On Affordability, Executive Power, and the Value of Presence
A Kitchen Table Conversation with Governor Wes Moore
He didn’t hesitate.
I asked him what his favorite food was, and before I could even finish the sentence, he was already somewhere else … back in his grandmother’s kitchen, back in the smell of whatever was on the stove, back in the story that made him who he is.
Jamaican food. His grandmother, born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica, an amazing cook. The food that resonates with him most, he said, is the food tied to his family.
I told him what I believe: all the best food stories, just like all the best human stories, involve immigrants of some kind.
He didn’t miss a beat. “That’s exactly right.”
That’s how this conversation started. And it tells you something about Wes Moore before he ever gets to the harder stuff.
He is the 63rd Governor of Maryland. The first Black governor in the state’s 246-year history. Only the third Black governor ever elected in the United States. A Rhodes Scholar. A captain in the 82nd Airborne who served in Afghanistan and earned a Bronze Star. A bestselling author. Former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, which distributed over $600 million toward lifting families out of poverty during his tenure.
He is also a man who lost his father when he was three years old.
I asked him how the experience of losing his father so young and being raised by his mother informs how he raises his son today.
He paused. Not long. But you could feel the weight of the question landing somewhere real.
He told me he has two kids. A daughter who’s 15. A son who’s 12. He loves them both endlessly, he said. But he knows there is a unique role he is playing for his son — and he knows it specifically because of what was absent when he was coming up.
His mother was amazing, he said. There were just certain nuances of being a man that she couldn’t quite teach him. Not because she wasn’t extraordinary. Because she wasn’t a man.
“The same thing about my daughter,” he said. “There are just certain nuances I can’t teach her because I don’t know it.”
It was one of the more honest things I’ve heard a father say in a long time. Not performative. Not political. Just true.
He said what his mother gave him — what she could give him, what she refused to stop giving him — was presence.
Being there. Allowing mistakes. Allowing learning. Being someone you could go to for advice and counsel.
“Just being a good parent. Just being present for them.”
I’ve been thinking about that word ever since. Presence. We talk about fatherhood in terms of lessons and discipline and modeling. And those things matter. But Moore kept coming back to something simpler and harder than all of it.
Just being there.
He grew up without it. He knows exactly what the absence feels like. And he has built his parenting — and, in a meaningful way, his governing — around filling that space.
His son James recited the Pledge of Allegiance at his father’s inauguration.
I don’t think that’s a small thing. I think that’s a man who has spent his whole life thinking about what it means to show up, and finding a way to put his kid at the center of the moment that defined his career.
There’s a book Moore wrote called The Other Wes Moore. Two boys. Same name. Same city. Same circumstances — Black, fatherless, raised by single mothers in the Bronx and Baltimore, same era, same streets. One became the Governor of Maryland. The other is serving a life sentence in prison for felony murder.
He wrote: “The chilling truth is that Wes’s story could have been mine; the tragedy is that my story could have been his.”
When I listen to him talk about his son, about presence, about the particular weight a father carries for a boy who is watching him — I hear that book underneath every word.
He knows what the fork in the road looks like. He’s studied it. He’s lived it. And now he’s governing a state with 6 million people, a significant number of them young men, and he carries that knowledge into the work every single day.
We shifted to the political. Not because I wanted to pull him away from the personal — I didn’t — but because with this Governor, the two are not separate things.
He is the Vice Chair of the National Governors Association. I asked him about the role governors should play in unwinding what we’re seeing from Washington right now.
He was clear-eyed about the limits. Governors can’t stop wars. Can’t bring gas prices down. Can’t unilaterally reverse tariffs that are driving up the cost of everything from groceries to hardware.
“I wish we could. But no governor has that ability or authority.”
What governors can do, he said, is work in their lane — and work hard in it.
In Maryland, that has meant a middle-class tax cut, because the middle class, he said, actually needed the relief.
It has meant going after grocery chains that are using your phone data to price-gouge you at the register. Maryland became the first state in the country to make price manipulation by supermarkets illegal.
It has meant working with private sector partners to expand access to generic prescription drugs — bringing down costs for people who are getting squeezed on every side.
I brought up what Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York with public-private bodegas as a model for keeping pressure on prices at the neighborhood level. Moore was measured but clear.
“We have got to make sure these prices are getting lowered. And we’ve got to be creative on it.”
He’s right. And the creative part is what distinguishes the governors and mayors who are actually governing from the ones who are waiting for Washington to fix things that Washington has broken.
He put it plainly: there are people right now who think the pain people are feeling is a hoax.
“For people who are in our communities, it’s not a hoax for them. This is real.”
I’ve talked to a lot of elected officials. Most of them speak in a register that keeps you at a distance — careful, managed, calibrated.
Wes Moore does not speak that way.
He speaks the way a man speaks when he has already done the hardest accounting of his own life and arrived somewhere on the other side of it. The story is already out there, in his own words, in his own book. He has already told you how close he came to being the other Wes Moore.
What’s left is just the work.
Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, he said something that I keep turning over.
He said that what all of our kids require is what his mother gave him: presence.
Not a title. Not a curriculum. Not a policy.
Presence.
I think about that in the context of my own kids. My own blended family. The particular weight of raising sons in a moment when the definition of manhood is being contested from about fifteen directions at once — some of them useful, most of them not.
I think about the other Wes Moore, 12 years old in the same city, without anyone to anchor him to a different version of himself.
And I think about what it means that the man who escaped that fate is now the governor of the state where it happened — and that he starts every conversation about policy with the same place he starts every conversation about parenting.
Presence. Just being there. Refusing to stop showing up.
That’s the whole thing, isn’t it.
Whether you’re raising a son, running a state, or trying to make democracy work in a moment when it’s under real pressure — the answer is the same.
You show up. You stay. You don’t look away.
The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.
Great story! Being present is always the most important aspect of being a good person. There are so many distractions that the practice of being present is very challenging but crucial.
beautiful. And that's all we can do: suit up and show up and do the work.