michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, have we finally reached full Trumpification of the Republican Party?

ross douthat

I think it tells you that a lot of G.O.P. elected officials still have this sense that the bigoted strain in Trumpism can just sort of go away when Trump does.

david leonhardt

Then we discuss pronouns. Instead of “he” and “she,” should we use the word “they?”

michelle goldberg

I think that people’s attachment to the gender binary is extremely deep.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation. And it may be a cliche, but greatness is good. [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, President Trump used a racist trope to criticize four women of color in Congress — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib. Trump told them to, quote, “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” Then the president doubled down on the sentiment.

news clip (donald trump) As far as I’m concerned, if you hate our country, if you’re not happy here, you can leave.

david leonhardt

And how did much of the Republican Party respond? By criticizing the four women at least as much as Trump— it’s the latest sign that Republicans appear to be approaching full Trumpification. What Trump wants, it seems, many Republicans are happy to do. Ross, I realize this may not be your favorite kind of discussion in which Michelle and I ask you to answer for the outrages of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But here we go. So what did you think about the reaction of other Republicans to Trump’s comments this week?

ross douthat

I mean, I actually thought that it shows the limits of Trumpification and the fact that the Republican approach to Trump’s racist provocation is a kind of denial rather than a kind of wholesale adoption. I mean, I think there is a part of the Republican Party and the conservative coalition that’s fully on board with the way that Trump talked about the four congressmen and the way he talks in general. But what you get from elected officials is the kind of weak condemnation of what Trump says joined to a pivot to let’s talk about something else, like how bad the liberals are. Which tells you something important, right? I think it tells you that a lot of G.O.P. elected officials still have this sense that the bigoted strain in Trumpism can just sort of go away when Trump does. You would have Trumpification if Mitt Romney came out and said, Trump’s absolutely right. They should go back to their home countries. Right? I mean that would be Trumpification.

michelle goldberg

Right. Which to be clear, you do have at least one senator saying just that and some congressmen saying just that.

ross douthat

Who is the senator?

david leonhardt

Steve Daines from Montana.

ross douthat

Oh, right, Steve Daines, yeah, he went on a sort of “America, love it or leave it” kind of thing. Yeah. But I think, in general, the Republican response is either a kind of condemnation, like the one Romney gave that is not as strenuous as it should be, or a kind of let’s pretend Trump didn’t say that and just say, yeah, Trump’s right that it’s bad that these Democrats are socialists.

michelle goldberg

So I think that what we’re seeing is not Trumpification completed but Trumpification in progress and escalating, so that when Trump said that a judge of Mexican-American heritage was not fit to hear a case that he was involved in, you heard Paul Ryan come out and say that it was the textbook definition of racism. And you heard much more, I think, strenuous and immediate condemnations. And so what we are accustomed to, the amount of racial invective that it takes to even break into the news cycle, keeps increasing. You know, I’ve been reading Tim Alberta’s book “American Carnage” about the G.O.P. civil war that led to Trump. And there’s something he quotes that kind of everybody quotes when they’re describing the evolution of the modern Republican Party. It’s a famous Lee Atwater quote from an interview in the ‘80s. But he says, “You start out in 1954 by saying n-word, n-word, n-word. By 1968, you can’t say n-word. That hurts you— backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things. And a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” And it seems to me that what’s happened in the Republican Party is that you had a generation of people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney who thought that everybody was really in it for the tax cuts, thought that this economic libertarianism was sincere instead of a cipher for a broader set of grievances. Trump has stripped that all away and gone back to giving the base of the party what it wants. Once you discover that this is what the voters of the Republican Party wanted, I don’t see how you go back to giving them what they don’t want so much.

david leonhardt

And to me, a good example of that is Florida. I mean, Ron DeSantis, who’s the current governor of Florida, ran a campaign last year that were it not for Donald Trump, I think, would have stood out for how racialized and, I would argue, racist it was. And Ron DeSantis is now the governor of Florida who’s doing all kinds of things like trying to take voting rights away from African-American former felons. Ross, I take your point that this is not full Trumpification, but I do worry that it’s moving in that direction.

ross douthat

At the same time, you don’t want to create some sort of narrative of historical inevitability of the return of bigotry and racism. Right? George W. Bush campaigned in almost all of the ways that liberals now miss about Republican politicians. Right? He went to mosques after 9/11. He pushed a huge program for fighting AIDS in Africa. His was a conservatism of some kind of racial outreach. So you have to ask the question, you know, well, what changed between 2000 and 2016? And I think the big answer is that George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a failure. And then we had a huge financial crisis. And we have a host of socioeconomic problems in America that the Republican message wasn’t addressing.

michelle goldberg

And we had a black president.

ross douthat

And you had an African-American president who was seen as an outsider by a lot of older white Americans. And into that mix stepped Trump with this mix of superficial economic populism, and birtherism, and bigotry. Was it inevitable that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee? I don’t think, in hindsight, it actually was. Is it inevitable that the party has to be Trumpified permanently? I don’t think it is. I mean, I think the failure of Republican politicians right now is their failure to say, what can we offer to our voters instead of “America, love it or leave it?” That as much as the failure to condemn Trump more forcefully is the problem for the Republican Party going forward. It has to figure out what it makes of the Trumpist turn.

david leonhardt

Let me ask you both something, which is if there’s one thing Donald Trump is good at, it’s manipulating public opinion.

ross douthat

Wait. No. Is that true? In what sense?

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s true either. I mean, I do think that he’s able to take certain extremely fringe ideas and mainstream them. But, yeah, we shouldn’t forget about the fact that he is extremely unpopular.

ross douthat

And he gets more unpopular when he does things like what he did this week. Right? Like —

michelle goldberg

Right. Even though it does redouble the loyalty of his base.

ross douthat

It redoubles the loyalty of some part of his base. But if we assume his base is 45 percent of the country, then after Charlottesville his approval rating went down into the mid- to low 30s. So there’s a big chunk of his base that I think believes in the “Trump is a populist fighting for you” message, and doesn’t like the bigotry, and doesn’t like the racism. So I think it’s a big mistake to attribute these sort of multidimensional, chess-move brilliance to Trump’s move here. What actually happened was that the Democratic Party was tearing itself apart because Nancy Pelosi and the leftward fringe in Congress can’t get along with each other. And Trump saw a political scrum and wanted to jump in it because that’s what he does. I expect his approval ratings to go down after this. We’ll see what happens.

david leonhardt

O.K. But he also, by doing so, he elevated these four members of Congress to really be symbols of the Democratic Party. And he kept the discussion to be about race. And what it reminded me of was this quote from Steve Bannon where Steve Bannon says, and I’m going to read it, “The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got them. I want them to talk about racism every day.” So it sounds like you both disagree with that.

ross douthat

But Bannon— no.

david leonhardt

You don’t think debates about racism —

ross douthat

But Bannon — Bannon is right about the Democrats. But if Trump is the one talking about race, that doesn’t help him. Right? I mean we went through this with the midterm elections. Trump went out and talked up the border caravan and how the Democrats were going to let illegal aliens into the country as his closing argument. And there’s no evidence that it worked. Trump is helped when the media elevates Ilhan Omar or A.O.C. as the face of the Democratic Party because they are far left. And I think most voters aren’t remotely close to where they are. But if Trump is the one doing race talk, I think he’s losing.

david leonhardt

Michelle, you agree with that?

michelle goldberg

Yes. And I think I am less worried than some about, yes, you know, elevating the profile of these four women is just what Trump wanted, in part because the symbol of the Democratic Party in 2020 is going to be the Democratic nominee, who’s not going to be one of these four women. But there are also a lot of people in this country for who they are an inspiration. You know, there’s a lot of new voters. There’s a lot of young voters. Those are the people I think, in many cases, who are going to be knocking on doors and giving a campaign its kind of cultural vitality. And so not only do you need these four women, you also need the perception that the party supports them. It doesn’t mean that the party supports everything that they do, but you certainly don’t need a House speaker who’s out there elevating her fights with these four women in public and kind of seeking to publicly denigrate and marginalize them.

david leonhardt

So let’s spend at least a couple minutes on health care. There is a lawsuit that the Trump administration is supporting that says that Obamacare should just be invalidated. Conservative legal scholars, including ones who supported past challenges to Obamacare, have called the case absurd and shocking. And yet a Republican-appointed trial judge ruled with the Trump administration. I mean, I just find this really alarming.

ross douthat

I just don’t think that’s Trumpification either. That is an example of a pre-existing pathology in the Republican Party where you have a hyperpartisan desire to use the courts as, basically, super legislators. But that predates Trump. I don’t think anyone in Congress wants the judge to overrule Obamacare because it would be a huge mess for Republican legislators. And I think it’s— I doubt that Trump himself wants it to happen. I suspect it’s a faction within his administration. If the judge rules against Obamacare, it will be a partisan decision and a foolish one. But I think that’s a problem with partisanship in general and Republicans in general, that it’s only tangentially connected to Trump.

david leonhardt

And am I right to think that both of you expect that, however it happens at the appeals court level or the Supreme Court level, Obamacare will survive?

michelle goldberg

I don’t — I’m not — I wouldn’t count on that.

david leonhardt

Ross?

ross douthat

I mean, I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to kill Obamacare.

david leonhardt

I’m sort of interested that both of you seem to think that both the health care case and the racist tweets are basically bad for Trump from a political perspective.

michelle goldberg

Well, I’m not sure about that. I mean, so, obviously, I don’t think that the racist tweets have majority support in this country. But we don’t have majority rule in this country. And so does it fire up enough of the Trump supporters who came out for him in 2016, stayed home in 2018, enough of those to make a difference in the few unrepresentative states that end up deciding all of our fates in our system of minority rule? I hope not, but maybe.

david leonhardt

And Ross, what about you?

ross douthat

I would say that the one difference between a case like this and something like the Charlottesville case is that Trump’s foils here are genuinely unpopular figures to the extent that they’re well known. That could make this a case where he gets away with more bigotry because it’s seen as a choice between Trump’s bigotry and Ilhan Omar’s far-left politics. But I think, in general, we have a very clear track record that when Trump is seen to be explicitly race-baiting, lots and lots of voters who might be otherwise inclined to support him don’t like it.

david leonhardt

O.K, we need to leave the discussion there. And we’ll be right back with our second topic of the day. [MUSIC PLAYING] Our colleague, Farhad Manjoo, recently wrote a much-discussed column about pronouns and gender. In it, Farhad calls himself a stereotypical cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad. But Farhad doesn’t want to be called “he” or “him.” Instead he or, more to the point, they prefers “they” and “them.” “It’s one way to make society less irredeemably obsessed with gender,” Farhad wrote. “There is a much larger debate here about degenderization, the push for a society less governed by gender.” We’re going to have that debate now, and we are thrilled that Farhad has joined us for it. Welcome to “The Argument,” Farhad.

farhad manjoo

Hey, good to be here.

david leonhardt

So just make the brief case for us about why you think it’s important for us to start using “they” on an everyday basis more often and “he” or “she” less often.

farhad manjoo

I mean, the most obvious reason is because it’s just “he” or “she” is not inclusive. It does not precisely refer to everyone. A lot of people feel that they don’t fit within that gender binary. And referring to them as “they,” it solves the kind of inadvertent misgendering problem. You know, some people say that it’s a huge accommodation to make because it doesn’t affect that many people. But I feel like we don’t really know how many people this affects. And I think those numbers are increasing as people think about this more. It doesn’t seem like a huge task for the rest of society to start thinking about language in a way that is more inclusive.

david leonhardt

But it seems like your case is not only about people who don’t consider themselves gender binary. It’s also for someone who says, I am a woman, or I am a man. You don’t think it’s necessary to have that part of their identity be front and center in a conversation constantly. Right?

farhad manjoo

Yeah. I mean, that’s precisely it. I feel like gender and gender constructs have too big of a place in society in the way that we think about the world, in the way that people understand their preferences. I have a son and a daughter who are six and eight. And it’s just crushing to me that they feel so strongly attached to very gendered expectations. They play with girl toys and boy toys and listen to what they call “girl music” and “boy music.” And it seemed to happen kind of automatically in a way that was difficult to think about how they were being kind of hemmed in by these gender expectations. I don’t know if changing the pronouns we use will have a huge effect on this. But it feels like a small thing we could do to kind of free ourselves from what I think of as this kind of prison of gender expectations in society.

david leonhardt

So, Michelle, what do you think about the whole idea of using “they?”

michelle goldberg

So I actually disagree with a lot of what Farhad said, even though, Farhad, I think you and I come from a pretty similar place ideologically. I agree with you both about the prison of gender expectations and about the need for “they” to refer to people who don’t want to identify with a gender. So I’m old enough that the word still trips me up a little bit. But you know, I use it, and you need it for the people who want it. Where I disagree is the idea that it should be universalized, for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, I think there is a real difference between changing language to adapt to an underlying changing reality and trying to use language to change the underlying reality. I think the second is very fraught. It enrages people. It makes them feel like they’re being forced to participate in a lie or in propaganda. I think that people’s attachment to the gender binary is extremely deep. And different societies and different cultures attribute different qualities to men and women. So these qualities aren’t essential. They’re extremely historically contingent. And this can be changed when they don’t suit us anymore. There might be an argument to make for rooting this out altogether. But it’s very hard, for at least me, to picture what that society would look like. And I think that if we are going to commit to the political project of eliminating gender as a social organizing principle, we should be really clear about the amount of political resources that you would have to devote to a project of that magnitude. And then, I guess, the final thing I would say is that my own relationship to femininity is pretty fraught. But I could easily imagine my trolls calling me “they” to call into question whether or not I am a real woman. That’s probably true, I would guess, certainly not all but for some trans people who have gone through a lot of trouble to identify as a man or a woman as opposed to a person of indeterminate gender. And so we have to do a lot more thinking and arguing about what we believe about gender before we go off and try to impose it on everyone else.

farhad manjoo

I will say, so in the second part of your argument about the importance of gender pronouns for people who feel that it very strongly represents them, I think that that universalizing “they” could well be used as a way to kind of — I heard from people in comments, for example, that they felt that this could lead to something like a erasure for them. And I think that is a danger. I mean, the way that I — the thing that I come back to though is that when people use “they,” they are very consciously using it as a neutral pronoun. And I don’t think that — I think that there would be instances where you might have it used in this trolly way. But that happens with all language. The more pernicious thing you notice all the time is people deliberately misgendering others — and then kind of inadvertently because you don’t know or you don’t know how to say it. And for those things, I think “they” takes care of it. You know, one thing I worried about in writing this, and I think it was one of the main criticisms from the left and especially for trans and non-binary people, is that what I was doing here was a kind of appropriation of what they need to do, me doing it from a position of privilege, and that I’m a cisgender man and don’t really have a need for this pronoun. I mean, one of the main ways we can kind of recognize this as a society and the importance of language for people who have worries about it is for cisgender people to start adopting this. I didn’t think exactly that what I was advocating was to use language to change politics as much as language has to reflect how our culture and politics are changing. And the culture is changing, and we really have to match the language or at least turn out some wrinkles in the language in order to match how people feel and how the language reflects how they feel.

michelle goldberg

I was at Netroots Nation last weekend. And they had converted most of the bathrooms in the convention center into all-gender restrooms. What it meant was basically that you sort of had to, if you’re a woman, you kind of had to often walk by men in urinals to go use the bathroom. I thought that maybe I was the only person who was so stodgy and old-fashioned as to feel mildly uncomfortable. But there was one bathroom in another part of the building that hadn’t been converted, and it had, like, three stalls. And there was this huge line of women waiting to use it. Don’t get me wrong. Trans women have every right in the world to use women’s bathrooms. Trans men have every right in the world to use men’s bathrooms. I think that this kind of rush to pretend that gender is not an important organizing principle can end up trotting on the needs of women for whom their lived experience is that it necessarily is.

david leonhardt

Ross, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you’re not a big fan of getting rid of the pronouns “he” and “she.”

ross douthat

Honestly, I’m really content to let Michelle play the reactionary in this conversation and just sort of sit back and listen. But, no, Farhad, I wanted to just challenge you a little bit on what you said about your feeling of disappointment in your children’s adoption of gender roles. We have three kids, and our oldest two kids are girls. They’re eight and six. And until my son was born, we had a very female-oriented domestic space in the sense that most of the books and toys and clothes and everything else were girl clothes— not in sort of a hyper-gendered way but in a sort of stereotypically gendered way. And I tried to interest my girls in Wiffle ball and various things, and they tended to be more interested in fairy tales and dolls and so on. And then my son was born. And so his experience of his childhood was of femininity as a norm. I mean, I read to him the girl books that I read to my daughters. And to the extent that it’s possible, I think he had, at the very least, a sort of gender-neutral entry into consciousness. And when he was about two and a half, one of my girls brought home a book about Blackbeard the pirate. And he, entirely unbidden, picked it up and immediately became obsessed with it to the point where he would wear a pirate hat to school every day. He’s obsessed with the weaponry of pirates, the pistols, the daggers, the swords. You know, this is just one example, but I think it’s a familiar example to a lot of parents, that I don’t think that my son was born into some sort of cultural prison of gender. I think that maleness and femaleness are biological realities that have strong cultural expressions that can vary from person to person. But I don’t see how, looking at my son, it would help him, remotely, for me to be disappointed in his obsession with piracy, and now his obsession with knights, and his desire to wave swords, and all the rest. I think it’s much healthier for me to concede the obvious and say, maleness is real. And what we want is to find a healthy and morally upright expression of maleness so that he thinks about himself as a man in ways that are protective and chivalrous rather than toxic and aggressive. And I think that’s a cultural construct, but it’s a cultural construct placed on top of a biological reality and a fundamental difference that, as Michelle says, persists in different forms in just about every human society. So I’m just curious: Why do you feel like your children are imprisoned rather than feeling like they’re just finding cultural expressions for who they actually are?

farhad manjoo

I mean, I feel like I see in my children a response to society in sort of everything they do. I mean, they’re incredibly molded by their friends, by what they hear in school, by us parents. And my worry is not for them at their age right now. As I said, they’re eight and six. It’s like how they think about gender and the role of gender, and how they think about, especially, their preferences and their interests, how those are shaped by society at large. At an early age, they’re being pushed in these directions that I don’t know accurately reflects how they would live in another kind of society. This is all just a little bit academic though. Because changing pronouns or just my writing a column about changing pronouns isn’t going to effect any of this. But it’s the larger backdrop to my feeling that the importance that we put on gender and the kind of almost invisible role in our day-to-day lives that gender plays on what we do is just too high. And much of my desire in writing this or in talking about pronouns is to just point out how stifling some of this can be.

michelle goldberg

Right. I mean, I just want to say obviously I don’t disagree with you about all of this being extremely stifling. I guess, to me, it’s just the question of, do you try to expand the social definition of what women can do and what men can do? Or do you try to erase the idea that male and female has any inherent meaning? And I guess, you know, I know people for whom the idea of doing that seems utopian. And I guess, for me, it just — it doesn’t speak to me. It’s not something that I particularly aspire to, even though, obviously I don’t want to live by the traditional limitations of femininity. And I don’t want my kids to be subject to those. I mean, I’ve had the same experience as you both, to a certain extent. And I think that it’s always a temptation, especially if you have one boy and one girl, or in Ross’s case is two girls and one boy, to overinterpret a very small sample size.

david leonhardt

I mean, one way I think about it is it’s almost certainly the case that there are real differences between boys and girls and men and women that extend beyond the ones that you can see. And yet it also seems to me likely that we’ve exaggerated how big those differences are. And, Farhad, I think that’s part of your point, that, Ross, your point about there being real differences can be true, but it can also be the case that they’re not nearly as big as we think.

michelle goldberg

Can I just say quickly we’ve exaggerated them very specifically to put women in a subservient position. Right? So that’s the problem, I mean, basically saying that women aren’t fit, weren’t fit to vote, then weren’t fit to run for office, or basically only fit to be a sort of live-in maid, and concubine, and nanny, and are built to do all of the drudgery that men don’t want to do but that then kind of makes men’s lives easier. That wasn’t an accident. But in a way, I think you kind of have to be cognizant of gender in order to see the way that it still functions to women’s detriment.

ross douthat

But I think you could also say — and this is where I disagree with you, David. I think you could say that we have exaggerated, as Michelle says, the extent to which male-female differences require some form of patriarchy. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve actually exaggerated male-female differences. That just might mean that we haven’t appreciated what women can do as much as we’ve should. And there’s, in fact, plenty of evidence that in gender egalitarian societies, including the paradises of Scandinavia, male and female differences actually increase further. I think there are places and situations where male-female differences still get exaggerated. I think in the world of New York Times readers, at this point in our history, it’s the opposite and that we’ve moved to a place of telling people that they need to deny realities in front of their face.

david leonhardt

Farhad, let’s end here with some advice from you. I was talking about your column with my 15-year-old. And I was expressing some skepticism. I’m one of those grammarian prissies who feels anxious about the difference between the singular and the plural. And my 15-year-old said to me, yeah, but, Dad, language changes. And so for people who were intrigued by the argument that you’re making, how would you encourage them to make the language they use in everyday life a little bit less gendered?

farhad manjoo

I think you should talk about the language and recognize the way that the language may not be inclusive for everyone. I mean, I never until recently made it a practice to ask people I interview, people I would mention in articles, about their gender and their pronouns. I feel like having that conversation is a good way to start. One of the ways we can talk about this is not as a replacement for traditional genders but as an addition. Offering “they” as a pronoun for “you” in addition to “he” or “she,” I think, is a kind of a way to avoid some of these problems. So most places, like airports and others, that have all-gender restrooms also have men and women restrooms. And that would be a relatively easy way to both offer it as an option and include it in the language without adding to this fear that were erasing people’s identities.

david leonhardt

Well, Farhad Manjoo, thank you so much for coming on “The Argument.” And we hope you will come back and join us again.

farhad manjoo

Great. Thanks for having me.

michelle goldberg

Thanks, Farhad.

ross douthat

Thanks, Farhad. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. Ross, it’s your turn. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

So this is one of my things where I recommend not so much a show as a performance within a show. But I’m going to recommend Meryl Streep’s performance on the second season of “Big Little Lies” on HBO. The season as a whole has been a little bit more forced. But Streep has showed up, basically, as the mother of a character who was killed by the female characters in the first season. It’s sort of a cliche to praise a Meryl Streep performance, but it really is just a tremendous performance as this particular kind of older, WASP-y, slightly passive-aggressive—

michelle goldberg

No. Not — slightly is not the right term.

ross douthat

Slightly, slightly is not the right word — extremely passive-aggressive yet effective and terrifying figure.

michelle goldberg

It is hard, at least for me, to do justice to how sinister, in a way that sort of builds slowly, but she is such a monster. She does it not in a scenery-chewing way but in this very subtle, incisive way. I don’t know. I’m very much looking forward to the final episode in which they’ve contrived to put her on trial as a mother. I think there’s such a hunger at this point to see her unmasked. It’ll be interesting to see if the show can give the people what they want.

david leonhardt

And it may be a cliche to praise Meryl Streep, but greatness is good. I found it really deflating when Al Pacino had some bad roles late in his career. And so the fact that Meryl Streep continues to be great is something to celebrate. One quick note before we go. A while back, we did a show responding to your questions and ideas, and we want to do another one. Should everyone adopt the “they” pronoun? Are the 2020 Democrats moving too far to the left? Is cornhole overrated? Or ask us about something that we have not yet discussed. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. That’s 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com, and we may include you in an upcoming episode. That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying of Kaiser Health News. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you next week. See? When we get away from politics, we all start talking about our children.

michelle goldberg