@petealexharris @EF @LaChasseuse Also, as someone who worked in and around politics before jumping to the grassroots side of things?

A thing people weirdly forget about politicians is that they're human beings with subjectivities, blind spots, and just personal limits. They flinch, they sometimes panic, they take shortcuts, they have really normal, run-of-the-mill human failure modes. It's really less frequent that someone is a puppet to a sinister master, and much more common that they're not playing to their strengths on something and bottled it.