Is this Phillies fan the future of the Democrats? | Will Bunch Newsletter

It was the timeless Rolling Stones who sang that “summer’s here, and the time is right for fighting in the streets.” I would never go that far, but it’s worth noting that the summer solstice arrives at 4:51 p.m. on Thursday, while Donald Trump arrives at Temple University for a rally at 7 p.m. on Saturday. Will Philadelphians turn out to protest? Should they? I have some deep thoughts on this — and they’re coming in my next column that drops on Thursday.

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In the 5th inning of Monday night’s Phillies game against the San Diego Padres, Alec Bohm stepped up to the plate with two Phils on base and a chance to blow open a close game. When Bohm’s drive to left field just cleared the fence for a 3-run homer, more than 43,000 people leapt to their feet, and a guy sitting in front of us in a white headband abruptly whipped around, jumped in the air, and gave Ro Khanna an aggressive high-five.

I can almost guarantee the random Phillies fan had no idea he was slapping the hand of a U.S. congressman. And one elected by the visitors’ home state of California, no less.

But Khanna, a 47-year-old Democrat who represents the upscale tech paradise of Silicon Valley and is considered a rising star of his party’s progressive wing, wants the world — even all the San Francisco Giants fans back in his district — to know that he still loves the Phillies. They’re the team he grew up with as a kid in Bucks County, rooting from the concrete heights of the 700 Level in the old Vet with $1 tickets that were doled out as a prize for getting good grades. (There might be a bigger story in this adopted Californian’s public display of affection for a Pennsylvania team — but more on that in a moment.)

I’ve known Khanna since I profiled him for The Inquirer five years ago, chronicling how a kid from a middle-class subdivision in Holland, Pa., and Council Rock High School became a top adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders and a progressive voice on U.S. foreign policy. Monday night, I got to tag along as the congressman enjoyed a belated Father’s Day with a crew that included his own dad — Vijay, retired engineer from Philadelphia’s former Rohm and Haas, and his mom, Jyotsna, a Council Rock substitute teacher when Ro and his brother were in grade school.

Now the kid who watched Mike Schmidt and Lenny Dykstra as specks from the cheap seats got the VIP treatment behind home plate for pre-game batting practice. As Bohm, Bryson Stott, and Brandon Marsh perfected the swings that would later produce 18 hits in a 9-2 rout, Khanna reminisced about sneaking away from his cousin’s wedding to watch Game 6 of the 1993 World Series, only to have his 17-year-old heart broken by Mitch “Wild Thing” Williams’ service of a home-run ball to the Blue Jays’ Joe Carter. But politics is never far from the front of Khanna’s brain.

We were talking about how Khanna’s dad, who played cricket as a youth in India before coming to America, became a fan of baseball and his alma mater’s University of Michigan football, only to see cricket now gaining a foothold in the United States. That “is part of my vision for America,” the congressman sharply pivoted. “We can become this beautiful multiracial community without giving up all of the great traditions. We can celebrate the great traditions — most immigrant families do — but add to it new ones. That is the beauty of this country.”

I’d wanted to catch up with Khanna to get his thoughts about the future of the Democrats at what feels like a make-or-break moment for the party, and also for its progressive wing that steadily gained influence over the last decade. President Joe Biden’s approval rating is under water, and he is facing a down-to-the-wire battle against a convicted felon in Donald Trump. Biden won’t win unless the kind of voters that Khanna appeals to — younger, progressive, critical of U.S. militarism overseas — show up for the Democrats in November.

“We’ve got to pull Biden across the finish line, and then organize,” Khanna told me. He thinks Biden can win with an economic message that’s focused on the future and on big things, suggesting a 10-day tour of the Upper Midwest to talk about reviving steel and other major industries. The four-term congressman is hopeful that Biden will stay in the Oval Office to sign his legislative priorities, including a bill to give all Americans child care for no more than $10 a day, raising the federal minimum wage to $17, and hiking taxes on millionaires and billionaires — many of whom live in Khanna’s district, home to tech giants such as Apple and Google.

Khanna hopes he can provide leadership on those issues because folks on Capitol Hill see him as a uniter among the ever-feuding Democrats — a member in good standing of the Sanders-ite progressive wing who works well with moderates and will even go on Fox News to pitch his ideas to Republicans. I spoke by phone Monday with Khanna’s friend Ed Rendell, the 80-year-old ex-mayor and governor still active in party affairs, who told me: “Ro Khanna is a very important guy for the future of the Democratic Party in the sense that I think the party has to come together.” Democrats’ left and center flanks need to “stop bickering and act more in concert,” Rendell said.

Is Khanna a bridge to the 2030s for a party whose future is looking very murky in 2024? It’s interesting that Khanna is returning again to his native state in late July for an event in Johnstown around rebuilding the steel industry — and that he invited me to publicize his Phillies’ fandom here in a swing state that’s become the decider in U.S presidential elections with its 19 electoral votes.

“I think he definitely could be a candidate for national office,” Rendell said. “I think he’ll be the leading progressive going into 2028, and he could be a presidential or vice presidential candidate,” adding: “We can’t win unless our candidate is a uniter.”

Khanna was a lot more reticent when I prodded him about 2028, when he’ll turn 52. “We’ve got to win this [2024] election, but there’s a hunger for a new generation of leadership and I hope to be a strong voice in that conversation with my economic vision,” he told me. “We’ve got to bring this country together. And then it’s for the American people to decide.”

There’s no doubt that America needs a new vision, so why not one that was honed by a straight-A kid squinting at Von Hayes from the upper reaches of the Vet?

Question: Does anyone actually care about ‘greedflation’? Shouldn’t [Pennsylvania Sen. Bob] Casey drop this, and talk about full employment under Biden, and GOP book bans? — I, Vermectin (@engelr412) via X/Twitter

Answer: I have to counter your premise here and argue that, yes, voters actually do care about so-called “greedflation.” It’s political malpractice to pretend that voters aren’t mad about paying higher prices at the supermarket or Chipotle. But it’s also terrible politics to let President Joe Biden take the fall for this, when study after study has shown that the quest for higher profits and the willingness of shoppers to pay more for stuff has been a major factor in the first big spike in inflation that many younger U.S. voters have ever experienced. Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collective, told Yahoo Finance that “what we see is across sectors, across companies, CEOs are just crowing about how they can raise prices on consumers, all while bringing in record profits.” Democratic politicians like Bob Casey can’t talk about this problem enough, in my opinion.

You guys really need to start watching more sports. Last week’s question about WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark and her Olympic snub drew a tepid response from the political geeks who seem to hang out here. “Caitlin Clark is a dynamic force but she is not among the 12 best players on the current roster,” wrote Joseph Witkowski. “The idea is to win a gold medal and that means going with the best.” Evan Meyer said the same in a lot fewer words: “Pay your dues, Rook!” I agree that Clark is too green for the experienced Olympic squad, but there could be an injury that gives her a shot, anyway.

📮This week’s question: Billionaires from Jeff Yass to Jay-Z are urging Pennsylvania to expand scholarship programs for public school kids in struggling districts to attend private K-12 schools. It’s true that our public classrooms have fallen on hard times, but are taxpayer-funded voucher-style programs really the best answer? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “School vouchers” in the subject line.

Most experts on free speech agree that the First Amendment protects — with a few key exceptions — your right, or even the right of a journalist, to say or write something that’s a lie. That is very good news for the editors of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, which ever since Donald Trump’s felony conviction in a Manhattan courtroom has published a string of stories about the mental fitness of President Joe Biden that could charitably be called misleading. One Post front page from last week — claiming that Biden had meandered away from a D-Day event in France when he was actually talking to a skydiver removed from the photo — was maybe the most dishonest stunt I’ve seen in 40-plus years of journalism. It all points to a theme I’ve been harping on since the start of the year: the outsized role of deliberate disinformation in the 2024 election.

The front-page antics of Murdoch’s Post are actually fairly old school in a world where AI, elaborate photo editing, and “deepfakes” are increasingly used to fool the public — sometimes in the hands of foreign adversaries like Russia, China, or Iran. But the vital role of the First Amendment in making America a true democracy also makes it difficult to counteract disinformation in any organized way. Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, most folks agree deep down that if the federal government starts deciding what is a lie or the truth when it comes to politics, the potential for abuse in the form of unwarranted censorship is enormous. In a perfect world, you’d see a safety net of organizations committed to facts and not political outcomes — academic researchers, or teams of journalists — working to expose and correct deliberate disinformation.

That world was under construction — but is rapidly melting as the 2024 vote approaches. This weekend, the Washington Post reported that arguably the leading academic bulwark against disinformation, the Stanford Internet Observatory, is on the brink of collapse — and the main culprit is pressure from congressional right-wingers. The Post said the elite Silicon Valley university is spending millions of dollars defending itself on Capitol Hill and against a couple of defamation lawsuits. The real problem seems to be that academic centers like the Stanford Internet Observatory focus attention on disinformation — like the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud — that have become the platform of the Republican Party. Part of the fallout is the premature end of a project called the Election Integrity Partnership — even though the election is still five months away. Meanwhile, Harvard recently got rid of its disinformation guru Joan Donovan, amid reports she was too critical of a major Harvard donor: Facebook’s parent company, Meta.

The collapse of high-profile efforts to counteract lies on the internet — right at a do-or-die moment for American democracy, and with disinformation becoming more sophisticated and insidious — is appalling. But just as bad is the willingness with which our top universities are wilting under opposition from powerful conservatives in Washington. Timothy Snyder, the Yale expert on fighting fascism, said his first rule is, do not obey in advance — and yet this is exactly what Stanford, Harvard, and the rest are doing. This whole episode should be instructive for U.S. voters, who should be asking why one of America’s two political parties has entered the war on disinformation on disinformation’s side.

Yesterday marked the 52nd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a landmark event from a time when we were a lot better at dealing with corrupt presidents. A dozen years ago, I observed the 40th anniversary with a column responding to an essay by the story’s best-known journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who argued that Richard Nixon was an exceptional president in his corruption of the office. I countered that the rot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ran deeper than just Tricky Dick. I wrote: “The truth that few wanted to confront was Nixon wasn’t really unique at all — just a peculiarly rotten and inept defender of a system, the national security state, that actually didn’t work at all, that was corrupt to its very core.” Read the rest: “Nixon Exceptionalism: What Woodward and Bernstein got wrong about Watergate.”

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