C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 26 , 2019
politics to authenticity politics.
Gone are the days when a presi-
dent could be in a wheelchair and
half the country would not know
it. Booker’s veganism probably
won’t be a selling point among
cattle farmers in the general elec-
tion (“It’s easier to be for some-
one who’s like you than someone
who’s not like you,” Galston says),
but he can prevent it from being
too big a liability by owning it,
being upfront about who he is,
and flooding his Instagram with
shots of veggies.
“My friends joke around with
me about being a vegan,” he said
in an interview, “but I love it and
wouldn’t change a thing. It’s part
of who I am, and I think people
understand that and get it.”
At least, unlike a certain for-
mer president, he likes broccoli.
And then, if you’ve already
hired a millennial to run your
social media strategy, why not
put that bike ride, that workout,
that eagle pose out there? The
first rule of a social media strat-
egy, Lewis says, is to keep feeding
it content. And the second rule is
to keep followers engaged by
showing your candidate letting
their hair down. Wellness con-
tent allows for all of that, though
Lewis says not to read too much
into it.
“Candidates who are polling
low and looking for traction,
they’re throwing spaghetti at the
wall and hoping to find any
opportunity to have anybody pay
attention to what they’re doing,”
he said. “That’s probably the
main strategy on their front.”
Being a wellness candidate,
though, isn’t necessarily a win-
ning strategy. Bill de Blasio in-
sists on being driven 11 miles
every day to work out at his old
YMCA in Brooklyn — and it’s
easily the least popular move he’s
made in a string of unpopular
moves as New York’s mayor.
It’s rather notable that none of
the front-runners seem to be
overly performative about their
self-care routines.
Sen. Bernie Sanders once
talked about chopping wood for
exercise in 2016.
Former vice president Joe
Biden has challenged Trump to a
push-up contest and said he’d
“take him behind the gym and
beat the hell out of him” if they
were in high school. (Biden later
said he regretted that tough
talk.)
Elizabeth Warren goes for six-
mile walks with her dog, Bailey.
And if you’re searching for a
picture of South Bend, Ind., May-
or Pete Buttigieg in a gym, the
closest you’ll get is him posing in
a button-down shirt and tie while
visiting a high school.
It may in fact be Sen. Michael
F. Bennet who has the best strat-
egy of all. He talks about meditat-
ing sometimes, sure, but earlier
this month he offered himself up
as a kind of salve for the country,
the human equivalent of burning
sage from sea to shining sea: “If
you elect me president,” he
tweeted, “I promise you won’t
have to think about me for 2
weeks at a time.... So you can go
raise your kids and live your
lives.”
[email protected]
[email protected]“Decades ago, presidential
campaigns didn’t go on for two
years,” says Kevin Lewis, who
worked on Barack Obama’s first
campaign and was his post-presi-
dency spokesman. Exercise or an
outlet such as meditation or jour-
naling is vital, he says. “You’re
burning the candle at both ends
and if you don’t find ways to put
that energy in the right place, it
will manifest itself in the wrong
place, like in the middle of a
debate.”
Ryan, who’s selling himself as
the working-class Ohio candi-
date, got into yoga to deal with
old injuries from his college foot-
ball days, and said in an interview
he’s found downward dogs and
meditating every day to be ben-
eficial.
“To me, it was something I
really, really enjoyed. Especially
in this business with your mind
going a million miles a minute
just trying to keep up with social
media and all its negative effects.
This is an antidote to that stuff,”
he said. “Plus it builds strength.
When my buddies would tease
me and I’d tell them each, ‘Come
on, big boy, let’s do a workout. See
if you can handle it.’ ”
They couldn’t.W
hat we really might be
seeing, Galston suggests,
is a shift from identitythe house.
In addition to giving you legal
advice, a lawyer could help to
mediate this between the three
of you.Dear Amy: My great uncle,
Tony, lives in St. Peter, Minn. He
is 87. He reads your column
every day. He has created a
game, where he reads the letter
and then thinks about what
advice he would give — and then
he reads your advice to see how
close he gets.
I live in Colorado and read
you in the Denver Post. Given
the distance between us, your
column is a fun way for us to
have conversations and to stay
connected!
JuliaJulia (and Tony): This makes
me very happy. Thank you both!Amy’s column appears seven days a
week at washingtonpost.com/advice.
Write to [email protected]
or Amy Dickinson, P.O. Box 194,
Freeville, N.Y. 13068. You can also
follow her @askingamy.
© 2019 by Amy Dickinson distributed by
Tribune Content AgencyDear Amy: Our sister has lived
with my parents for almost her
entire adult life. For a time, she
paid a small amount for room
and board, but it was mostly
free.
As my parents aged, she
became a caregiver to them until
they passed away.
Now that our parents are gone
my sister continues to live in the
house that all three children
inherited.
We would like to sell the
house and distribute the money
from the sale, just like we have
already done with stocks and
other moneys.
The problem is that our sister
does not want to move. She feels
that she is entitled to stay in the
home because she was the
primary caregiver to our
parents.
My brother and I are not sure
how to handle this. We don’t
want to fight with her, but would
like to move forward and sell the
house.
Your input?
Flummoxed SiblingsFlummoxed Siblings: Do not
handle this yourselves. See an
estate lawyer.
Your sister’s caregiving of
your parents has value, which
might be equaled out by her
years of free room and board.
Find out.
It seems to me that if she has
already received money from the
estate, she could possibly buy
out the two of you and stay inHow do I get over this
building resentment and just
realize it may never happen? I
don’t want to believe that no one
cares.
Want to Share my LifeWant to Share my Life: You’ve
spent the last (almost) two
decades visiting your hometown.
When you do so, you’ve been
able to reconnect with multiple
people at once. Your friends and
family have had less of an
incentive to visit you because of
this.
Your partner’s friends and
family might visit you more
often because your partner
doesn’t have a similar “one-stop
shopping” dynamic with his
hometown.
It might not sound like a big
deal to you, but hopping on a
plane with a 5-year-old for a
multiday visit is a big deal for a
parent, especially when the
ultimate motivation is to spend
adult-time with an old friend.
Your pal might make other trips
with her child because they are
visiting family members who
also have children.
Personal visits are a great way
to keep relationships alive, but
they’re not the only way.
You might mitigate your
resentment about this by
altering your own travel
commitments. Travel more for
pleasure and less out of
obligation. And stop issuing
invitations to people who never
accept them.Dear Amy: I
moved away from
my home city
18 years ago. For
many years I
would go back
and visit all my friends and
family once or twice a year.
Now, many of my friends (and
my parents) have also moved
away.
I find balancing travel to see
my friends, family and my
partner’s parents more
challenging as time goes on.
One of my oldest friends has
visited me only once in the past
18 years, even though I have
gone out of my way to visit her
and get to know her partner and
child.
In the past two years I have
invited her to come and visit me
more than a few times.
I have a nice home and guest
room, live in a desirable city
with fun things for adults and
children to do. There are easy
and affordable flights between
our cities.
My friend has the summers
off.
She has a young child, now 5,
who seems to be her excuse, but
I notice she has managed to
travel to other places.
Basically, all of my partner’s
friends and family have stayed
with us, but it seems that no old
friends or family members care
to visit me or get to share in my
adult life.
I ignored this for years, but it’s
been 18 years now — come on!signal who they are by what kind
of wellness activities they engage
in. “There’s an idea that it’s a
progressive thing to look after
yourself. A lot of these wellness
tropes get associated with politi-
cal movements: Veganism is asso-
ciated with an interest in climate
change, and good health is associ-
ated with a moral correctness
now.”
Much of the wellness world is
based on the idea of ridding
yourself of things that are toxic, a
word that liberals have often
applied to Trump and the current
political climate. “So the search
would be for something clean,”
Larocca says. “And it’s set up in
opposition to someone like
Trump.”
But another reason we’re see-
ing so many Democratic candi-
dates seemingly obsessed with
wellness might be simply that
they need it.
“Campaigns are exhausting.
They frazzle your soul.... It’s like
trying to ride a bicycle in an
earthquake,” Galston says.
Candidates might arrive at one
state in the morning and wind up
in another at the end of the day,
all while trying to do their day
jobs as senators, governors, etc.
and maintaining a life with his or
her family. And that’s in an aver-
age year without 20-some candi-
dates.and Michelle Obama-fied. People
talk about therapy and holistic
betterment or the HeadSpace app
in everyday conversation. (Hey,
even Clinton is now mostly ve-
gan.)
“The Democratic Party this
time around is not trying very
hard so far to appeal to working-
class voters because in Democrat-
ic primaries there aren’t as many
as there used to be,” says William
Galston, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution who’s
worked on six presidential cam-
paigns, including Clinton’s.
“What you see in the concentra-
tion of yoga, meditation and
working out is classic tropes and
habits of the urban upper middle
class.”
The U.S. wellness industry is
set to reach a market value of
$179 billion in 2020, and it stands
to reason that people who can pay
for yoga class have enough spare
change to donate to a political
campaign. Williamson has met
constituents in a yoga studio.
And Tim Ryan — author of the
2012 self-help tome “A Mindful
Nation: How a Simple Practice
Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Im-
prove Performance, and Recap-
ture the American Spirit” — held
a yoga fundraiser in New York
City. (“We raised good money!”)
There’s other coding involved,
too, Larocca says. Candidates canwith the idea that the world was
just too traumatic and too diffi-
cult and you have to take care of
yourself,” says Amy Larocca, a
New York Magazine writer who’s
working on a book on the well-
ness movement for Knopf. “If you
look at Instagram mentions of
self-care, they increase exponen-
tially after the election of Trump.”
The search term, according to
Google Trends, hit a five-year
high in the week after the elec-
tion, and peaked in September
2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh
hearings. More than 6 in 10
Americans report the current po-
litical climate to be a stressor,
according to a 2018 report from
the American Psychological Asso-
ciation.
“Mental wellness is by far the
biggest trend in the U.S. wellness
market — whether it’s the big
spike in meditation, the explo-
sion in cannabis and CBD, or the
new obsession with sleep,” says
Beth McGroarty of the Global
Wellness Institute, a nonprofit
that researches the $4.2 trillion
global wellness economy. “We
seem to desire more than any-
thing to be unconscious, the only
time we’re not in front of screens,
social media, and divisive, insane
news cycles.”
McGroarty says there’s also
been an increase in interest in
what might be considered “woo-
woo spiritual wellness” such as
astrology, crystals and tarot read-
ing since Trump’s election. That’s
self-care in 2019.
A 1988 quote from African
American lesbian poet Audre
Lorde can be found paraphrased
and misappropriated all over Ins-
tagram: “Caring for myself is not
self-indulgence, it is self-preser-
vation, and that is an act of
political warfare.” She was refer-
ring to her life of marginalization
because of her identity. This mo-
ment probably wasn’t what she
hoped to inspire.S
oon after the end of the first
night of debates in Detroit,
Williamson’s followers gath-
ered in a half-moon in a nearby
concert hall, singing “Amazing
Grace” and waiting for their long-
shot candidate to bless them with
her presence.
She greeted them with an im-
promptu speech about angels,
demons, love, hate and, some-
how, Abraham Lincoln. Then a
voice rang out from the crowd:
“We need to make an offering!”
Spiritual? Religious? Pagan sacri-
fice?
Whatever the person meant,
Williamson understood. “Tonight
I don’t do that,” she said, but she
did encourage them to show her
their love in the form of enough
$1 donations to meet qualifica-
tions for getting onto the next
debate stage. (So far Williamson
has passed the donor threshold,
but she looks unlikely to meet a
polling requirement by Wednes-
day’s deadline.)
By partaking in wellness cul-
ture, Democrats are in many
ways speaking to their base,
which is not the same base that
delighted in Bill Clinton leisurely
jogging to McDonald’s.
And they’re speaking to a
mainstream culture in which the
language has been Oprah-fiedonly person in the world power-
ful enough to help Aerosmith’s
Steven Tyler break his drug and
alcohol habits. Williamson may
be Goop personified, but she’s
hardly alone in a field of vegeta-
ble-munching, weightlifting,
mantra-chanting Democratic
hopefuls out to show not tell that
they can be America’s healthy
alternative to a technically obese
president who tweet rants at
4 a.m.
And because this is an age
when follower count presumably
leads to votes, these private, indi-
vidualistic rituals have taken on
the cast of 24-hour Instagram
theater:
Sen. Cory Booker, a vegan who
meditates daily (“I find it centers
me,” he said), had to restrict
himself to fried PB&J sandwiches
on a stick, instead of the standard
pork chop on a stick, at the Iowa
State Fair.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a vegetari-
an, has done an interview in the
ocean while surfing and is the
only female “grunting gym rat” to
take part in a hardcore circuit
training workout for select mem-
bers of the House.
Sen. Kamala D. Harris is a
professed lover of SoulCycle, that
spin-class-slash-lifestyle-choice
where you shout out affirmations
and strive for both your personal
best and euphoria all in 45 sweaty
minutes. (She’s said she won’t
join boycotts of the brand be-
cause its owner threw a fundrais-
er for President Trump.)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand does
bench presses with 25-pound
weights both for the benefits of
reporters and impressive, if ton-
ally deaf Twitter videos.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock
announced he was running via a
Twitter video of him literally
running in a charity race.
Former congressman John
Delaney, easily the most jacked of
all the candidates, regularly posts
Twitter videos of his workouts
doing dead lifts (“Got to be strong
to beat Trump”) or doing 10
pullups (“Easy!”).
Then there’s Beto O’Rourke,
who, as he contemplated running
for president, took his own jour-
ney of self-discovery that took
him all the way to the Santuario
de Chimayo, a chapel built atop
an ancient holy site in northern
New Mexico and home to what is
believed to be magical dirt with
healing properties.
“I went in,” O’Rourke said.
“And ate some dirt.” (This isn’t
exactly encouraged.)
As a candidate, O’Rourke is so
wellness-oriented that he’s held
an eight-mile bicycling town hall,
and inspired a recurring Jimmy
Fallon Web sketch called “Beto
Breaks the Internet” in which
Fallon impersonates O’Rourke
doing, say, an Instagram story of
his “12th workout of the day.” In
it, Fallon-as-O’Rourke declares,
“Doctors say the chemical make-
up of my sweat is closer to Gator-
ade than water, so I just leave it
on the machine just in case any-
one needs a little boost.”
“Wellness is not an idea that is
exclusively left, but definitely the
2016 election was when you really
saw the term explode on the left
SELF CARE FROM C1
2020 candidates race to embody the self-care movement
Hometown visits wear thin for this tired traveler
Ask Amy
AMY
DICKINSONThe
Reliable
SourceHelena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil
are away. Their column will resume
when they return.SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POSTSERGIO FLORES/GETTY IMAGESSen. Kamala D. Harris, above,
flips meat at the Iowa State Fair
this month. Sen. Cory Booker, a
vegan, left, had to restrict
himself to fried PB&J
sandwiches on a stick. Several
presidential hopefuls have
professed their wellness
routines during their
campaigns.