.

Most Catholics support same-sex marriage, in defiance of the church’s formal position, and many parishes fully welcome LGBT people. Yet there are places, and times, when the hammer comes down.

Church leaders know full well that the priesthood would be decimated if closeted gay men were exposed and expelled. Yet the church as a matter of policy bars men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and considers gay people “objectively disordered.”

Catholics are supposed to show compassion. Yet Shelly and her dad were shown anything but.

She has been on administrative leave since August, and last month her lawyer, David Page, filed a charge of discrimination against the school and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They have up to 180 days to respond.

On Tuesday morning he showed me paperwork for a second charge of discrimination that he said he would be filing imminently; it cites what happened to her father as an unlawful act of retaliation meant to dissuade Shelly from pressing her case.

Pat Fitzgerald, uncomfortable with media attention, declined to speak with me, preferring to let his daughter do the talking. “His struggle comes from caring about Roncalli and being in conflict with what they’ve done to me,” Shelly told me, referring to Roncalli High School. In October he attended a protest against the church’s treatment of LGBT people. His sign said, “Please treat my daughter Shelly kindly.”

There is, by many accounts, profound anger and hurt at Roncalli. As it happens, Shelly was one of two directors of counseling there; the other, Lynn Starkey, 62, is in a same-sex civil union and in November filed her own charge of discrimination with the EEOC, claiming a “hostile work environment” in the aftermath of Shelly’s departure. For now she remains on the job.

Many students started an LGBT advocacy group, Shelly’s Voice, that also attracted parents and other adults in the community. A related Facebook page, Time to Be a Rebel, has more than 4,500 members.

But one parent told me that students who question Shelly’s dismissal fear repercussions. “Seniors are being told that if they speak out, they take the chance of not being able to graduate,” the parent, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, said.

According to posts on the Facebook page, a small cluster of Roncalli students were invited last month to a lunch with Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis, only to have him stress that homosexuality is a disorder and its expression sinful. One student called it an ambush.

For comment on all of this, I contacted the Roncalli principal, who referred me to a spokesman for the archdiocese. The spokesman sent me a statement that said Pat Fitzgerald’s exclusion from student retreats reflected the “continuing attention surrounding his daughter’s suspension” and “his own participation in public protests over Catholic Church teaching.” He was still welcome at Masses, the statement said.

In regard to Shelly’s suspension, a past statement from the archdiocese reiterated what the Catholic Church has said in similar cases: Employees of Catholic schools are expected to live in compliance with church teaching. But is that legally enforceable?

Shelly’s EEOC complaint tests where federal civil rights law covers sexual orientation, a matter on which courts in different areas of the country have disagreed. Also, the Catholic Church has attempted to claim a “ministerial exception” from nondiscrimination laws that conflict with religious tenets, but there’s continued dispute about whether this applies to workers, like Shelly, who aren’t in the clergy.

Shelly pointed out that the Catholic Church isn’t generally going after teachers who flout its rules by using birth control or divorcing or having sexual relations outside marriage. “They’re going after LGBT people,” she said. “They’re going to die on this hill.”

And they’re going to hurt people — like Shawn Aldrich, who attended Roncalli, just as his parents and his wife and her parents did. He has two children there now. What has happened to Shelly astounds him.

“She was phenomenal at her job,” Aldrich told me. “So why are we dismissing her?” He knows what church leaders say about homosexuality but noted, “It’s our church, too.” Besides, he said, “All of us are made in God’s image.”

He and his wife plan to end their family tradition. They won’t send their third child, now in seventh grade, to Roncalli. “And that breaks our hearts,” he said. “That absolutely breaks our hearts.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1dbdc794-cf1e-4cd0-9a59-d5ec552d549b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/catholic-church-gay-discrimination.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Catholic church is breaking people's hearts

The school’s treatment of Shelly Fitzgerald, 45, was a big local story last summer that went national; she ended up on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in September.

<h1>There’s no shame and much honor in the job of coming to judgments about news events.</h1>

But we don’t have to rush there.

That’s what too many of us pundits did upon first seeing video footage and hearing accounts of the encounter in Washington on Friday between teenagers from a Catholic boys’ high school in Kentucky and a Native American elder and veteran playing a drum. There were glimmers of something cruel and even dangerous happening to him. Glimmers were enough for us.

Now of course we’ve seen extra footage, heard additional accounts and moved to a place that should more frequently be our starting point: uncertainty. Tweets have been deleted. Outrage has been put on hold.

It won’t stay there for long. It’s too electric, too profitable, and there will be prompts and genuine cause for it. But will we pause next time to make sure that we understand what we’re reacting to and whom we’re condemning? Even if that means fewer retweets? Will we filter our responses through a mature acknowledgment of what, in real time, we can and cannot take for granted?

Only if we’re honest about what we’ve been doing and why we’ve been doing it.

With everything from Twitter followers to television bookings, we’re rewarded for fierce conviction, for utter certainty, for emphatically taking sides and staying unconditionally faithful to what we’ve pushed for and against in the past. We each have our brand, and the narrower and more unyielding it is, the more currency it has and the more loyal our consumers. Instead of bucking the political tribalism in America, we ride it.

We react to news by trying to fit it into the argument that we routinely make, the grievance that we usually raise, the fury or angst or sorrow that we typically peddle. We have our narrative, and we’re on the lookout for comments and developments that back it up. The response to the initial footage of the teenagers — and, in particular, to the one who wore a red MAGA cap as he stood before and stared at the drumming veteran — adhered to this dynamic.

Was that a smirk on the teenager’s face? A sneer? His expression was just indefinite enough to become a symbol of entitlement for the pundits who favor that locution, of the white patriarchy for another group, of the wages of Trumpism, of the fraudulence of Catholicism.

And while many pundits’ outrage was correctly calibrated to what they assumed was going on, it was built on assumption. It was hasty. A crowd was forming and the clock was ticking and nobody wanted to be late to the inquisition. A “hot take” is prized — hence the well-known phrase for this instant analysis. Nobody talks about a “cold take,” though that’s the temperature of truth.

To glance at Twitter as the video of the Covington teenagers went viral over the weekend was to see each pundit one-upping the disdain of the pundits who vented before him or her. It was also to wonder about the degree of preening and performance involved. They weren’t merely spreading the word of what had supposedly happened in Washington. They were seizing the opportunity for a fresh and full-throated reminder of their own morality and politics. They were burnishing their brands. And that self-interest was — and is — the enemy of caution.

I’m not going to single out any particular pundits and tweets, because there were many and because, under different circumstances, one of those tweets could easily have come from me. As it happens, I missed this pile-on. But I’m sure that if I scrubbed my Twitter history, I’d find that I’ve behaved in the fashion that I’m lamenting here.

My focus on pundits may seem narrow, but we’re stand-ins for a much larger group of Americans, including politicians, many of whom denounced the Covington kids as prematurely and confidently as pundits did. Also, we’re visible, and our trade is influence. We’re sometimes called “thought leaders,” for heaven’s sake. Do we mean to be leading people toward overconfidence in their ingrained perspectives and a disposition to see all of life through one narrow lens? Should we be modeling snap assessments and press-a-button derision? The teenagers have received death threats.

The rest of the media didn’t behave all that differently from how we did, and to some degree probably followed our example. Newspaper and television stories bought into preliminary versions of what happened in Washington, which encouraged readers and viewers to do the same. And we all abetted our detractors’ efforts to delegitimize us. Witness the way President Donald Trump framed the initial condemnations of the Covington kids as “fake news.” We let him keep banging his drum.

Some of the condemners counter that their essential point remains, that entitlement, cruelty and racism persist and even thrive in today’s America. That’s for sure. But when the evidence cited for that turns out to be inconclusive or wrong, their position is weakened. Their goal isn’t served.

Some conservatives are gleeful about how this went down. But isn’t their vengeful joy its own rushed celebration, its own self-serving simplification of a complex sequence of events? We’ve realized the error of the first draft, but we’ll probably never produce a final, indisputable one. I wish more of us had the humility to concede that.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2baf5eec-4654-4e67-8dae-ff56ef7fa740" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/covington-teenagers-twitter.html">The New York Times</a>.

That’s what too many of us pundits did upon first seeing video footage and hearing accounts of the encounter in Washington on Friday between teenagers from a Catholic boys’ high school in Kentucky and a Native American elder and veteran playing a drum.

The cold truth about the hot take

<h1>I remember when candidates announced their presidential bids in formal tableaux, with flags and members of their family placed just so. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., announced hers on Tuesday while sitting opposite a comedian on a late-night talk show.</h1>

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., rolled out her campaign a few weeks ago in a three-part sequence of sorts that culminated in an Instagram video of her in her kitchen. She fetches a beverage as she talks to the camera. “Hold on a second,” she says. “I’m gonna get me a beer.”

She then beckons her husband into the frame. “Thank you for being here,” she says to him. “I’m glad you’re here.” Twitter had a field day with that. Why wouldn’t he be there? It’s, um, their home.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., hasn’t made her big announcement yet, but over recent days, as she readied for it, she traced the same steps that Gillibrand subsequently would, also visiting “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” As part of that appearance, she released a “Mood Mix” video in which she ticks off favorite songs — including Beyoncé's “Lemonade,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” — and sings snippets of some of them, cracking herself up.

That was positively demure next to a video that Beto O’Rourke, another potential Democratic presidential candidate, disseminated recently. Beginning with a close-up of his open mouth, it documented a visit to the dentist — which was his prompt, to be fair, to interview the hygienist about her life near the border between Mexico and Texas.

The 2020 presidential race won’t be the first in which candidates twist themselves into questionable and sometimes mortifying knots to demonstrate how real, relatable, unpretentious or hip they can ostensibly be, but, Holy Mother of Oversharing, it promises to chart whole new frontiers in that regard.

Give partial credit (or blame) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who has developed an enormous following on social media, where she documents even such humdrum moments as the making of her mac-and-cheese supper.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. There’s definitely nothing wrong with politicians’ efforts to collapse the distance between them and us. But there’s too often something phony and stagey about it, and I worry that energy lavished on this is rerouted from more relevant, substantive endeavors. I wonder how it’s related to any talent for governing or fitness for office.

Also, could a new standard of intimacy and accessibility dissuade qualified people from running? Already plenty of them take a pass, daunted by the grueling nature of campaigns and the invasion of privacy. If voters expect to see candidates raiding the refrigerator and flossing, politics could become even less alluring and more densely populated by egomaniacs than it already is.

For now O’Rourke remains an outlier, and I hasten to add that I find him more compelling than baffling, his dental work notwithstanding. His videos aren’t the whole of him — and some of them are downright charming. But a little goes a long way. A lot becomes unsettling. Where does it end?

Maybe he shows up in Warren’s kitchen, giving her more credible cause for surprise at her company. They do tequila shots as they compete to see who can best mimic the tweets of President Donald Trump. Now that’s a video sure to go viral.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2ba2ba8b-3d0c-4203-a8ec-eac3a2a73017" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/warren-harris-beto-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

Would you like to see your Presidential candidate floss?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., rolled out her campaign a few weeks ago in a three-part sequence of sorts that culminated in an Instagram video of her in her kitchen.

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