Khanna had anticipated that wariness. “Look, you people in this room will disagree on where I stand on abortion, on gay marriage. But why can’t we find the place where we do agree?” he said.
“I just think we’ve got to wake up as a country across the political divide and come together on how we build the next generation of manufacturing in America. And we’ve got to get these jobs not just in Silicon Valley, or New York, or Austin, but around the country,” he said.
“We have forgotten what won World War II. It was a victory of production. I mean, it was obviously the men who sacrificed their lives in Normandy, and our amazing military, but the way we really won is we outproduced Japan and Germany by orders of magnitude.”
Khanna, according to former and current advisers and aides, is at heart something of an academic and a policy wonk. But he’s keen, too, on the language of politics and persuasion even to the point of bumper-sticker slogans. It matters what you say, he believes, but realistically, it might matter even more how you say it.
“He’s just very good from a messaging perspective,” Steve Spinner, a friend and mentor and Khanna’s campaign chair for the past decade, told me. “That’s an area that Democrats historically struggle with, from the White House on down, and it’s something that Ro is actually quite good at.”
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