The Abdul-James Test

The midterm elections end in seven days, one week. (I voted early, almost three weeks ago.) You would think that our media and “political operatives” would have pulled out all the stops discussing and analyzing them from every conceivable perspective.

Of course there are the simple takes. Will the Dems take the House (they almost certainly will!), and by what margin? Will the Dems take the richer prize of the Senate? Will the Dems come within a stone’s throw of the two-thirds margin in the Senate needed to convict and remove Trump after impeachment? How many failing GOP loyalists will have the stones of reality hit them in the head?

But I have another test entirely. It tests our electorate’s ability to discern truly promising youthful leaders among all the white noise (pun intended). My test is simple: will Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas become members of our US Senate?

If both win, I’ll say our democracy is salvageable, maybe even on the mend. If only one wins, I’d say we have our work cut out to save it. If both lose, I’d be looking for a new democracy of residence, at least if I weren’t already 81. Here’s why.

Most of the pols we have in federal office today are so far from the ideal that many of us have forgotten (or never knew) what good pols look like. The president and his appointed heads of our Departments of Defense, FBI, and HHS are not really pols at all. They have minimal relevant skills and have never run any big organization successfully in their entire pre-2025 careers. And this shows. Their most obvious talent is showmanship. And the president’s advancing senility is also showing.

So how could our voters, especially the younger ones, even know how to identify real political talent, given the utter absence of it in high federal office today?

Enter El-Sayed and Talarico. Both are far younger than our average pol. Both are wicked smart, but never flaunt their intelligence. Both are religious men—but their respective religions play very different roles in their campaigns (more on this later). Both love this country deeply, and both feel deeply the grotesque moral rot in the current administration and its grifting, boss-driven politics.

Both are young, strong, verbal, vocal and about as far from Trump’s dementia or Joe Biden’s deer-in-the headlights debate performance (which led him to step down) as you might imagine. Both, in different ways, have put their fingers on how our present governmental clown show has made life hard for the vast majority of Americans and easy for the rich and the oligarchs. Both have recipes (even formulas) for making things better.

Beyond that, they differ. El-Sayed is a Muslim. He rarely mentions his religion, except to refute prejudice against it. He downplays it for obvious practical reasons: it’s still a small minority religion here in the US, and the GOP, having no useful policies to aid ordinary people, does everything it can to associate Islam with terrorism.

Talarico is a Christian. But he’s not the kind whose Christianity goes no farther than condemning abortion and “lawless, godless atheist Communism.” He knows his Bible by heart, and he knows that Jesus loved and helped the poor, the weary, the sick and the stranger (i.e., immigrants).

El-Sayed is more of a fighter. (Watch him go toe-to-toe with Fox bully-pundit Jesse Watters here. [Be sure to set timer to zero.]) Talarico is more of a moralist and religious thinker, as revealed by this Ezra Klein interview here. But both have plenty of genuine motivation to help ordinary citizens and do public service, and both have no patience with detractors and distractors and are skilled at showing them up.

If you vote in Michigan or Texas, or if you just want to see how skilled, young pols operate, do yourself a favor and watch their stump speeches, many of which appear on YouTube and/or the Hook streaming medium there. Just watching a single one will restore your faith in democracy and show you what ours could be like.

I’m a Jew, although not especially religious. So neither man’s religion is mine. But I admire how each—especially El-Sayed—handles his own religion in the political sphere, giving no ground but recognizing the unfortunate facts of political life. Political Christianity in the US is nothing that Jesus would recognize, and Islam bears a totally unfair bad rap by virtue of 9/11 and international Islamic terrorism. But each man bears his cross, as it were, with vigor, intelligence, humanity, deep morality, and steadfastness. And each understands that a politician is not a cleric but a civil administrator tasked with making our country and citizens’ lives better.

As a senior (in the vanguard of the Baby Boomers), I feel sorry for youth today. In public life, really good political role models are so rare. There is virtually no one in the Trump Administration that I would put in that category; all have been compromised and brow beaten and must continue that way to keep their posts. And prominent Dems, with few exceptions, seem worn out by decades of fighting phantoms.

So if you’re just coming of age and voting for your first or second time, pay attention to El-Sayed and Talarico. They’re what the best of the pols of my youth were like, including the greatest ones cut down by assassin’s bullets: JFK, RFK (NOT Jr.) and MLK (who never held elective office but was one of the most brilliant political analysts and actors I’ve seen).

Everyone needs role models. The pols in the Trump administration are role models only for grifters, autocracies and failed states. El-Sayed and Talarico are the real deal. They are the best of the best. Our future as a nation depends on how many of them—and how many like them (including existing senators like Jon Ossoff)—we elect in a week.