Adam Hamilton’s Moral Crusade

OLATHE, KANSAS – Adam Hamilton’s favorite two phrases are “This is not OK” and “This is not who we are.”

It’s what the mild-mannered 62-year-old cites as the reason he jumped into the race for the U.S. Senate; he was saying those lines so much around the house that his wife asked him to stop talking and go do something about it. And it’s how he frames policies: in notably moral terms.

Republicans’ stripping health insurance from 63,000 Kansans, roughly 1 out of every 50 people in the state? That’s not OK, that’s not who we are. Letting kids go hungry because of food assistance cuts isn’t OK, and people paying $100 a week for gasoline because of a war that never should have been fought isn’t who we are. Tariffs are not OK, they’re costly for consumers and unpredictable for businesses. And what Hamilton calls “the corruption, the chaos, the cruelty that’s happening out in Washington,” the threats to the Constitution and the silence of public officials who could end those threats: That’s not OK either. That’s not who we are.

Nothing got Hamilton as energized in a recent debate against his opponent, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), as when the conversation turned to recent ICE raids in western Kansas. “There was a preschool teacher arrested in front of her children, that’s just not OK. We’ve militarized and politicized ICE … This is really harming people in the livestock and the dairy industry, and it doesn’t reflect who we are as Americans.”

And though Hamilton is running on working with both parties and “leading from the middle” (which is what he named the bus tour that kicked off in a Kansas City suburb last Saturday), he doesn’t appear to think that Roger Marshall is OK either. Driving around Kansas or watching television, you couldn’t escape the brutal ads about Marshall sending women to jail over modest medical debts, one of them so harsh (it features a woman who was arrested, in front of her daughter, while eight months pregnant) that the Marshall campaign threatened to sue for defamation. It turns out that sending patients to jail for medical debt just isn’t who we are.

The campaign Hamilton is running has a model: Joe Biden’s “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” in 2020, the struggle to restore honor and dignity to the White House. But Biden hid out in his basement during COVID and couldn’t totally articulate what the battle was about. Hamilton, a 36-year pastor of the nation’s largest United Methodist Church, has the talent on the stump and moral authority to pull off this appeal. And while he’s a moderate, he’s the kind of moderate who is disgusted most not by extremism but by meanness and spite.

“I have a deep passion for the things that Democrats care about, and that is social safety nets, caring about children, caring about families, caring about education,” he told reporters in a gaggle in Olathe. Raising the retirement age or cutting benefits for the poor to tame the federal deficit doesn’t feel like a fit for someone who leads this deeply with his heart.

From my view on the ground, this pitch absolutely can work. The polling showing a toss-up, Donald Trump and JD Vance both coming to the state in the space of a week, and Republicans pouring money into what they thought was a safe seat all confirm that. Up and down the state, practically every voter I talked to sounded desperate for someone to fight back against the madness. “I grew up in Kansas. We’ve had sane people,” said Mitch Lee, a supporter at the bus tour kickoff. “We’ve had sanity in this state.”

But I wanted to know if Hamilton’s values extended to America’s capture by oligarchy. And Hamilton’s response shows both the promise of his approach, and its limits.

I had co-written a different Marshall health care story, about his 30-year business relationship with a private equity tycoon named Dan Tasset, who bankrupted hospitals and failed to pay employees promised benefits, leading them to rack up enormous health care bills. In a press gaggle with Hamilton, I asked: Was allowing self-interested investment managers to make decisions affecting patients’ life and death OK, or who we are as Americans? Shouldn’t we just ban private equity from owning hospitals and clinics? And how can we get a health care system that better represents our values?

“So I’m not going to answer the first question,” Hamilton replied, pivoting to a canned response about Marshall suing former patients and turning around and taking away health insurance from 63,000 Kansans. It was the same script, almost verbatim, as a radio ad I heard continually.

As for what he would do about health care, Hamilton wants to restore subsidies so people can afford insurance and then work with both parties and “industry leaders” on a long-term solution. “It’s not something you’re going to do in two weeks. And as a pastor, that’s not my area of expertise,” he told me. “My area of expertise is getting people together and inviting people to listen … We are going to lead from the middle, and we’re going to solve problems and help America be healthier and better, live up to its values.”

Was Hamilton just unprepared for the question? Inexperienced in deep-dive policy matters? Or did his politics of moral principle stop at the door to the executive boardroom?

Unpacking that requires understanding where Hamilton, and Kansas, came from.

Nothing’s the Matter With Kansas?

That Kansas’s Senate race is a true toss-up is surprising, but not that surprising. Kansas has a two-term Democratic governor, Laura Kelly. The last Republican elected to that position, Sam Brownback, instituted a disastrous tax-cutting experiment that tanked economic growth, generated never-ending fiscal crisis, and devastated public education; the right-wing legislature repealed it and he left office a reviled figure. “People still have PTSD from Brownback,” said Emily Blanks, a Democrat from Bonner Springs running for the state House.

After Roe v. Wade was repealed in 2022, Kansas voters were the first to decisively protect abortion rights. This year, when Republicans tried to shift the state supreme court to an elected position so it could make more conservative rulings, Kansans decisively defeated that, too. The state is a wind energy leader with nearly half of its electricity coming from renewables. None of this squares with rock-ribbed conservatism.

“Kansans are a lot more progressive than the nation gives us credit for,” said Krista Mann, an activist with Indivisible Kansas City. In fact, that’s historically true. In the Progressive era, Girard, Kansas, was home to a popular socialist newspaper called the Appeal to Reason; Eugene Debs briefly lived there. I visited Osawatomie, the site of Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 “New Nationalism” speech, where he laid out the Progressive Party platform of anti-corporate regulation, national health care, campaign finance reform, and an eight-hour workday. When Barack Obama wanted to swing populist before the 2012 election, he gave a speech in Osawatomie, too.

Roosevelt spoke at John Brown Memorial Park, where confederates from Missouri attacked Brown and other abolitionists in advance of the Civil War. “Kansas is one of the only places that regards John Brown as an unproblematic good guy,” said author and native son Tom Frank, whose book What’s the Matter With Kansas? was among the first to ask why Americans voted against their economic interests. That slogan, incidentally, comes from a Progressive-era speech by William Allen White denouncing historically free-state Kansas for being overly radical.

Frank grew up in Johnson County, a well-to-do suburb of Kansas City. “When I was a kid, it was the most Republican place in the state,” he said. Today, that has completely flipped; the very first thing I saw in Johnson County was a freeway banner that read, “Vete [Go Away] ICE.” Joe Biden won every precinct in the county in 2020, and Kamala Harris soundly beat Donald Trump there in 2024. Democrat Sharice Davids flipped a U.S. House seat in Johnson County in 2018 and hasn’t lost since despite being continually targeted.

In his book, Frank chronicles the intraparty Republican war between the Mods and the Cons. Over the past decade, the Mods in Johnson County all became Democrats, while working-class voters outside the bigger cities shifted right.

Adam Hamilton is a Johnson County Mod. He wouldn’t dispute that. He was born and raised in Johnson County, his church is there, and he was a registered Republican as recently as 2020. On the stump, he praises Kansas Republican Bob Dole for joining with George McGovern to create SNAP, and Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Ted Kennedy working together on a national health care bill, or Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill sitting down and being civil after a day of opposing one another.

If anyplace makes sense for a message of bipartisan nostalgia and a somewhat utopian vision of U.S. democracy, it’s in Kansas, the literal center of (48-state) America. “The actions of this administration are not consistent with traditional Republicanism,” said Mann. “We take pride in strong public education, in leaving people alone, in our rights and freedoms. All of that is under attack from this administration.”

Two former Republican governors, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have endorsed Hamilton, as has a former Republican state House majority leader. Hamilton claims that 30 percent of the people at his rallies are Republicans, and I randomly met enough of them to believe him.

“Adam has integrity,” said Lynn Dickinson in Holton, a town of 3,200 in Jackson County, which Trump won 70 percent to 28 percent two years ago. “We need somebody in there that’s not going to say yes to Trump.” In Atchison, the hometown of Amelia Earhart, a retired Army colonel named Russell Thader was wearing a Ukraine lapel pin. “We treat Russia better than Canada,” he said. He liked Hamilton’s “promise to be sensible.”

A couple tables over from Thader, David Riedley was voting Democratic for the first time in his life. “I just don’t think the current administration is doing what’s best for everyday Americans,” he told me. “It’s a different issue every day, whether it’s the war that we started that we shouldn’t have, the cost of everything, the horrible appointments and the corruption in his administration and his family, the profit taking, it just all needs to end.” His wife Shelley, a lifelong Democrat, was beaming next to him.

Hamilton is well positioned to capitalize on these disillusioned Republicans and independents. “He’s a reasonable, thoughtful, caring person,” said Rep. Davids, whom I caught up with at a Democratic headquarters in Wyandotte County. “With so many people struggling, that matters to people. It matters to know that the person that is asking for your vote actually cares about what your life is like right now.”

“And He Steals Cookies”

Of course, rumors of the demise of blood-red Kansas are overstated.

“We just don’t believe in basically anything the Democrats are doing,” a severe-looking man told me after exiting an early-voting location with his wife in Garnett, the seat of Anderson County, which went 79 percent for Trump in 2024. Towns like this are why Hamilton was a long shot from the day he announced his intention to run as a Democrat. After all, Johnson County is already about as blue as it can be; Democrats must make up ground in places like Garnett to be successful.

I asked the same guy if he was satisfied with the job Republicans were doing. There was a long pause. “Not completely,” he said finally. “They’re doing the best they can, I guess.”

That pause was brought to you by Donald Trump and his policies that have hit Kansas particularly hard. The cost of living is up, gas prices are high in a state with wide-open spaces, and during his Great White North trade war, Trump promised to ban Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier from U.S. markets, without realizing that the company employs 1,500 people in Wichita. (He later walked back the threat.)

Farmers are pissed off too. Trade wars hobble agricultural export markets, as do wars that spike the cost of fertilizer to grow crops and the diesel powering the machines that harvest them. Steel and aluminum tariffs have raised the cost of those machines, too. Local soybean growers never recovered from the China trade war in the first Trump term. The destruction of USAID hurt local grain farmers. And the mystery meat that recently entered the U.S. tariff-free collapsed Kansas cattle markets.

“A lot of folks are pretty bothered and upset, just not very loud,” said Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union, who lives in Courtland, another one of those blood-red areas. “When you’re sold a bill of goods, it’s hard to admit that you’ve been lied to … I have people who won’t speak to me because I’m a liberal Democrat. My own dad and I don’t speak about politics.”

A more adept senator might have been able to project sympathy with his constituents and challenge Trump enough to present an independent voice. But Roger Marshall, according to just about everyone I met, is running one of the worst campaigns in the history of Kansas.

Until facing defeat, Marshall hadn’t a bad word to say about Trump’s policies. He infamously walked out of a town hall in the western town of Oakley last year, lamenting critics of Trump as “one of the rudest audiences I’ve ever had.” All his events since have been tightly controlled. (On Sunday, Hamilton did a town hall from the same spot in Oakley.) The analogy of walking out on the state can be extended, amid persistent evidence that Marshall actually lives in Florida and not his hometown of Great Bend. The fact of Marshall’s Floridian relocation was recently repeated by Great Bend’s own mayor, who called Marshall’s Florida residency “obvious.” (Marshall scrambled to sell his waterfront home in Sarasota on the first day of early voting in Kansas, which mostly heightened the issue.)

The residency wouldn’t matter if Marshall wasn’t a rubber stamp for Trump, Levendofsky argued. “Bob Dole and Pat Roberts didn’t have homes in Kansas. Dole used his sister’s home in Russell, Roberts used a donor’s home in Dodge City, and nobody cared,” he said. “Because they always came home, they were good representatives on the Ag Committee. They held town halls. Marshall has not. He’s turned his back on Kansas.”

Residency issues are a familiar bugaboo in federal elections. But Marshall must wish that were his only problem. There are the arrests of female patients for medical debts with exorbitantly high interest rates, a story that has defined the campaign. There’s the aforementioned relationship with a private equity destroyer of hospitals. There’s his use of taxpayer money for personal trips, and the sneaking suspicion that his Senate office runs his campaign, which would violate campaign finance laws. There’s the $4.2 million earmark that benefited his personal ranch. There’s his habit of campaigning in a poor state, where a majority of schoolchildren are on free or reduced lunch, while wearing a giant Rolex watch. There are his claims that tariffs are helping Kansas businesses, which have been contradicted by the businesses themselves. There’s the timely stock purchase of a company right before one of its drugs won FDA approval, and his bills pushing new pesticides made by companies in which his wife was personally invested. And there’s even the $678.75 bill for cookies that a baker in Hutchinson, Kansas, says Marshall didn’t pay for six years. (Marshall paid it off with interest recently.)

These have become lore in the state. At Hamilton’s event in Atchison, the host identified Marshall as “a bill collector in Great Bend … and he steals cookies.” But most of Marshall’s problems speak to a core disconnect between him and the people he’s supposed to represent. At a busy voting station in Paola, Miami County, independent voter James Burchett told me he liked Hamilton and hoped he could take him at his word. “The other person,” Burchett said, referring to Marshall, “his word’s not worth taking.”

Marshall’s negative reputation has a physical manifestation on the ground. Hamilton yard signs and billboards were everywhere, even in the deep-red countryside; Marshall’s were scarce. Hamilton’s event in Olathe was outside a busy Democratic campaign office, encouraging people to phone-bank after the candidate speech. Jake Lowen, executive secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, told me that they are running an active member-to-member program in five regions, including parts of the state they don’t normally canvass. “The cross-cutting thing when we talk to members is this message that things are too damned expensive,” Lowen said. “The politicians not wanting to be part of the solution are facing real backlash.”

I met Blanks, the state House candidate, at a canvass launch at the Laborers’ union hall. She said that she’s arrived at neighborhoods to talk to voters, only to find two or three door hangers already on the doors from other Democrats.

The most hilarious thing I heard in Kansas was on right-wing talk radio out of Kansas City, where a caller named Mark was screaming about the lack of overt Republican enthusiasm. “Where are the yard signs for Marshall? Where are the billboards?” he wailed. The host tried to reassure him with a farcical claim: A lot of Republicans are proud Marshall supporters, but they’re just afraid to put up a yard sign because of Democratic violence.

Yet the mood is not vicious but passionate, and in a close race, it can make a difference. “I’ve been following politics since high school, I haven’t seen this energy in a very long time,” Blanks said. “Hamilton’s race has fired a lot of people up … he’s giving people a reason to vote.”

And so are some other candidates.

“Crony Capitalism Doesn’t Work Worth a Damn”

I walked into a Wyandotte County Democrats campaign office in Kansas City, Kansas, where a man with a flannel work shirt, jeans, and a ballcap not big enough for his head was speaking. He was talking about “my community, which is the Ag industry,” and the ICE raids in western Kansas. The raids hit the primary meatpacking area of the state, where most of the workers are Hispanic immigrants; in some schools in that region, 90 percent of the students are ESL. Wyandotte is heavily Hispanic and has experienced ICE raids, too; everyone had internalized the story.

The speaker talked about the defiance of the locals—like a shopkeeper telling a shotgun-holding ICE agent intimidating his customers to “get your ass on the street”—and said we needed people in Washington with that kind of fighting spirit. But he also talked about fear: how the meatpacking workers scattered after the raids, and a friend of his hauling cattle there to be processed drove up to empty plants.

“For those of you who have never unloaded cattle at a packing plant, I have, it’s real inconvenient to unload them, you can’t load them back up because they’re not set up for that,” the man said. He added that his rancher friend, a proud MAGA supporter, told him, “That MFer Trump, who I voted for three times, I’ll never vote for that son of a bitch again … and you can throw that up to me every time you see me from here on out.”

And then something unusual happened. The man got choked up. “This is going to be the opportunity, literally, of a lifetime to change the political direction of this country,” he said, his voice cracking. “And God knows we need to do it.”

The speaker was Don Coover. He’s a former military intelligence officer, rancher, and livestock veterinarian running in Kansas’s Second Congressional District, which Trump won by 20 points. The district includes Kansas City but also most of eastern Kansas outside of Johnson County. And polls show the race against Republican Rep. Derek Schmidt within the margin of error.

Coover is no progressive; he’s endorsed by the Blue Dog Caucus. And he’s making the same appeals to Republicans as Hamilton, as he must in order to win. (Schmidt’s former deputy chief of staff endorsed Coover.) But he’s not running quite the same way as Hamilton. As a livestock vet, Coover has been immersed in the worlds of agriculture and health care enough to see up close the ravages of corporate power. And he’s willing to name names.

“A whole variety of decisions have been made to the disadvantage of the family farm and small business,” Coover told me in an interview. “We have politicians making self-serving or corrupt capital decisions that promote large companies like Tyson, Cargill, JBS, National Beef.” Those are the four major meatpacking middlemen that control over 80 percent of all beef processing.

Coover explained how in most communities, there’s usually just one packer. “These four companies don’t even have to come up with a formal arrangement, they just say, ‘We’ll only bid on cattle on our part of the country and you only bid on cattle in your part of the country.’ And the packer says, ‘If I can do that, I can discount [what I pay for] cattle by 20-25 percent,’ which is cheaper than it costs the people to raise the cattle. If you owned every gas station, you can charge a nickel more.”

He described the need for more competition, both in agriculture and in health care, where he said the exact same pill he prescribes for a dog costs 100 times more for his wife, “and I’m not giving it away to my dog.” His skepticism of concentrated power extended outside fields he had personal experience with. “Crony capitalism doesn’t work worth a damn,” he told the crowd in Wyandotte County. “Elon Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, these guys don’t make this kind of money because they’re really capable, they make this kind of money because they’ve got real influence.” When I asked him what needed to be done about that corruption, he said Congress should “start pursuing people that are guilty of those actions and hold those people accountable.”

In many ways, Coover and Hamilton are similar. They both are plainspoken and empathetic; they both position themselves as offering commonsense solutions. They both characterize their opponents as corrupt and out-of-touch rubber stamps for the president, and stand on their own integrity as a model for citizen leadership.

But Coover wants to throw the money changers out of the temple, while Hamilton dodges questions about private equity. And by the polls, Coover is doing just about as well, in a tougher race where voters are more tilted to the right.

That maybe is not fair to Hamilton; it was one question. In debates he has said tech founders should not be the ones to regulate AI, though he was nonspecific on solutions; on Facebook he has condemned Flock cameras; on his website he endorses bans on algorithmic price fixing and junk fees and Wall Street purchases of homes and private insurer overbilling through Medicare Advantage. And yes, there’s even a section urging that Congress “investigate private equity consolidation in essential sectors including health care.” But there is a disconnect between words on a website and his ability, in the moment, to call corporate profiteering what it is. Why?

Maybe part of it is an outgrowth of the environment these two live and work in. Coover is from the eastern Kansas cattle ranches, where the corporate squeeze is in his face every day. Hamilton is from Johnson County, where the big money in Kansas lives and where they get uncomfortable if you talk too loud about redistributing it. The terrains illustrate the difference between an economic populist on the prairie and a Rockefeller Republican at the bank.

All things equal, you need both to deliver a majority, especially in Kansas. And people can transcend their environments. When I joined up with the Hamilton bus tour, I was looking for signs of where his values would lead him, and whether if he won, he would make decisions for Kansans over special interests.

“This Is What’s Missing in the United States Senate”

I parked in Olathe outside a gun shop, and talked to some of the 150 supporters waiting for the bus to arrive. Several of them were members of his church. Mitch Lee and his wife Linda told me that when they fell on hard times and unemployment, “he came to our house and gave us money … personally.” Mark Evilsizor grew up in the evangelical church and he said that going to Hamilton’s “was like a breath of fresh air, where he’s not certain and he changes his mind over time. I mean in a good way, in a considered way.”

The “Leading from the Middle” bus pulled in, framed gorgeously by a sky marked with a few clouds. Hamilton, wearing a blue blazer and jeans, strode out to chants of “Adam, Adam.” He hopped up on a little platform for a short speech. “We have a real chance to make history, and it’s not about making history, it’s about saving our democracy,” he said. “It’s about trying to do what’s right for the people in our country … what do we do to care for our neighbors? What do we do to make sure that there’s justice and kindness and compassion?”

Afterward, he ambled into the crowd to take pictures and talk to the assembled. Someone asked him about the Republicans’ transgender attacks, and he repeated a line that got national attention. “People are tired of the Republican Party taking a small group of people and bullying them, picking on them,” he said. “Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself.”

Scripture is not actually a defining feature of Hamilton’s stump speeches, but he peppers in references to things like Matthew Chapter 25 (“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat … I was a stranger and you welcomed me”) and the slightly more obscure Micah 6:8, which says, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” The emphasis is on the compassionate parts of the Bible, the parts spurring people to do good works.

In a press gaggle in Olathe, Hamilton offered some self-deprecating humor: “I’m not a good musician, I’m a terrible golfer. My one superpower is I listen to people, and I bring people together, and I deeply care about them.” In the Senate we have today, someone who actually cares about people, and I have no reason to doubt this of Hamilton, would vault into the upper echelons just by walking into the chamber. So superpower is an apt word.

About an hour north in Atchison, attendees filled tables at an event center that was clearly decked out for something else, given the piano right next to the podium. (“Ignore the yellow caution tape, those are Halloween decorations,” the man at the front door said to me as I entered.) Hamilton spent nearly an hour here, and the full stump speech really gave a sense of how compelling he is as a speaker. He opened by saying that he prayed for Trump during his inauguration, asking God to help him to be decent and compassionate and kind. “Now I can tell you, just because I’m a pastor for 36 years does not mean my prayers get answered,” he said to chuckles.

He recounted his story of watching the news every night, saying, “This is not OK,” and being called to public service, not to become America’s chaplain but to defend the Constitution and fight for ordinary Kansans. The first thing he cited among all the bad policies coming from Washington was the ICE deportation quotas, which reminded him of Japanese internment. But he broke his goals for the Senate down into four buckets: address the soaring cost of living, make health care affordable, bring people together, and restore decency.

He infused these issues with personal stories: the single mom in Wichita who felt like she was drowning amid inflation, the young farmers in Ottawa who financed their operations and didn’t anticipate the sky-high diesel costs that risk sending them into foreclosure, the 62-year-old in Hutchinson who had to choose between $2,700-a-month insurance and her house payment, the woman in Greensburg who asked him “to help me not hate the people in the red ball caps.”

When he was done, he took a couple of questions. One young man, the only African American in the room, asked Hamilton to address the issue of a child sexual assault at a camp Hamilton’s church ran 21 years ago. Perhaps because he’s a man of faith, this has been the primary attack Republicans have thrown at Hamilton in advertising, something the candidate has worked to rebut. Hamilton said that his church helped to get the perpetrator arrested and put new policies in place for such situations, policies that many churches now use. Of the attack ads, he said: “At best they are a total distortion of the facts, at worst they are complete lies.”

His final remarks are a run about The Wizard of Oz, which famously was set in Kansas. There’s a museum in the city of Liberal that he visited, with a large collection of memorabilia. Using a call-and-response, he asks what each of the characters Dorothy meets on the Yellow Brick Road were lacking: the Scarecrow’s brain, the Tin Man’s heart, the Lion’s courage. “And I thought, this is what’s missing in the United States Senate,” he said. People have lost their minds and are no longer asking questions, he said; they’ve lost their hearts and forgotten who they went to Washington to serve; and they’ve lost the courage to stand up to a president from their own party.

“What we need is senators who have a brain and use it, who have a heart and feel empathy and compassion with it, and who have the courage to say, ‘Hell no, this is not OK.’” There were massive cheers.

Hamilton made a shorter version of the same speech, with the same Wizard of Oz bit, in Holton. The crowd ate it up. “We need a person who’s honest, has integrity, who stands up to what’s wrong,” Michael Carpenter told me. “No rubber stamps.”

But after the speech, when Hamilton started to mingle with the crowd, a man named Jim McClintock, who had his dog on a leash, had a question. “My major concern is we are an occupied country at the moment,” he said, citing “AIPAC money, Israeli lobbyist money,” and money in politics in general. “My question to you is are you going to take money.”

Hamilton responded. “I don’t take AIPAC money, and I’m not endorsed by AIPAC, and I’m not taking corporate PAC money,” he said, noting that much of Marshall’s cash did come from corporations, while Hamilton raised over $10 million in the last quarter, with 10,000 individual donations from Kansans. “What I’d like to do is figure out how we help get money out of politics instead of having it dictating politics.”

It wasn’t a dodge, and it struck at the heart of a corrupting influence in politics. I asked McClintock if that answer satisfied him. “Yes. I already kind of knew but I wanted it out loud … [Marshall] is so out of touch with the people that he was representing, that voted for him. I think the Democrats right now have a good way because they’re listening to people.”

But what happens when the Democrats get back to Washington, I asked? Will they keep listening? McClintock thought about it. “That’s my big question.”