Nebraskan here. Nothing makes me crazier than the Ben Sasse hagiography that happens every few months. It’s the best indication we have of the way that mediated versions of people have replaced who they actually *are*. You want to know who Sasse is? Come to Nebraska & ask around.
I sat through a full Ben Sasse townhall once. It was like watching an American politics lecture given by an MA student who wasn’t actually studying American politics but was talking to an elementary school music class and he’d read parts of two books on Jefferson so he’d be fine.
The inescapable fact about Sasse is he’s putting everyone on, acting at all times. Sometimes he’s acting like he’s got big ideas. Sometimes he’s a patient professor explaining civics to people who’d be better of watching Schoolhouse Rock, sometimes driving Uber or hocking Runzas
Like any halfway decent actor, he’s charming, and a little goofy and boyish, so you end up inexplicably rooting for him to do...something. But his big ideas a) are bad and b) he seemingly has no clue how to carry them out. So buy a Runza from him next season at Memorial Stadium.
But don’t expect him to actually work out some grand bargain on health insurance or immigration reform. He talks a lot about those issues but his ideas never seem to materialize when it comes time to get to work. He just ends up voting for whatever garbage his party trots out.
And don’t get me started on his civics lectures. If you’ve been paying attention at all for 4 years, you know he talks a big game about what’s wrong with our country...and he’s got plenty of blame for everyone but himself.
He’s all about the importance to our country of civility and bipartisanship and norms and institutions...but ask him how his meeting with America Garland went. When Uncle Mitch told him to get in line and help torpedo some major norms, you know exactly what he did.
I don’t mean to go on and on but we all know he’s been positioning himself to run for the next big thing ever since the GOP decided to follow Trump off a cliff. So instead of legislating or doing anything difficult, he’s written TWO books bemoaning the sorry state of our country.
How do you have time to write TWO books, my dude?! Is the Senate not a job that keeps you busy at all?! Because it’s not just the books. It’s the late night tv shows and the magazine interviews and the funny tweets (until Uncle Mitch told you to knock those off for a while).
Like, there are people in my state who could use some *actual representation*, like the farmers, for example, who have been fantastically screwed by this ridiculous administration. And where’s Sasse on that issue? Writing books about the virtues of detassling corn for our youth.
We need an actual Senator. Like, on the Agriculture Committee. Because he represents Nebraska. Corn and beef and soybeans. But he wanted the fancy facetime you get on Judiciary. So he furrowed his brow and voted for Kavanaugh while his constituents’ soybean crop didn’t sell.
Look. Maybe this is the best we can do. He wrote his angry constituents a nice letter after the Kavanaugh fiasco where he *literally* referred to Schoolhouse Rock. I am not kidding. But we all know it’s not the best we can do. Serious people exist. They know things & act on them.
When I first moved to Nebraska, I went to a public lecture with my fiancé (then a 1L). The lecturer was Ted Sorensen, who gave something of a lifetime retrospective to an appreciative crowd of hundreds. That was the first time I felt like Nebraska was a potentially special place.
Sorensen talked about going to Nebraska Law and then, a couple years after graduating, being in the room with JFK as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding. And as we walked home, my fiancé and I couldn’t stop talking about the central question, which Sorensen didn’t address.
How does he get in the room? A young guy from Nebraska. In the Kennedy White House discussing what to do about the goddamn Cuban Missile Crisis. And what we concluded, and what I tell my students, is that it’s BECAUSE he’s from Nebraska.
Because the thing is, if you’re from Nebraska and you’re great, you stand out. There are 1.7 million people here. Greatness shines. Sorensen shone. He stood out and he was elevated into the national spotlight. If he was from New York or California? Maybe not. Certainly harder.
So, as I said earlier, people who are impressed with Sasse: come to Nebraska and ask around. Greatness shines here because we’re a small state, population-wise. The truly talented stand out. And if you ask people about Sasse here, you won’t hear what you hear about him elsewhere.
