Back in the day, before motorcades and scandal headlines, before Bill Clinton played sax and Newt Gingrich decided to choke the soul out of public service, Henry Cisneros and I went to the same Catholic school on the West Side of San Antonio. He was in fourth grade. I was in first. He probably didn’t know me from Adam, but I sure knew him—sharp kid, already carried himself like he knew the world would call him “Mr. Secretary” someday.
The nuns ran the place like a Marine boot camp in sensible shoes, and they were dead serious about two things: proper penmanship and the absolute moral duty to help the poor. You didn’t leave Catholic School without some sense that politics, when done right, ought to be a form of grace.
So fast forward a few decades—I’m a political reporter, he’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development—and we’re sitting across from each other at the Hotel del Coronado. The kind of place with chandeliers that cost more than a teacher’s yearly salary, and views so perfect you’d swear God subcontracted them.
He’s in town to support a local congressional candidate. I’m there for the story. Two Catholic boys at the edge of an empire.
And I figure, this is the moment. So I ask him: “Henry, what the hell happened to the Democratic Party? Where are the ideals of JFK, LBJ, Bobby—even Hubert damn Humphrey?”
He smiles that polished Cabinet smile—just enough teeth, just enough pause to sound reflective.
“The ideals are still there,” he says. “But politics have changed.”
And I’ll be honest: it broke something in me.
Because here was a man who’d once carried the weight of representation on his shoulders—who’d walked into rooms that weren’t built for people like us and made them listen. And now, when the party was adrift—talking like technocrats, legislating like Republicans, triangulating the soul right out of its own base—this was all he had?
The ideals are still there…
Maybe. But if you have to dig through layers of donor memos and Silicon Valley gloss to find them, are they really?
Look, I was raised Catholic. I can take disappointment. I’ve sat through homilies that could bore the paint off walls. But this was Henry. A man who used to talk about dignity and justice and building cities that didn’t crumble just because they were poor.
And now he was giving me… what? A weather report?
Let’s be honest: when the GOP took Congress in ’94, Clinton didn’t just pivot—he damn near plagiarized Gingrich, calling it the Third Way. Welfare reform, the crime bill, Wall Street coddling—all under a banner that used to mean something. They called it triangulation, like it was geometry instead of political cowardice. The Democratic Party learned to talk like tech CEOs and act like budget hawks. They trimmed the soul right out of the platform and sold it as modernization.
And folks like Henry? They knew it. Hell, they felt it. You could see it in his eyes—he still believed in housing, cities, people. But the party had moved on to algorithms and market incentives.
Then came the scandal. Payments to a mistress, the feds, the resignation, the pardon. It was messy, and it knocked him off the national stage.
But that’s not what stuck with me.
It was that moment at the Hotel Del. When I asked where the old Democratic Party went—and the man who helped build it couldn’t give me more than a gentle sigh and a shoulder shrug.
I didn’t need fire and brimstone. I just needed honesty. I needed someone—him—to say out loud what the rest of us have known since the Clinton years:
Democrats didn’t lose the party. The party lost its nerve.
Henry Cisneros should’ve been a defining voice in the fight to bring it back. But that day, I saw a great man give a small answer.
And somewhere, Sister Mary-Whack-You-With-a-Ruler is shaking her head and muttering, “You knew better.”