A Critic at Large: Bound to Win

Memoirs of the Presidential candidates.

Jill Lepore

Amy Klobuchar, Camp Fire girl, was kicked out of fourth grade at Beacon Heights Elementary School, in Plymouth, Minnesota, for wearing pants, and not just any pants but superfly, pink-flowered bell-bottoms. “Amy Klobuchar,” the principal told her, “at Beacon Heights School you wear dresses.” When Julián Castro was in seventh grade, in San Antonio, he poured Elmer’s glue into a school aquarium to see what would happen to the fish, and his mother—a Chicano activist who once ran for city council—set him straight about the consequences of cruelty. Cory Booker’s parents fought against housing discrimination, braving the bared teeth of a real-estate agent’s Doberman pinscher, and when they moved with Cory and his little brother into an all-white neighborhood in New Jersey his father said that the Bookers were “four…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 20, 2019

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