Jon Ossoff is running for president.

Graham Platner has a message that is catching on: America is really screwed up.

Jon Ossoff has a better one: 

"Our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but from our ideas. [Crowd sounds rise from applause into a roar] Americans are not a race, but a people [pause] united not by our ethnicity but by our shared convictions, and THAT is what makes us exceptional."

Jon Ossoff is running for president. This is the crocus; this is the gathering storm, the first clear signs of a move. We see it in the big theme, the staging, the camera angle. He isn't running just for reelection to the Senate. He is presenting himself as a national leader confronting a big theme in contrast to Trump's big theme. Trump is making the U.S. about preserving a traditional heritage of ethnicity, language, and religion. Ossoff says we have a creed of life, liberty, and happiness; equal justice all; and one nation, indivisible. The big stuff.

I am very OK with that. I have been waiting for candidates photographed from below like this one, the Democratic alternative to Trump with a raised fist, having survived the assassination attempt.

There is a path for Ossoff. He has taken the qualifying steps. He won a Senate seat in Georgia in 2020, right after Joe Biden narrowly won the state of Georgia. Ossoff is running for reelection. He has to win in order for him to move forward, but if he wins he solves a problem for Democrats. They need a leader and they are nervous that the one who has seized the spotlight is unelectable anywhere but in bright blue places. Gavin Newsom, for better or worse, is California. Rich, dynamic California. Rich and expensive. California of the homeless people on the streets, California of seven-dollar gasoline, California of million-dollar-plus fixer-upper starter-homes, California of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and electric cars and renaming schools named Abraham Lincoln because Lincoln didn't do enough to empower Blacks.

Ossoff is reassurance. Trump took us to the edge and Democrats will feel relieved if they get through the Trump era with our democracy together-enough that we can hold a 2028 election. Ossoff is back-to-normal. Trump is change; Newsom is a different change. Ossoff is a sigh of relief from change: a moderate from a reddish state, southern but the new South, not the old Alabama-Mississippi unreconstructed South. If Ossoff can win there, and he did once and maybe twice, he can win in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.  

My sense is that is where the country will be. Let's just be Americans again. 

Ossoff talks about patriotism and common values. You find clips of him shot like this one. He isn't as good at stirring oratory as JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, but he is talking grand themes. Maybe he will get better. 

Ossoff is Jewish. That may be a deal-killer with some in the antiSemitic populist left and right, and Jewish backers feel betrayed by him. He voted to oppose some funding of weapons for Israel. Prominent donors pulled their support and tried to recruit popular governor Brian Kemp to run against Ossoff. Kemp chose not to. Democrats don't know what to do about Israel but being on the side of restraint, pointing out the damage to Gaza, as Ossoff did, is probably skating to where the puck is going. Even Trump said it: Everyone is unhappy with Bibi Netanyahu now. Israel has squandered a brand that took decades and millions of lives to build.

There are two varieties of angry within Democrats. One kind of angry is blue-collar, populist anger. Graham Platner expresses it in an articulate way that Democrats who groaned through the Biden presidency are thrilled to hear. Someone who talks! He seems manly and confident and straightforward, even as he describes his errors and redemption. Platner is one direction for Democrats.

There is another kind of anger: progressive, seize-the-moment, reform-America anger. Blue state/blue district politicians have it: AOC, Jazmine Crockett, Elizabeth Warren. These are people who are disappointed with Presidents Clinton and  Obama, believing they could have done more. Biden campaigned as a moderate but governed as Elizabeth Warren, and if he just hadn't been old and inarticulate and hadn't blown his campaign, we might be consolidating those gains, not reversing them and much more. There is angry appetite for a fighter who will be both true blue and nationally popular and win forty states with a "give them hell" progressive message.

Ossoff will disappoint both those groups. Ossoff is a purple state politician with Republicans in state and local office. He may be too moderate to win a Democratic nomination. He is the opposite of edgy. And yet Democrats chose James Talarico, not Jazmine Crockett in Texas, so maybe Democrats want consolidation. Progressive Democrats want a governing majority; they must be able to win in states like Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, Nebraska, Montana, and both Dakotas. It used to be possible.

Trump clarifies the stakes for Americans. Democrats want to nominate someone who can win.

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