Turns Out Francesca Hong's Chief of Staff Doesn't Like White People, Either

There's something almost comic about the Culver's story, if it weren't so telling. A candidate for governor of Wisconsin gets uncomfortable around a room full of elderly white customers eating frozen custard and, rather than just admit that or shrug it off, she tells her own son they're out of custard so she can leave. That's not a policy position. That's a reflex. And reflexes tell you more about a person than any stump speech does.

Francesca Hong wants to run the state on a message of inclusion, but the instinct she modeled for her kid in that parking lot was avoidance based on the skin color of the people in the room. If a Republican candidate had walked into a diner, gotten weird about the crowd, and invented an excuse to bail, we all know how that story gets written up. The standard doesn't change just because the candidate has a "D" next to her name and a nice line about equity.

Then there's the chief of staff, which suggests this isn't just one awkward moment from a stressed-out mom. It's a pattern in the operation itself, from the top of the ticket down to the people running her office. When the discomfort with white constituents shows up both in the candidate's personal behavior and in her staffing, that's not an isolated slip. That's culture.

Wisconsin voters deserve a governor who can walk into any Culver's in the state, order the custard, and sit with whoever's there. Small thing, sure. But it's the small things that show you who someone actually is when nobody's supposed to be watching.