ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

jamelle bouie

I’m Jamelle Bouie.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, why isn’t President Trump trying to win the political center?

ross douthat

Trump is for various reasons not even trying to claim the centrist space that’s left behind.

david leonhardt

Then, school busing, did it work? And should Democrats be arguing about it?

jamelle bouie

I think integration would help create a healthier political culture in the United States.

david leonhardt

And finally a recommendation.

ross douthat

I feel like there’s like a hugely successful and controversial think piece waiting to be written that’s just like the case against baby food.

david leonhardt

Presidents running for re-election usually try to win over the political center. Bill Clinton signed welfare reform. George W. Bush tried to improve K through 12 education. Barack Obama talked about reducing the deficit. President Trump doesn’t seem to be doing any of this. He’s instead continuing his same strategy of polarization, a strategy that his base loves but that has kept his approval rating below 50 percent. Michelle Goldberg is off this week, so our colleague Jamelle Bouie is joining us. Jamelle, you got Ross and me and many other people thinking about this question with a recent column you wrote, so let’s start with you. Why isn’t Trump trying to reach beyond his base?

jamelle bouie

There’s a couple things happening. One of the things I think is happening is actually very understandable. The 2016 presidential election was Donald Trump’s first election as a politician. And he won it arguably using a set of strategies of polarization and division. And he kind of doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t have the dexterity or flexibility to really try anything else. He’s clearly a very impulsive person. And so he has decided to lean into the same kind of racial division, cultural division, rallying up who he has identified as his core supporters, despite the fact that the American public, a good chunk of them, have clearly reconciled themselves with the fact that Donald Trump is president and sort of look at him in terms of a normal president. So you can imagine a world where Donald Trump recognizes that himself and begins to not use Twitter as much, push out policies that appeal to this broad center, focus on his economic record, and comfortably go to re-election. I mean, to the extent that the Democrats have a chance of winning, it all kind of is because Donald Trump himself does not recognize the extent to which Donald Trump has been normalized.

david leonhardt

The word impulsive is a good word. I mean, the word I think of is instinctual. But impulsive is actually a better word for what Trump is. And we sort of saw at the very end of the midterm. Remember, he made up this idea of some secret middle-class tax plan? Right, and it was like some advisor had said to him, you should be appealing to the middle class. And he just absolutely made something up, but there was, it didn’t have any effect.

ross douthat

I mean, I doubt that it was an advisor who suggested to him. I think that was probably more Trump’s own instincts. Because I think part of the story here is that there is clearly part of Trump that can be a kind of economic centrist of a certain distinctive, authoritarian, xenophobic kind. Right, you saw that in the 2016 campaign where he broke with Republican orthodoxy on all kinds of issues, tried to co-opt Democratic positions. But there’s nobody in the White House who has his ear who’s pushing that. And our colleagues Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman have a piece this week about roughly this issue. The question is why hasn’t Trump done more to sort of follow through on his promises to Midwestern working class voters? Why isn’t there an infrastructure bill? Why has that become a joke? And one of the things that shows up is that the Trump White House, especially since Steve Bannon threw himself out a window basically, is divided between a group of Tea Party-ish figures led by Mick Mulvaney, who are pretending they’re going to cut the deficit someday but are mostly just sort of impeding any kind of heterodox policy innovation, and the Jared Kushner faction, whose idea of centrism is finally getting a comprehensive immigration reform bill, which is sort of the standard D.C. Republican idea of centrism, which is very different from what Trump ran on last time. So I think somewhere in Trump’s brain, there’s a sort of module of centrism, of economic populism that can be triggered under moments of political duress. But for a variety of reasons, he hasn’t ended up with anyone working for him who has that vision. And you know, I guess this is also a way in which this is a somewhat normal administration where personnel is policy. And you can tell more about what the Trump administration was going to be from the people who have ended up in the White House than from whatever impulses the president himself has.

david leonhardt

Can I mention one thing that terrifies me, which is that Trump may actually be running closer to the true political center of this country than I want to admit? Which is that a really hawkish and even racist appeal on immigration and talking about trade without actually doing anything on it might actually have the ability to win him, say, the upper Midwest again and run up big margins in parts of the south that will allow him to take Florida. And that while we’re looking at this from a kind of highly analytical policy standpoint, Trump might actually be replicating some of the reasons he won in 2016. Am I being too paranoid there, Jamelle?

jamelle bouie

I’m not going to say that your paranoia is wrong. I’ll say that it’s unclear to me whether or not there will be a backlash from the other segments of the electorate. I think a thing that didn’t happen in 2016, and in part because no one took Trump that seriously. I think that fact, that no one took Trump that seriously, is really critical to understanding what happened in 2016. In that you had a lot of voters, college educated voters, suburban voters, non-white voters who were like, Hillary Clinton’s not great, don’t like her. Trump, we can’t take him that seriously. And so even if I’m not going to vote for him, I’m going to worry too much about it. I might not even vote. Now that a large part of the public can actually see what has happened and that he, in fact, is pretty bad as president, it’s possible that those kind of appeals will just end up mobilizing all those voters into saying, oh, well, I sat out last time and it was disastrous. So I can’t sit out this time. And you have seen this in nonpresidential elections for the past two years. The Virginia in 2017 gubernatorial race was basically this dynamic. Ed Gillespie running on a Trump-ish platform did drive up turnout in red rural Virginia, won many more votes than he did in 2014 running statewide. But he also generated a big backlash in the suburban and more urbanized parts of the state in the east. And that is a dynamic that could very easily happen nationally.

david leonhardt

And it did happen to some extent in the 2018 midterms.

jamelle bouie

Right.

ross douthat

Right, I mean, I think what Trump has going for him in this election that he didn’t have in 2016 is that he’s been president during four years of relatively good economic times. So I think the counter argument you could make to the “why doesn’t he have some policy win to offer the working class?” is that what he’s offering the working class is strong growth that’s been actually a little better for middle and low wage workers than the growth in the late Obama years. And so in that sense you don’t want to take too seriously the strategic analysis emanating from inside the Trump White House. Because often what they’re doing is trying to retrofit something. But there is, I think, a semi-plausible case that the good economy rather than an infrastructure bill or whatever is what they’re going to rely on to hold a certain kind of wavering, white, middle class, working class voter. And that they have a theory that there’s a block of at least Hispanic voters who don’t really care about the president’s racialized rhetoric, like the strong economy, are attracted to him in other ways, and that he could improve a little bit among Hispanics in a way that compensates for maybe some lost white suburbanites. To the extent that there is a coherent theory of how Trump does it again, that’s probably it.

david leonhardt

Can we spend one second on the Latino vote? I mean, to me it is one of the dogs that didn’t bark in 2016. I mean, the evidence that I’ve seen suggests that Trump did roughly as well among Latinos as Mitt Romney did in 2012.

ross douthat

Which was not good, to be clear. But it was not the catastrophic collapse that people were anticipating.

jamelle bouie

He was at the 27 to 30 percent range, which was like the low end for Republicans in the post-2000 landscape.

david leonhardt

Why do we think that is?

jamelle bouie

I mean, I think it’s because Latino, Hispanic, these are census designations, but they don’t yet track to any sort of identity. There’s no—

david leonhardt

They way that Jewish American or African-American does.

jamelle bouie

Right. I mean, the useful contrast is to black Americans, that for a variety of historically contingent reasons, there is not just a pan-African, pan-black identity, cultural identity. But also there’s a strong sense of linked political fate among black communities across the country. So even though I’m from Virginia Beach and from southern suburban black America, I have friends from Harlem. I have friends from Oakland. I have friends the middle of the country. We’re all black. And we all have very different cultural traditions. One thing that may happen to black people one place will likely happen to black people in another place. And that shapes how black politics works. And that doesn’t quite exist for politics among Hispanic Americans. And so you have instead segments of Hispanic voters, people whose parents are undocumented or who are descended from undocumented people, behave politically much more like black people than, say, Cuban-Americans or fourth generation Mexican Americans in Texas, whose families have been there forever. And who may not be white but understand themselves in a different way relative to the rest of the culture than someone who’s, again, family may have just arrived in the United States a generation prior.

david leonhardt

And who have some similarities to fourth and sixth generation Irish immigrants and Italian immigrants in New York, who obviously in some way are more white, are white. But when they came here, people said they weren’t white, and—

ross douthat

Well, and also, I mean, I’ve long argued that Republican economic policy is often a bigger impediment to winning a certain tranche of what we call Hispanic voters than the immigration issue alone. And in that sense, in 2016 you could say, well, Trump probably cost himself something with Hispanics by seeming like a bigot and gained himself something with Hispanics by seeming more like an economic moderate. And it was in the end a wash, which is why he ended up with the same rough numbers as Romney.

david leonhardt

It does seem to me that there is one factor we haven’t yet talked about, which is Democrats really have moved to the left. Now, I think on some of those movements, they’re moving toward where public opinion is. The American public is quite progressive on taxes, for example. But on other issues, I think the Democrats are moving beyond the American public, the idea of taking away private health insurance, the idea of sending a signal that we’re not worried about strong borders. Ross, don’t you think to some extent, the Democrats may be doing some of Trump’s work for him?

ross douthat

Well, I mean it can both be the case that the Democrats are moving to the left in ways that will potentially make it harder for them to win, and also the case that Trump is for various reasons not even trying to claim the centrist space that’s left behind. And that makes me circle back to the assumption that in a weird way, despite everything that’s changed, we’re going to get a very similar electoral map and breakdown in 2020 as we did in 2016, with some of the same fraught electoral college issues and all the rest. But what do you think, Jamelle?

jamelle bouie

I just, I have strong memories of the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Republicans made all kinds of claims and commitments on policy that at the end of the day didn’t really matter for the electoral outcome. At the end of the day, Mitt Romney performed about as well as you would expect a challenger to an incumbent with a growing but not strong economy on his side. The paradigmatic example of Mitt Romney’s elitist economic stance, right, the “47 percent” comments, didn’t have any effect on his total vote share. It harmed him in the polls in the weeks following, but that effect quickly dissipated. And we reverted back to what you would expect. And so looking at the Democrats now, Sanders is for abolishing private insurance. A number of Democrats have signed onto that. Castro wants to decriminalize border entry. Some Democrats have signed onto that. But I’m not actually sure come October of 2020 whether or not those things will really matter for how voters are evaluating candidates. It’s of course better to have a popular position than an unpopular position. And what I expect to happen as we move through the process is that candidates will gesture to the left on these things but leave them space to do something different. And so I’m just not, just on a practical political level, I’m just not even sure how much it’s all going to matter, which is why I am hesitant to say, oh, well, Democrats have embraced this thing. They’re doing Trump’s work for them. I think Trump’s work is going to be whether or not voters give him full credit for the good economy.

david leonhardt

Well, let’s leave the discussion there. Now we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. It was the signature moment of the 2020 presidential campaign so far, Kamala Harris confronting Joe Biden about his opposition to school busing as a way to desegregate schools in the 1970s.

kamala harris

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. And she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.

david leonhardt

That exchange cause Harris to shoot up in the polls and Biden to lose some of his support. It also inspired a broader debate over busing and segregation in America. Over the last week, I’ve done a lot of reading about busing, reading some of the research and the commentary on it. And I guess I’ve come away thinking the evidence is really quite strong that busing worked, that kids who lived in desegregated cities saw really substantial gains in their school performance, largely because white kids basically continued to do roughly as they had been doing. African-American kids started doing much better. You can always find one study that points in one way and another that points in the other way. But to me the bulk of the evidence is consistent with this larger research that shows segregation is bad for kids. Our colleague, Tom Edsall, I thought, had a nice summary of the effects of busing. Academic achievement improves, college completion rates go up, arrests go down on, unwed parenthood declines and employment rates go up with better pay. So busing obviously has a bad rap politically for some of the reasons that we’ll discuss. And I’m not suggesting that Democrats should be running on a platform of busing. But I guess on the narrow question, I walk away thinking, busing was more successful than a lot of people realize. And Jamelle, I’d be interested whether you think my summary is wrong in any way or leaves any things out.

jamelle bouie

No, I think your summary is right. Not just busing, and I think part of the difficulty with this conversation is that the terms we have it in are in terms of this particular policy solution that was used to accomplish the goal. And the goal was desegregation or integration. And busing was used because the previous two decades of white flight, of population change, meant that there was no way to integrate especially northern school systems without moving kids. Although as our colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones often point out, kids were always being bused. That in most cities, in most places, it was just white kids being bussed to the white schools and black kids being bussed to black schools. And so the difference post-1972 is not that all of a sudden kids are being bussed when they weren’t, but that they’re just being bussed to different destinations. And that the aphorism from the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” That is, black Americans showing up at white schools, that was the issue, not so much the busing. But I read, I think, probably some of the same work as you have, David, on the effects of busing and the effects of court mandated desegregation. And it was a policy success, especially in the south where countywide school districts meant that there was no way for white parents to avoid desegregation orders, no way for them to set up a new municipality and take advantage of that. In the south, busing was extremely successful. And the south remains today, I think counterintuitively, one of the most integrated regions of the country in terms of school, in terms of neighborhood. I myself am a product of integrated neighborhoods and integrated schools in the south. And speaking from my own experience, I wasn’t bussed, but I went to school in the wake of desegregation orders in Virginia. I have no doubt that my trajectory as an adult is tied to the fact that I grew up in integrated environments. And so it was funny, after the exchange on the debate stage, many people noted that no one on that stage really has a plan for integration. And while I don’t think busing’s ever going to come back — it is just too politically toxic, it evokes too much. There ought to be a serious debate about integration, about the fact that the United States is still a very segregated country, that we’ve abandoned the attempt to integrate schools and neighborhoods, but that integration remains the most effective way to shrink disparities in racial outcomes. And here’s where I get a little John Dewey-an about the nature of democracy: I think integration would help create a healthier political culture in the United States.

david leonhardt

Ross, how do you think about this?

ross douthat

I mean, I think one way to think about it, and I’m curious what you guys think, is that basically if you assume America has a specific debt to African Americans because of, you know, slavery and segregation that has to in some sense be repaid. One of the lessons of the last 50 years is that methods for addressing that debt tend to be politically durable and sustainable when they are not — not invisible but are disguised a little bit, so that you can’t see explicitly which white families are being asked to give something up basically. So there’s always been a lot of controversy about affirmative action, both in higher education and in contracting for minority owned businesses and so on. But those kind of programs lasted, I think, precisely because if a school has an affirmative action program, you can’t pick out the five white kids who didn’t get in because of this program. Even when, you know, you’ll have certain plaintiffs in affirmative action cases. But they often are plaintiffs who obviously wouldn’t have gotten in anyway. What busing does is very different. It takes not just specific white people but specific white people’s children and sends them into communities with larger minority populations and into schools that aren’t as high performing and aren’t as safe. And the Edsall piece, I read the same piece. And it ends up with two competing studies about the question of whether white kids do worse from busing, white kids who are bussed into more minority schools within, into districts with higher crime rates and so on. And one study suggests they do, and one study suggests they don’t. I think even allowing for the palpable power of racism in all of this, it’s totally understandable that white parents would be inclined to believe the studies that say their kids are going to do worse over the studies that say their kids aren’t. There is a lot of data on how peer effects increase crime rates and reduce high school graduation rates and so on. And so I think busing probably worked for black kids at some cost to white kids. And it was that cost that made it politically unsustainable as a way to address racial disparities.

david leonhardt

I mean, my instinct is that the cost was probably a much smaller factor in its unsustainability than the racism that you mentioned.

jamelle bouie

In part because the instances of white kids being bussed to black schools wasn’t that common. Much more common was the reverse, that black kids were integrating white schools. And some black students were bussed across long distances because of residential segregation. But some black students were not being bussed very far at all. They were being bussed pretty short distances. But they had just been cut out of their neighborhood schools.

david leonhardt

I mean, there seems to be wide agreement that busing’s not going to come back in any large numbers, whatever the reason.

ross douthat

And one reason that actually matters to this debate too is that, something that frames a lot of our conversations, America’s just a lot less white. And so we have these arguments about, are America’s schools resegregating versus are they just staying as segregated as they are? And one of the factors in that is that there are just fewer white kids as a percentage of the school-age population. So you end up with what can look like resegregation just from the decline of the white population.

david leonhardt

Jamelle talked about the importance of integration and the fact that actually we don’t have much of a policy discussion. Do you agree about the importance of integration to our national well-being? And if you do, how would you like to see it happen?

ross douthat

I totally agree. I think it’s an incredibly hard policy problem. And I think we’re living in the Trump era where official conservatism has, to put it mildly, not gone deep into plans for desegregation. But the right, at least the intellectual right and the policy right, didn’t abandon the idea of desegregation completely. There was a large amount of work done on the right in the 1990s and 2000s that took the view that, one, some combination of school choice and school vouchers could have a positive effect on integration and black student outcomes. Which was one rare case where you had conservative policy people in alliances with African American groups. And then there was a real sense, I think, in the Bush White House, which has now vanished, that what they called the “ownership society,” this idea that you’re going to increase homeownership rate especially among minority populations by reducing basically the demands for borrowers who buy homes, that that was going to be a soft push towards integration. That homeownership would increase, and you would get integration on the margins and so on. And what was interesting is that even the mild right wing pushes for integration ran into some of the same issues that the more dramatic policies like busing ran into. Which is that white suburban voters, they weren’t frightened of school choice and vouchers the way they might be frightened of school busing. But they weren’t interested in them. They weren’t in favor of them as policies. And so there was never the kind of large scale energy for that. And then obviously the ownership society plan came to grief in the great recession. And since then, there hasn’t been any, I think, any kind of sustained conservative thinking about this. But I think it is a very desirable outcome. And also it’s not only the fate of busing that suggests that it’s a hard policy problem to crack. And Jamelle, you have been writing recently about the opposition of mostly liberal, upper middle class parents in places like New York to very mild desegregation oriented initiatives. And that, I mean, that’s what, as a conservative who lives among liberals, that’s what I’ve seen through my life, right? That the same objections that Joe Biden’s constituents had to busing recur among supposedly racially enlightened liberals, couched in very different language. But they’re all still there as an impediment.

jamelle bouie

Right, I mean, if there’s an area of opportunity for desegregation right now, it is in the housing crisis. And it’s in attempts to basically deregulate American neighborhoods, of ways for people to be able to afford homes in more affluent places and getting them access to the same resources those places have. And they do inspire anti-busing-like opposition. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. And in liberal Charlottesville, Virginia, people start to sound very MAGA when you suggest that you should be able to build a small two or three story apartment building in a traditional single-family zone neighborhood. If I were being a cynical political type, I would say that I do think there is an opportunity there for at least very free market oriented conservatives to build alliances. Because in the places where there has been progress made on deregulating zoning, the alliances don’t look like you would expect them to look. They’re tenant groups. They’re affordable housing groups. It’s developers. It’s libertarian-minded people. It’s everyone, people who love the market, people who profit from the market, people who just want housing have a collective interest in letting cities build more. And so there are places in American politics where free market oriented conservatives could begin to work on the local level if they have desegregation, integration as an aim, just in trying to liberalize housing laws.

ross douthat

The federal government’s power here is limited, but it’s the one thing that I’ve seen. Ben Carson, the lone major African American figure in the Trump cabinet, praised for as trying to push a little bit on these issues.

david leonhardt

And I guess, I agree, the market forces are really important. But there is another force here that can also play a big role, which is we spend a ton of money as a society on housing vouchers. And those vouchers aren’t very well designed. And if you basically said to people, hey. We’ll give you more money to move into a better school district, that can really have an effect. I mean, essentially giving lower income people the opportunity to move into upper income neighborhoods can really transform people’s lives.

jamelle bouie

Patrick Sharkey has done some work on that and shown that it’s very effective.

david leonhardt

Yeah, and I mean, I think, look. To some extent this is a call to conscience that you’re both making here, which is we live in a time of segregation. We live in a time of horrific inequality. And I think there are a lot of people who are really worried about those subjects. And one of the things that we can do to address those is really to get involved locally and try to push back against the NIMBYism and the idea that neighborhoods should stay as they are. Because if you want neighborhoods to stay as they are, to some extent, you’re arguing that segregation and inequality should stay as they are. And they shouldn’t.

ross douthat

I’m curious for both of you guys but maybe especially Jamelle, we’ve suddenly had the return of busing as a point of conversation after we had the surge of reparations discussion. And reparations are very unpopular. Probably right now if you polled it, reparations are more unpopular than busing. But I suspect if busing were reimplemented, it would quickly become more unpopular. My sense is that, in a weird way politically, reparations are actually more plausible than dramatic busing initiatives precisely because it’s not that you’re literally taking money from white people. You could finance it through the deficit. I mean, neither one is going anywhere. I think you can also make a case that a one-time reparations payment has nothing like the effects that desegregation would have. I’m just curious how you think about those two proposals as different progressive strands.

jamelle bouie

So it’s funny. Looking at the emergence of both the reparations discourse and busing discourse, what I see is less actual concrete policies because no one has really an integration plan. The reparations plans are very hazy. The closest anyone in the Democratic field has anything that you might even call effective is Cory Booker’s baby bonds idea. Which, it’s like universal. Everyone would benefit from this, but African Americans would benefit considerably more just because of —

david leonhardt

And consciously so, I mean, he told us when he came on the show is, look. I recognize this would disproportionately help African Americans, as is just. But this is much more politically doable.

jamelle bouie

Right, but what I see happening is basically— and I see this to a certain, through similar extent with the immigration conversation among Democrats — that there is a recognition among liberals, progressives, everyone left of center that Trump demands more than just, like moral condemnation of his racism. That he is revealing things about our society that have to be addressed. And what this is an attempt to begin discussing what that means and what that looks like. And maybe it isn’t reparations. Maybe it isn’t busing. Maybe it isn’t decriminalizing the border. But it is something. Something must be done, not just for repair but also in terms of recognizing that for key democratic constituencies, racism is a kitchen table issue. It’s important to their lives and livelihoods. And so what are we as a party going to do to address this?

david leonhardt

O.K., so we will leave it there and move on to our weekly recommendation. Jamelle, as our guest, you get to do it. This is when we give our listeners a suggestion meant to take their minds off of politics. What do you have for us?

jamelle bouie

So I cook a lot. It’s my primary activity next to writing. And I cook a lot of Indian food and have for a very long time for reasons that have to do with the people I hung out with in college and the places I lived in college and so on and so forth. And I have a lot of Indian cookbooks. And I recently picked one up. It’s a little older, but it’s phenomenal. It’s called “660 Curries” by Raghavan Iyer. And the name is a bit of a conceit that it’s very clearly geared towards people whose knowledge of Indian food is, “Oh, it’s curry.” And the recipes within I would hesitate to call all curries. There are definitely things that you would recognize as such. But a thing I just made, for example, was a salmon fillet marinated in garlic and turmeric and then pan fried and then steamed with coconut milk and chilies. That’s not really a curry, but it is delicious. And the thing about, I think, most people’s engagement with Indian food — I’m speaking not as an expert but as somebody who just is very passionate about it — is that it’s defined in terms of restaurant Indian, very cream based, meat based, heavy things, a lot of rice, a lot of bread. But the Indian subcontinent is massive. There are, what, like a billion people? And the difference between cuisine in northern India and southern India or eastern India and western India is the difference between eating Italian and Swedish. There are massive differences in ingredients and styles and whatnot. And the book is great in that it’s quite comprehensive in trying to give you a sense of what the entire subcontinent’s cuisine looks like. And so if you’re like me, someone who’s from the coast and who likes vegetable heavy, seafood heavy food, many of the recipes in the book represent that tradition of Indian cooking. If you are looking for something like chicken tikka masala, you can find that too. And the recipes are very accessible. It’s inspired me to be a bit more hardcore about making things on my own. So I’ve recently gotten into making paneer cheese and yogurt as ingredients to have on hand for food. So I highly recommended. I’m busy cooking my way through the book this summer and inviting people over to my house a bunch just to have them eat food. And I can test recipes out on them.

ross douthat

Do you cook more or less since you had a kid?

jamelle bouie

I cook more just because, especially now that he’s — my son’ll be a year old next week. And for the past three or four months, he’s been eating solid foods. And so now that he has to eat solid foods, I cook much more just to provide meals for him.

ross douthat

Does he eat the Indian food?

jamelle bouie

He does. I made some saag paneer last week. And I have a photo of him just like covered in spinach and tomato and cheese. He’s ate like half of it, and the rest he kind of just smeared on his body.

ross douthat

That’s, yeah, I mean, I feel like our efforts to be cooks have essentially fallen apart since we started having kids. So it’s inspiring that you’re able to up your game. It’s also interesting. Our oldest daughter was a very picky eater and wouldn’t eat anything when she was like nine or 10 months old. But we discovered that once she actually started eating that she preferred strong tastes. Like she really liked olives and things like this. And we theorized that one of the problems was she just hated all the bland baby food. So the fact that your successfully feeding Indian food suggests that that maybe was right.

jamelle bouie

Our approach with him was not to do bland baby food and just start feeding him what we were eating and seeing if he responded to it. And he is much more willing to eat very strongly flavored whatever than he is a regular piece of bread. The sole exception being croissants, which he will just like inhale.

ross douthat

I feel like there’s a hugely successful and controversial think piece waiting to be written that’s just like the case against baby food —

jamelle bouie

Oh, yeah.

ross douthat

—for The Times. And I think we’ve hatched it right here.

david leonhardt

Yeah, it sounds like Jamelle is going to — can now write it. Well, I have to say my wife is already a big Jamelle Bouie fan. She’s also obsessed with Indian food. So this is going to take you to a whole other level in the Leonhardt household. Jamelle, what’s the recommendation again?

jamelle bouie

The cookbook is “660 Curries,” by Raghavan Iyer.

david leonhardt

Thank you for joining us. Please come back.

jamelle bouie

I will.

david leonhardt

That is our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. That’s 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. We may feature your comment in an upcoming episode. And 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 and Alex Laughlin for Transmitter Media and edited by Michael Garofalo. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week.

ross douthat