I hope that I am wrong about this, but I am not optimistic about Talarico.
He said all the right things to position himself as not just a progressive candidate, but as a christian candidate. White, male, middle aged, handsome, well spoken, seemingly levelheaded, and gives off strong Mr. Rogers vibes. Those things make him comparatively more palatable than most other democratic candidates, especially in Texas.
However, the democrats have had more than a handful of bad actors and turncoats in recent years. Candidates that talk the blue talk and walk the blue walk, but once they take office they quickly turn face. Sinema, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Robin Webb; not an exhaustive list of democrats that turned their backs to the rhetoric and policies that got them elected, but their the ones that spring to my mind first. Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and a host of others could be rightly accused of actively aiding the republican-led undermining of the rule of law (and civil rights) while in office.
The Streisand effect has a long history of backfiring on public officials, so much so that it’s not too far of a stretch to wonder if the administration banked on the FCC debacle to elevate Talarico. To be clear, I’m not entirely pessimistic about Talarico; I want to believe that there are still good people who want to get into public service for the right reasons. I’m just not optimistic because he’s almost too good. Running a sleeper candidate against one of the stronger progressive voices in congress (who frequently and loudly called out the GOP’s bullshit) is exactly the kind of thing that the far-right think tanks would do.
In my line of work, I have to sit in on a lot of meetings that discuss industrial accidents and incidents. Presenters in these meetings typically have spent weeks or months meticulously dissecting the incident, finding root causes, developing and implementing mitigations, and drafts for proposed changes to policy and process to prevent another occurrence. The meetings are intended to be a high-level review of the materials before sending the entire report to org leadership.
However, there’s always at least one person in the meeting that raises their hand/unmutes during the presentation just to point out in an accusatory tone exactly how and why the incident occurred. Whatever thing that person is bringing up is just a slide or two away, and is already included in the analysis, along with mitigations and process changes drafted during the previous weeks’ investigation. Some people will just never miss an opportunity to tell others that they would never have made such a crude, easily avoidable mistake, not on their watch.
Rarely, a commenter in these meetings does make an excellent point and adds new insights or suggestions. Regardless if the comments were useful or inane, my responses typically fall along the same line: “Thank you. You are right, and I will address this in coming slides/bring this back to the team for consideration.” It leaves the commenter feeling like they have contributed to the discussion, whether that’s true or not.
I take the same approach with comments where the only purpose is to tell me how I’ve made a crude mistake. But rarely, someone does say something that gives me something to take back with me. Specifically, I too was once called out for using the word “retarded.” The poster who called me out wasn’t exactly rude, and they didn’t insult me back, but I still felt taken aback because that word is one that I grew up with, and I know my intent wasn’t to insult people with disabilities, so I didn’t understand why using it made me seem like a bad person.
I thought about it for a while and realized that the language we use to describe things often does a poor job of conveying what we actually mean. When we use words like “insane,” “psychotic,” or other terms that originated in psychology or mental institutions, we are not just misattributing whatever behavior we are describing. We are also revealing an implicit bias.
We may not be directly insulting people with disabilities, but continuing to use that language still carries a message. It suggests that we either do not know more accurate words, or that we have accepted a habit of speech that quietly devalues disabled people. In that sense, it places them in the same rhetorical position as the people invoked by the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…”; they become the quiet exception, the ones implicitly treated as “one of the good ones.”