WHO’S THAT BARISTA? YOUR CONGRESSMAN
Congressman Eric Swalwell takes a trip into different walks of life by working a new job each month
It can be a little dizzying keeping up with the efforts of our political and business leaders to immerse themselves in the real world.
A couple of them seem so eager to walk in our shoes that you wonder whether they might occasionally step on our feet.
U.S. Rep Eric Swalwell, D-Castro Valley, has promised to perform a different job each month. He has an entire hashtag devoted to the effort, #InYourShoes.
Last weekend, he did a stint as a barista at a Starbucks in Dublin and as a Southwest Airlines baggage handler at Oakland International Airport.
San Jose Councilman Tam Nguyen joined in the real world effort last year when he spent a night at a homeless encampment in Portland.
And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been conducting a national tour, allegedly to learn more about his customers in the heartland.
In his time on the road, Zuckerberg has driven a tractor, listened to opioid addicts, fed a baby calf, and visited the Charleston church where a mass killing occurred in 2015.
This tactic is not precisely new: When then-insurance commissioner John Garamendi ran for governor in 1994, he pledged to work a job in each of California’s 58 counties.
That pledge took Garamendi to gigs as a hardware store clerk in Weaverville, a grocery clerk in Fairfield, and a crowbar-wielder in Los Angeles. He lost the primary anyway to Kathleen Brown.
The next year, amid a dispute over a contract, San Jose Councilman John Diquisto cleaned two men’s bathrooms in a park to demonstrate how long it would take (35 minutes).
What’s different now? Well,
for starters, we have social media, which has immediate impact in a way that the coverage of Garamendi or Diquisto never did.
When Swalwell wore a reflective vest and helped load and push back an airplane, a picture of him with the big earphones was swiftly sent to his Twitter feed. “Plane speak,’’ he called it.
Zuckerberg takes the level of savvy one step farther: All his moves are carefully choreographed and managed, with photos sent to his Facebook page. The compositions are near-perfect. I don’t doubt that these leaders bring sincerity to the mission. Swalwell wants to know more about airports. Zuckerberg cares about opioid abuse. Nguyen is concerned with the homeless.
But a second factor is at play here. You may have noticed that there is, ahem, a vacuum of effective leadership at the top of our country.
So while Zuckerberg may insist he has no political motives, the tour of the young billionaire inevitably invites speculation that he might want to run for the presidency someday. (The Facebook chief has said he finds it hard to identify with either Democrats or Republicans.)
Swalwell, meanwhile, has become a vocal critic of the Trump administration in Washington, a go-to man when television stations need a Democratic spokesman in the daily soap opera.
For both of them, the effort to immerse themselves in the real world has political advantages: It makes them seem more in touch with their constituents. It narrows the perceived gap between the powerful and the powerless.
If it were just a matter of listening and learning, they wouldn’t bother to trumpet their experience so quickly to the rest of us.