Outside Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s primary night party, four men on the sidewalk were dressed in full neon sequins, trying to get the party started. Inside, the bar had barely opened.
Espaillat spent 20 years trying to get to Washington and another 10 years in Congress. He arrived to give his concession speech and left in under 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, the real party was going on about three miles away. That’s where Zohran Mamdani was completing his victory lap of three celebrations with candidates who likely would not have gotten near Congress without his endorsements, just a year after he stunned the political world by beating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary.
I think this is only partially true. Say what you will about Obama, but he did meaningfully improve a huge number of people’s lives just by raising the age restriction for kids on their parents’ insurance plans and a few other programs for the expansion of medical care coverage.
He’s still a shithead who authorized the bombing of hospitals abroad and failed to deliver universal healthcare, but it was nice—even for me—to get just a crumb of progress for the first time at a point in my life where it made the biggest impact.
Same thing with Trump-- I think the stimulus checks were both objectively and subjectively a good thing.
The problem is, we can do so much better than crumbs.