Actually one of the most moving civic sites I've seen in India is literally tens of thousands of people

reading the preamble of the Constitution together, Muslims carrying the national flag explicitly. So I think there is a little bit of that pushback that perhaps enough is enough.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

In 2004, George W Bush won re-election against John Kerry

to the surprise of a lot of good well-thinking liberals like the sort of people who tend to listen to this

podcast not to stereotype me and all of you and in trying to understand how this could have happened, one

fury ended up becoming very influential. According to one poll taken before the

election, more Americans thought that they would into one poll taken before the election.

More Americans thought that they would enjoy getting a beer

with George W Bush, then with John Kerry.

So the beer test, a kind of version

of the general likeability test, became very influential.

People will vote for the candidate who they want to have a beer with.

Now, I've come to think over the last months that this get things exactly backward.

Actually what voters think about is not do I want to get a beer with a candidate, it's would the candidate want to get a beer with me?

Do they like me and people like me? Would they feel comfortable in my home, would they think I'm a good person if I

honestly talk to them about how I see the world. Now you can see many examples of politicians failing that

test in ways that really hurt them. In Massachusetts, Mafa Coakley ran for the US Senate seat of the

then late Ted Kennedy and was beaten by Scott Brown in part because when she was accused of not

campaigning hard enough she said what do you want me to do stand outside Fenway

Park in the cold shaking hands, she clearly thought that the kind of people who go and see the

red socks are not the kinds of people she really feels that comfortable with, well, that

...