Opinion | Ossoff: A Cross-Ideological 2028 Dark Horse

What have you made of Jon Ossoff’s emergence as a cross-ideological 2028 dark horse? There’s something interesting in what people are projecting on to Jon Ossoff. I have been jokingly calling him in our team Slack, the Lisan al-Gaib, which is a “Dune” reference to the Chalamet figure who is essentially the kind of chosen one. The foretold prophet. This is a joke. Just to be clear. There is something about the way that he is performing his candidacy, the social media videos they are putting out, the fact that he is very conventionally handsome and young and could be in a movie. Like A.O.C., he’s very controlled in his media. Yeah, he’s not playing a volume game. Not playing a volume game. You don’t see him on podcast interviews right now. No, not playing a volume game. I think that he has figured out a way, in a broadly palatable ideological fashion, to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions, which is important. And Ossoff, they have figured out, you know the clip immediately when you see it. And Ossoff used to be a documentarian, who did documentaries on international corruption. So there’s a background here. This guy actually knows how to create TV about corruption. But there’s something really interesting to me about, yeah. First, the scarcity, the creating want. This who is John Ossoff, this building anticipation. Plus this figuring out of a visual grammar —— – That’s distinct and wholly your own. – And looks like Obama. – Yes, it does look like Obama. – It looks like the hero shot. It’s always a hero shot, which was a constant —— You gotta be skinny for that to work. I just want to, for anyone else who’s taking notes out there in production. You got to be pretty thin for that hero shot to look good. There was a great — the hero shot being this sort of three-quarters upwards angle. – And otherwise you get a lot of chin. – Yeah, you get a lot of chin. And there was this great Onion article on Obama, something like, Obama accidentally stares too far – into the future. – Yeah, yeah. Because he was very good at this. – And the Ossoff shot is always —— – It’s always like this, it doesn’t – seem like he’s looking at a crowd. – Yeah. He’s looking past the crowd.