Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. The Senate finally voted on Monday to reopen the government, and the House just agreed to do the same. So what — other than dividing their own caucus and canceling a lot of flights and terrifying people on food stamps and (with their entirely predictable capitulation) infuriating their base — did the Democrats accomplish with the shutdown?
Frank Bruni: Here’s what Democrats accomplished, Bret: They exceeded my expectations when it comes to their talent for self-injury. After last week’s elections, the party was riding high, and the big political stories were President Trump on the ropes and ugly MAGA infighting over Nick Fuentes. Now we have ugly Democratic infighting over an end to the shutdown without any continuation of Affordable Care Act subsidies. By either not being able to hold ranks or not making sure at the start that Democrats were all on the same page, the party has snatched discord from the jaws of victory. Impressive stuff, don’t you think?
Bret: Reminds me of the great Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to any organized political faith. I am a Democrat.” But maybe the party will catch a break if the latest Jeffrey Epstein disclosures manage to stick to the president — though I tend to doubt they will.
Frank: Whether they stick or not, the “Epstein files” will dominate the news again for a while. And with Mike Johnson, the House speaker, now forced to swear in Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of New Mexico, the House members who have been pressing for a vote about the release of all of the files seem to have the support they need to make that vote happen. Republicans are in a real bind: They don’t want to defy and infuriate Trump, but they also don’t want to open themselves up to the accusation that he and they are keeping secrets from the public. Good times.
Bret: The only way any of this sticks, politically, is smoking-gun, red-letter evidence that Trump had a sexual relationship with one of Epstein’s victims. Otherwise, it doesn’t do much but provide fodder for a few manic hours on MSNBC. Democrats need to focus a lot less on Epstein and start worrying a lot more about winning over normal voters with better ideas about governance.
Frank: Just to round out the record, plenty of Republicans have been as or more obsessive about Epstein — or at least about the files. I point you to Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, for just two examples.
Bret: Well, to my point: It’s an obsession for fringe politicians. We should be thinking instead about making politics work again. Are you at least relieved that John Thune, the Senate majority leader, resisted Trump’s pressure to reopen the government by ending the filibuster?
Frank: I am. Very much so. But I feel more than relief. I feel hope — a little, precious seedling of it. There’s a growing number of examples of Republicans pushing back at Trump and at the ugliest parts of MAGA. The fever isn’t exactly breaking, but maybe its temperature has dropped a quarter degree? I just won’t attribute that to Tylenol.
Bret: Yep — thank God congressional Republicans refused to throw away their institutional prerogatives simply to appease the whim of a demolitionist president. Democrats should think twice whenever they have a majority again and are tempted to do away with the filibuster.
But back to the elections: We did have those impressive results in Virginia and New Jersey, which delighted me, along with Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City, which, uh, did not.
Frank: Not happy about Mamdani, Bret? Really? You were so mysterious about your true feelings about him until now.
Bret: What’s your read on the results?
Frank: Simple. Most Americans — be they in New York, New Jersey or Virginia — are rightly upset about the cost of living, desperately want some help and are utterly unimpressed with Trump’s performance along those lines. While they struggle to make ends meet, they see images of the East Wing in rubble and read about the opulent, ostentatious ballroom that the president who’s supposed to be their champion is replacing it with. It’s like some Gilded Age caricature, and the dissonance rankles. I’m not sure the lessons of Nov. 4 are a whole lot more complicated than that. You?
Bret: My takeaway was this: Centrism wins. New Jersey and Virginia could have been somewhat tight races. New York should have been a cakewalk for whoever won the Democratic nomination in June. It turned out to be just the opposite. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey romped to victory because they appealed to middle-of-the road voters, while Mamdani, for all the hype, got a bare majority against two deeply flawed candidates by running on an ultra-left-wing platform — and that despite the progressive inclinations of many New York City voters. The lesson is that, outside of deep-blue precincts, polarizing candidates are a Democratic dead end.
Frank: While I agree with you for the most part that centrism — or something close to it — is Democrats’ best bet, I find New York City to be so different from New Jersey and Virginia that I’m not sure the three can be combined into any one ideological story line. Also, I think we political analysts are sometimes too quick to apply the left-versus-center, liberal-versus-moderate prism to results. Maybe the more valuable takeaway for Democrats is, hey, voters like candidates who aren’t getting senior-citizen discounts and hip replacements. Sherrill: 53. Spanberger: 46. Mamdani: 34. Not a coincidence and not irrelevant.
Mamdani did very, very well with voters under 45, whose turnout is among the reasons that more than two million New Yorkers cast ballots for mayor for the first time since 1969. I can tell you from my conversations with the college students I teach that Mamdani’s style of communication really resonated with them. Excited them. They weren’t responding, for the most part, to his proposals. There was a generational kinship.
Bret: It would be good for both parties to have an informal ban on running candidates anywhere north of, say 70. That way, we might have avoided both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The other imperative is for parties to meet their voters where they are. Trump is president again because Democrats didn’t seem to be living on the same planet as most voters. Until last year, they were the party that wanted to pretend there was no crisis at the southern border, that inflation was “transitory,” that Joe Biden was fitter than a fiddle, and promised that “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care they desire and need,” as Kamala Harris put it in 2019. Now candidates like Sherrill and Spanberger are saying: We want better schools and lower costs and an executive who doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you — like a certain exterior decorator in the White House.
Frank: Before I respond more fully, Bret, what is a bejesus? I’ve used the word myself many times and now realize I have absolutely no idea. And does a bejesus do battle with Beelzebub?
Bret: No, Bejesus was a discarded character from “Beetlejuice.”
Frank: As for Democrats opening the door to Trump by tacking too far left on various social and cultural issues, you know I agree with you on that. One thousand percent. But that’s not the only moral of Sherrill’s victory or of Spanberger’s. And I’d note that the examples you just gave mash together “wokeness,” bad governance, aloofness and lies. The border: terrible governance. The claim that inflation wasn’t a big deal or would soon pass: suicidally dismissive. The insistence that Biden was at his peak: the summit of mendacity. What I see in much of that isn’t far-left madness. It’s the arrogance of power.
Bret: My core political conviction for many years now is MASA: Make America Sane Again. The last 10 months of manic misgovernance creates a huge opportunity for Democrats, provided they don’t just try to ape Republicans by steering left and becoming obnoxious online gits. Like, for instance, a certain well-coifed governor from the left coast.
Frank: OK, here we reach our most heated disagreement, Bret. You have me really worked up now. Painstakingly coifed, sweepingly coifed, unctuously coifed — these do not equal well-coifed.
Bret: You’re-so-vainly coifed?
Frank: Cue Carly Simon. More seriously, you’ve put your finger on what gives me the greatest pause about Gavin Newsom, though I congratulate him on leading the successful effort to pass a voter referendum for redistricting in California. I don’t think we move beyond Trump by mirroring or mimicking him. For Democrats, the answer to Trump’s “owning the libs” isn’t owning or subletting or time-sharing the Trump cultists. It’s giving exhausted Americans a more inspiring alternative. That’s how Biden won in 2020. His decline afterward was so quick and messy that we tend not to remember what he did right during that campaign.
Bret: Different subject, Frank: the Supreme Court. On Monday, the justices declined an effort to revisit their 2015 Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriages. And, in oral arguments about the legality of Trump’s imposition of tariffs without congressional consent, they sounded very leery of the government’s position. I think this is a better court than some of my liberal friends give it credit for.
Frank: Um, which liberal friends would those be?
Bret: I have some. Really.
Frank: You have many, in fact. There — I ratted you out! I was just wondering if you were pointing your finger at me.
Bret: Hey, I’m still pals with Gail!
Frank: Look, the long view here is that just when you think you have the Supreme Court figured it out, along come rulings that let you know that you don’t. Has happened again and again, decade after decade. That seedling of hope I mentioned before? It has a companion seedling, planted by the recent Supreme Court developments you mentioned. I think it’s foolish for anyone to make any firm assumptions about what Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett will do. Especially Justice Barrett. As for Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, I expect nothing good from them. They’re apparently monarchists who finally deemed it safe to come out of the closet.
Bret: The court always surprises. I doubt anyone would have guessed that the two most consistently interesting justices, Gorsuch and Barrett, would be Trump nominees. Then again, I’m old enough to remember when progressives went berserk over the nomination of … David Souter. One of the great advantages of life tenure for judges is true independence — something liberals ought to think about when they fantasize about term limits for justices.
Oh, before we go, I hope readers didn’t miss Penelope Green’s hilarious, heartbreaking and altogether fabulous obituary in The Times for Maria Riva, the actress and memoirist whose mother was Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich was a monster of a mother and a prodigy as a lover. A sample:
Until Ms. Riva was a teenager, her mother’s many male and female suitors left the house before dawn, keeping up the ruse, for The Child, that they were just good pals. (In those early years, to name just a few, the cast included Mr. von Sternberg, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, who was also a lover of Greta Garbo’s.)
They often reappeared in the morning, freshly dressed in their street clothes, for breakfast. Dietrich was as enthusiastic about her cooking as her nighttime adventures. But the pantomime must have grown exhausting to all the players, Ms. Riva assumed, as her mother began billeting her with governesses in hotels and rented houses.
Well, uh, wow. She reminds me, actually, of my grandmother.
Frank: I love that. Here’s one more recommendation. Our colleagues Adam Nagourney, Heather Knight, Kellen Browning and Laurel Rosenhall wrote an excellent story after Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement from Congress at the end of her current term. It chronicled the time she spent in the 1980s, as a relatively new member of the House, at the bedsides of constituents in San Francisco who were dying of AIDS. I remember the AIDS epidemic, Bret. And I remember how friends I lost to the disease were treated like pariahs. What Pelosi did back then mattered, and it says as much about her — and about the true meaning of public service — as any of the many major accomplishments in her career.
Bret: Her finest hour.
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