The morning Senator Croft discovered he had accidentally voted for the wrong bill, his communications director handed him a spreadsheet titled “Emotional Response Options” and asked him to pick three.
Croft studied the spreadsheet. Column A listed feelings. Column B listed corresponding gestures. Remorse paired with a hand over the heart. Determination paired with a clenched fist at a podium. Humble accountability paired with a brief, camera-friendly pause before speaking.
“What happened to just being sorry?” Croft asked.
Brianna Voss, twenty-eight years old, Yale, three years in the Washington ecosystem, looked at him the way veterinarians look at very old dogs. “That’s not on-brand for your quarter.”
The bill in question had allocated forty million dollars to a program called the National Institute for Compassionate Governance, which was itself a federally funded body whose primary output, in its eighteen months of existence, had been a report recommending the creation of a federal body to study the concept of compassionate governance. Croft had meant to vote against it. His thumb had found the green button in the dark of a Tuesday evening when his blood sugar was low and his mind was somewhere in coastal Maine.
By Wednesday morning, the vote had made him a hero to three different advocacy groups and an enemy of two think tanks that had previously given him awards.
“We should lean into the hero side,” Brianna said. “I’ve already drafted a statement about your longstanding commitment to empathetic policy frameworks.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Nobody does. That’s the point.”
Croft was sixty-one. He had spent fourteen years in the Senate representing a state that produced corn, soybeans, and a particular strain of voter who distrusted anything that couldn’t be weighed on a scale. He had been re-elected three times on a platform he privately summarized as: government should mostly leave you alone, fix the roads, and stay out of your medicine cabinet. He was not a complicated man. He was, by Washington standards, practically a hieroglyph.
The Institute’s director, a Dr. Paulette Nhem, called at ten-fifteen to express gratitude and schedule a briefing. Croft agreed to the briefing because Brianna was standing in his office making the face she made when she needed him to agree to things.
Dr. Nhem arrived Thursday with two aides, a projector, and a thirty-slide deck titled “Toward a Taxonomy of Governmental Feeling.” Her hair was silver and she wore reading glasses on a beaded chain. She looked like someone’s beloved aunt, which Croft suspected was deliberate.
The first slide showed a pyramid. The bottom tier was labeled Procedural Empathy. The middle tier was Structural Compassion. The top tier, the apex, glowing faintly gold in the projected image, was called Empathic Sovereignty.
“What is Empathic Sovereignty?” Croft asked, because he was still a man who asked questions when he didn’t understand things, which in Washington marked him as either very green or very dangerous.
“It’s the state in which governmental actors have fully internalized the emotional landscape of their constituents,” Dr. Nhem said, “and legislate from that internalized landscape rather than from external political pressure.”
Croft thought about this. “So you mean doing what people actually want.”
Dr. Nhem smiled carefully. “It’s considerably more nuanced than that.”
“Walk me through the nuance.”
The nuance, as best Croft could track it across the next forty minutes, involved three pilot programs in different federal agencies, a planned series of workshops for congressional staff, a quarterly journal that had so far published two issues, and a proposed framework for what Dr. Nhem called Empathy Impact Assessments, which would require any new legislation to include a scored analysis of its projected emotional effect on affected populations.
“Who does the scoring?” Croft asked.
“We would,” Dr. Nhem said.
The room was quiet for a moment. One of her aides, a young man with the alert stillness of someone who had been trained never to react to anything, stared at the middle distance.
“Let me make sure I have this right,” Croft said. “Congress passes a law. Before it passes, your Institute scores how the law is going to make people feel. And if the score is low—”
“It would trigger a mandatory review period.”
“And during the mandatory review period—”
“The legislation would be paused while additional stakeholder emotional consultation was conducted.”
Croft looked at Brianna, who was looking at her phone with the focused intensity of someone who had decided to be somewhere else in her mind.
“Dr. Nhem,” Croft said, “I voted for your funding by accident.”
The aide stopped staring at the middle distance. Dr. Nhem’s smile did not move but something behind it recalibrated.
“I appreciate your candor,” she said.
“I’m going to vote to defund you in April.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
“But I want you to understand something first.” Croft leaned forward. He had spent fourteen years in rooms like this one, and he had learned that the most useful thing a politician could do, occasionally, was tell the truth just to see what it did to the air. “I grew up in a town of four thousand people. My father ran a grain elevator. When the commodity markets went sideways in 1987, three of his friends lost their farms. He drove to each house. He sat at the kitchen table. He didn’t have a taxonomy. He didn’t score anybody’s feelings. He just showed up.”
Dr. Nhem was listening. It was the particular listening of someone building a counterargument.
“Your Institute,” Croft continued, “has spent eighteen months producing a report recommending more studying. You want to slow down legislation so you can consult about feelings. You will employ, what, thirty people to do this? Forty? And when a family in my state loses their health insurance because a bill got stuck in your review process because somebody’s emotional impact score was too low, who drives to their house? Who sits at the table?”
“Senator, the Institute exists precisely to prevent that kind of harm—”
“The Institute exists,” Croft said, “because somewhere along the line we decided that caring about people and building a bureaucracy to document the caring were the same thing. They’re not.”
Dr. Nhem gathered herself. She was good at this. You didn’t get forty million dollars appropriated for a concept by being rattled. “I understand your skepticism. And I think if you look at our second-quarter metrics—”
“You have metrics for empathy.”
“Proxy indicators. Constituent satisfaction surveys, response time analysis—”
“You have a customer satisfaction survey for feelings.”
The young aide made a very small sound. It might have been a cough.
After they left, Brianna looked up from her phone. “That went poorly.”
“It went honestly,” Croft said.
“Those are not the same thing.”
He drafted his own statement that afternoon. No speechwriter, no column B of corresponding gestures. It ran two paragraphs. It said he had voted for the Institute by mistake, that he believed the forty million dollars could be better spent on direct services in the states it was meant to help, and that he intended to introduce a bill to redirect the funds accordingly. He said he was sorry for the confusion his accidental vote had caused and that he looked forward to a full committee discussion.
It was the dullest press release Brianna had ever seen. She sent it out verbatim because he asked her to and because after three years she had begun to suspect he was right about more things than she’d been trained to believe.
The advocacy groups withdrew their support by evening. One of the think tanks sent him a letter restoring his award. A reporter called it a refreshing, if politically baffling, move. A blogger called it a coded message to corporate interests. A woman in his district named Helen Marsh, seventy-three, retired schoolteacher, sent an email that said simply: Finally.
He pinned the email to the corkboard above his desk, between a photo of his father and a note his daughter had written him when he was first elected that said: Don’t become one of them, Dad.
He was working on it.
The Institute published a response the following week. It was six pages long. It assessed the emotional impact of Senator Croft’s statement on key stakeholder groups. His statement had scored a four out of ten on what the report called the Collaborative Affect Index.
Four was low.
In the margin of the printed report, Croft wrote one word: Good.
He left it on Brianna’s desk. She stared at it for a long moment, and then she did something she almost never did in the office. She laughed. It was a real one. It had no brand.
Leave a Reply