Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President -- NYT, Michelle Goldberg

[ancianita]

A lengthy read and good 'sell' by Goldberg, and worth the time.

"... If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he — and let’s face it, it’s probably a he — would look a lot like Ossoff. He’s young and handsome, with a picture-perfect family: a beautiful wife who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist and two small daughters. He’s a Southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonizing divide over Zionism.

But the excitement Ossoff is generating is about more than demographics. It stems from his skill in eviscerating Trump’s gluttonous profiteering, his brazen attempts to turn this country into the most squalid sort of kleptocracy.
In his bid for re-election in a state Trump won in 2024, some expected Ossoff to tack to the center; last year JD Vance predicted that he’d start praising Trump’s agenda. Instead, Ossoff is excoriating Trump and his systemic corruption in a way that transcends the Democratic Party’s progressive-moderate divide.

He couples that attack with an achingly earnest sort of patriotism. Ossoff’s recent speeches, which he says he writes himself, have two parts.
First, he dissects the rot in America’s governing institutions, a rot that, he always notes, predates Trump and helped give rise to him.
Then he lays out a liberal, pluralist version of American identity to challenge the Trump administration’s white nationalism.

“We’re bound together by the same great national spirit that passed civil rights laws, defeated fascism and landed men on the moon,” Ossoff said in his kickoff speech. A bit later, he added, “This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand. That our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas....”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/opinion/jon-ossoff-president.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rlA.xVxl.3ZC0P_ORizXg&smid=url-share

I haven't sensed "the excitement Ossoff is generating;" perhaps this piece is her contribution to that. Not a fan of Goldberg, but here she's convincing, imo. Now I lean away from a Newsom/Pritzker ticket toward a Newsom/Ossoff ticket, since Ossoff can get needed electoral votes from a state that in the last 26 years has only voted Democratic 14.3% of the time and Republican 85.7% the rest of the time.