Tulsi Gabbard, the Mystery Candidate
Tulsi Gabbard was relieved to have escaped out the back door of the Surf Ballroom and across the parking lot. It was getting dark on a Friday night in August, and she had just finished her five-minute speech at the annual Wing Ding fundraising dinner in Clear Lake, Iowa. As her 2020 presidential rivals ticked through theirs, one of Gabbard’s aides found us a spot in the park next to the jukebox-style memorial to Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, who played the Surf just before the plane crash that killed them in 1959.
Gabbard, the 38-year-old representative from Hawaii, seems to have an instinct for getting people to pay attention to her, I noted.
“Really?” she replied.
I pointed out that her sister, Vrindavan, the main decision maker of Tulsi’s 2020 presidential campaign, who is rarely more than a few feet away from the candidate, was laughing. Tulsi didn’t seem to register the reaction.
“If you think this was all some grand strategy, it wasn't, I promise,” Gabbard said.
Good politicians are smooth. Gabbard is beyond smooth. She’s unflappable to the point of being confounding, even to the many people I spoke with who have worked with her for years in Washington, D.C., and at home in Hawaii. She may be the most elusive candidate running for president, with a campaign that has followed none of the rules of conventional or contemporary politics, and a small but committed group of supporters.
During the first Democratic debate, in June, Gabbard took Representative Tim Ryan’s legs out from under him over his support for the war in Afghanistan; in the days after, she defended former Vice President Joe Biden against Senator Kamala Harris’s attack on his views about busing. At the second debate, in July, Gabbard clotheslined Harris with details about her record as California attorney general That night, according to Google, Gabbard was the most-searched candidate.
