For the last six months or so, I’ve been making slow but steady progress on a first draft of a novel set in a world that looks very much like my own. One of the main characters is Juliet, a woman in her early 60s who is many things: particular, controlling, careful, and more secretive than she appears at first glance. She is also deeply, profoundly competent. Juliet is a problem solver. Juliet has a plan. Juliet gets shit done.
(I am not Juliet, but I sure wouldn’t mind if future readers thought I might be a little like that)
Without being too spoiler-y, the narrative arc of the book rests, in part, on the other characters letting Juliet tell them what to do and the extent to which they trust in her competence. One of my characters, who is actively in crisis, first understand Juliet as bossy. But then, when things start really going sideways, that feeling turns into something more like gratitude: “It felt like liquid relief to let Juliet, no-nonsense, unflappable Juliet, take over.”
In both fiction and real life, sometimes it feels damn good when someone shows up with a plan.
Much has been made of Tim Walz and his “big dad energy” and why it feels so appealing to so many of us. There are a lot of theories and I suspect most of them are at least a little true. He’s a bundle of green flags, a loving husband and father. He’s the kind of dad whose 17 year old stands up and publicly cheers for him. He has a long and documented history of treating people, especially kids, with decency and respect.
He’s the dad many of us wish we had.
He’s the dad that some people thought they had until Fox News rotted their brain and turned them into “alt-right orphans”.
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I watched the video of Walz talking earnestly about the importance of gutter maintenance several times as it made its way around social media last week, spread by people who were, once again, charmed by my governor. Each time, I was struck by how comforting his competence is.
One of my areas of constant, low level guilt is that I don’t think I’m a great homeowner. I’m not handy. I don’t DIY anything. I have a growing list of repairs and fixes we need to make to our nearly 100 year old house. I’ve made almost no progress on either learning how to do them myself or in hiring someone to take care of them
(The process of having to figure out who to call and vetting contractors and getting multiple estimates and figuring out how to hide the fact that I am a dumb dumb so I don’t get taken advantage of feels like a part-time job that I don’t have time for).
My list gets longer and I just feel more guilt about it. And though I am smart, capable, and good at many things, this isn’t one of them. What I want, almost more than anything, is for someone who I trust to tell me what to do, in plain language, with no shaming, and with a cheerful energy of “this is a solvable problem”.
I listen to Tim Walz talk about gutters and I think “I can do that, that’s a thing we can do to better take care of the house.”
It isn’t just gutters, of course. Walz could also walk you through minor car repairs, making a good hot dish, and even dealing with a bout of lice, as our Lt. Governor discovered shortly after they won their first election together:
The nice thing about Governor Walz is that, in addition to being so seemingly competent at solving the problems of ordinary life, he’s also really, really good at doing his job of figuring out how to make life better for the people he is responsible for as an elected official.
Sometimes I think many of us are just really, really tired from years without political competence1.
When I think back to the awful years of the Trump presidency and the pandemic, I can still feel the weight of all that responsibility. We had a long stretch of having to make decisions (that sometimes literally felt like life and death during the early days of the pandemic), knowing that we couldn’t trust our President. It was unsettling to live with the knowledge that, at a basic level, our highest elected official simply didn’t appear to be capable of caring whether people lived or died.
Some of us watched family members, friends, or people in our communities slip away into a particular kind of madness - the antivaxxers, the Q anons, the people who thought George Floyd deserved it, the ones who bought the lies about abortion and migrants and though critical race theory was the bogeyman (even though they couldn’t actually explain what that was).
There were so many problems (both real and those imagined by the far right). There was so little reason to feel confident that the people in charge could solve them.
(Honestly, I still have doubts that the people in charge actually wanted to solve them. Conservative forces thrive on (white) people feeling unsafe2)
We spent a lot of time trying to make the right individual decision (when to mask, when to stop, does recycling matter, do I donate money to the campaign of an octogenarian) when what we were facing were problems no one person could solve. It’s exhausting, trying to always make the next right choice, without having the comfort of feeling like there was an actual plan in place.
I don’t have a crystal ball but I’m going to make a prediction: I think Harris/Walz will win in November and I don’t think it is going to be nearly as close as some people believe it will.
I believe enough of us still think big problems can be solved by smart people who care about the people they are supposed to serve. I think more of us want politics oriented toward justice and find it hard to argue with the idea that we should feed kids, keep our noses out of other people’s bedrooms and medical decisions, and expect billionaires to pay more in taxes than teachers do.
I think they will win because Tim Walz (and Kamala Harris) make us feel less alone, less like the safety and wellbeing of our families and our communities is entirely our own responsibility.
(They will not win because they are sending me 97 emails a day though, they can chill out a bit on that front, please and thank you)
They will win because we don’t want to feel alone. They will win because we are tired of feeling like the burden of caring for our families and communities rests wholly on our own shoulders. They will win because, whether it is politics, a PTA meeting, or at work, sometimes we want someone to step forward and say “okay, here’s the plan, this is the problem we are going to solve and here’s how we are going to do it” and when that someone has a kind face and a history of service… we feel a little safer than we did before.
They will win because, whether it is gutter maintenance or ensuring that children don’t go hungry, there is profound comfort in competence.
I don’t think Biden was incompetent but I also think he was well passed his prime and it isn’t disrespectful to point that out.
Here’s where I should probably note that all opinions are my own and not reflective of any current, past, or future employers
“The process of having to figure out who to call and vetting contractors and getting multiple estimates and figuring out how to hide the fact that I am a dumb dumb so I don’t get taken advantage of feels like a part-time job that I don’t have time for).”
This, this, THIS! 👏🏻
You know what occurred to me as I was reading this? I really wish we were next door neighbours. I do love my life here but I think it would be at minimum 25% better if you were my next door neighbour. Just think, our sons would play football (soccer) together and our daughters would make friendship bracelets together, and I would have much more toned abs just from laughing so much. 😆 Sometimes I can’t actually believe that I haven’t met your husband. I know I would like him a whole lot. At least we have Substack and WhatsApp. It’s better than nothing! ❤️
I super agree. This world hinges on people being raised to be responsible, and raising our kids the same way. It’s been a dark time having people in charge who only wanted to enrich themselves and a few others. I think Biden had an extraordinarily hard job to bat cleanup after that, and I commend him for righting the ship. I feel that included stepping down to let others be the muscle we need to make things better than they were. I’m not looking for magical unicorn action here; I just want people who want to do the work. I loved the ending of the movie “Sully”, where he commented to the feds about how lives were saved because of *all* of the people who did. their. jobs. It sounds simple, but for a society it’s really profound.