The New Yorker:

Zohran Mamdani isn’t the only candidate challenging the status quo—and having fun doing it.

By Bill McKibben

Back during Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor of Boston, in 2021, I joined a Zoom call to help boost support for her strong climate policies. During the pandemic years, Zoom calls were politics, but I still often find myself on them, in the process meeting candidates for local offices around the country. It’s a good analgesic for the wearying cynicism that is the hallmark of the moment, since these people are often idealistic, enthusiastic, and smart. But, once in a while, you encounter true political talent—something that is as rare but as obvious as, say, great athletic prowess or a deep musical gift. That was Wu. Even with the awkwardness of Zoom—“Unmute!”—she seemed able to project both intelligence and, for lack of a better word, kindness: not an emotional Bill Clinton I-feel-your-pain response, but a sense that she was concerned with the problems presented and had the wherewithal to take them on.

I know people who insist that when they first heard Barack Obama’s keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, they knew he would one day be President, and I confess that I had the same feeling when I first heard Wu. Bostonians picked her from a crowded field in that first run, and two weeks ago she essentially won a second term eight weeks before the election, beating the Democrat Josh Kraft, the second-place challenger in the city’s nonpartisan primary, seventy-two per cent to twenty-three. Given Boston’s top-two system, Kraft, who is the son of the billionaire owner of the Patriots, could have stayed in the race until November, but he decided on a graceful exit. If there’s an election at all, Wu will be the only name on the ballot.

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