Does the Jason Kander Story Have a Third Act?

There’s a saying, though it’s more of a whisper, that politicians are damaged people. That those who run for office have a pathological need for validation, that they’re willing to go to obscene lengths to get attention, even if it means putting themselves or their family at risk. Jason Kander is ready to admit that all of this is true.

You may remember Kander as the Millennial Afghanistan veteran who emerged on the national stage just under a decade ago. He was the clean-shaven, strong-jawlined Democrat who rapidly climbed the ranks in Missouri politics, and was soon seen as the left’s “next big thing.” He believed he was too. He gleefully racked up hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and basked in the DMs that rolled in from new friends. Celebrities such as Chelsea Handler and Andy Cohen once threw him fundraisers. Kander was daring enough to explore a run for president at the age of 36. His idol, Barack Obama, even granted him a private meeting to discuss the idea. “Jason, you have what I had,” he recalls Obama saying. “You’re the natural.”

Kander was reminiscing about this chapter of his life as we sat in his black pickup truck waiting in the carpool line for his son, True, to come out of elementary school. He has a warm baritone and speaks with a midwestern lilt, sounding, one would imagine, as the Brawny paper-towel guy might if he showed up on a cable-news panel. Kander’s intonation also resembles Obama’s. When the two sat down, in the winter of 2018, the former president dispensed what Kander described as “tactical” campaign advice, as well as this maxim: Never believe your team’s hype about you, and never let a rival (or Fox News) get under your skin. Obama told Kander that if he was going to run for president, he’d have to maintain a sense of who he was independent of the machine around him.