who gets to be a reformer?

“You can begin to dream about the America that should be. Because we are not going back to where we were. It’s like when New Orleans got destroyed by Katrina… You get to construct a new day, if you win. And that is what 2028 and beyond is going to be about.”

That’s what former New Orleans Mayor and apparent 2028 hopeful MITCH LANDRIEU told a gathering of young Dems around this month’s DNC meeting, as scooped by CNN’s Isaac Dovere. 

It’s a frame that instantly resonated with me; it echoes the one I laid out as I launched (aka attempted to justify) this way-too-early 2028 newsletter last August: “Whoever inherits Trump’s institutional carnage will have a singular opportunity to build a new, better American democracy.”

Now, this would be a longshot bid, to say the least. But Landrieu has been on my presidential short list since the moment he gave his 2017 speech about removing Confederate monuments. (Even if you’ve seen it, it’s worth taking 15 minutes to rewatch the full thing. It holds up.)

Despite low name ID and no obvious path to relevance, I think his unteachable political assets – the raw talent, clarity of mission, and capacity to inspire – set him apart from the crowded field enough that it could fuel an unlikely rise. He’s a natural-born repairer of the breach, and a radical reformer. And he may be the only 2028er with the ability to connect with both black voters and working class whites. 

So in some ways, Landrieu feels uniquely suited to lead Dems out of the wilderness and into a new American chapter. In other ways, he’s a fatally flawed messenger.

Perhaps he could overcome his dynastic political lineage – he won his first election in 1987, replacing his sister in a seat their dad once held – but recent roles will be harder to outrun. As WH Infrastructure Czar, he oversaw the fraught implementation of Biden’s signature $1.2T law. As co-chair of his doomed 2024 re-elect, Landrieu dutifully defended the aging president’s mental acuity and vigor in many TV hits.

He’s hardly alone in this predicament – correctly diagnosing the failures of the status quo, but belabored by deep connections to it.

“[After Trump,] there’s gonna be a whole lot of debris. And I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sort of nostalgia about how things were. Cuz even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” KAMALA HARRIS mused Sunday in Chicago.

“My warning to my own party is to avoid the temptation to think that we can just somehow take power, and put everything back the way it was. The way it was wasn’t working either,” PETE BUTTIGIEG said on Colbert last night.

“If you want status quo, I am not your guy,” RAHM EMANUEL declared last week.

To be clear, Rahm really is running as a heretic — punching at the Dem establishment (even if he’s a card-carrying member) and backing up his pugilism with a bevy of provocative policy proposals. 

And Pete is the insurgent who shook up the last primary. “We can’t just polish off a system so broken,” he said in a 2019 launch video, and he made abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the court, and nuking the filibuster central to his campaign. And as impressive as he was then, he’s better now (more on that below). Still, in this moment, I bet he’d rather be a 37-year-old mayor than a 44-year-old ex-Cabinet secretary.

Who gets to be a reformer? Only the voters can decide. 

Maybe Pete, or Rahm, or Kamala, or Mitch will pass that test; it’s graded less by résumé than by vibes. After all, Trump still enjoys not-a-politician status in his second term as president. 

But I think the threshold for being seen as a credible change agent will be high in this primary — and it won’t just be White House alums who fail to clear it. If we’re being honest, nobody in the presumptive field feels particularly disruptive, do they?

The environment remains ripe for a charismatic outsider to pull off a Trump-like takeover of the Democratic Party. And to take the reluctant establishmentarians at their word, maybe that’s exactly what we need.

PETE BUTTIGIEG continued his tour of America last weekend, drawing huge crowds in both Wichita, KS and Tulsa, OK, where his 90-minute town hall yielded several viral exchanges. 

I’m a broken record on this, but he’s a much more relatable, emotive, and compelling candidate since becoming a father. I wanted to zoom in on one answer that didn’t go viral, but captures that growth, while showcasing his utterly supra-sapien communications skills.

Please, just watch this response he gave to the final question he got in Tulsa, which was about political violence:

To recap, he managed to seamlessly weave from the hopelessness that violence is born out of, and the broken system that breeds it, into a moving anecdote about his visit to Vernon AME Church – where Black Tulsans found refuge during the 1921 race massacre – into seeing a sign inscribed with Hebrews 12 to cheer on runners at the 10K he’d stumbled upon, which, he said, was a reminder of the America that is possible when we heed our better angels – scripture used not as a cudgel to beat people down, but to lift people up – before telling the crowd, “you’re all here in an act of hope,” to build the America our children deserve, somehow tying it all together with a cute story about his son and a rousing call to action.

So, yeah, he could still win this thing. He is both more human than ever, and almost certainly not human.

AI superintelligence has arrived, and it’s a gay Traverse City dad who really gets you.