On Wednesday, members of Cuesta College’s Democrats Club hosted U.S. Representative Salud Carbajal for a quick round-table discussion about affordability on the SLO campus. Around 10 students and the club’s faculty advisor, Zachary Gass, attended the meeting. Another Cuestonian reporter and I were present to cover the event – an opportunity I was excited and nervous about. 

I love Carbajal. I’ve never been happier to vote for someone. I follow him on social media, and I read every article I see about him. I attended a town hall with him and Jimmy Panetta, and everything I have seen made me like him even more. My relationship with him has always felt personal, so much so that my friends and I just call him “Salud” and talk about him like he is just another friend on the Central Coast.

He grew up the son of a farm worker in Oxnard. His family relied on public services, which allowed him to be the first in his family to attend college. He used scholarships, grants and loans while he served in our armed forces and attended school. It is because of these government programs that he was able to succeed, and beyond just saying it, he actually fights to protect these programs in our federal government. 

I have always loved Carbajal, not just because I support his policies, but because he always seemed like one of us. He always felt like a friend of a friend, someone I didn’t know but could relate to or see myself knowing. 

Until Wednesday. 

Wednesday, for the first time, he was a politician.

Carbajal arrived several minutes late to the campus event. He popped into the room jovially, made a joke about his transition lenses, and walked directly to the students gathered around a round table in the center of one of the largest rooms on campus. He walked around the table, shook every student’s hand and asked for their names. This action suggested that what would happen next would be intimate and personal, just like his greeting. It was not.

For 15 minutes of the 45-minute session, Carbajal talked about his past and where he came from. He spoke casually and conversationally, but for some reason, it did not feel authentic, even though I knew it was all true. It seemed like a curated story that was written to revolve around his main talking point of the day: affordability. His casual tone and attempt at playful banter were not reciprocated by most of the students present. After opening the conversation to questions, there was a silence around the room until a student broke the tension with a question about AI-generated content designed to trick consumers. Three students asked two questions each, while the rest of the students sat and didn’t interact. Whether this was from nervousness or disinterest, I do not know.

For every question a student asked, Carbajal would try to refocus on affordability. He brought up several bills he is working on, which he had on a prepared list his assistant handed him during the conversation.

Wednesday’s event was a PR move. It was all fluff and personality with no real substance. This is pretty standard for these types of events, and when I reflected on the experience and asked myself why I was disappointed, I realized I had forgotten that Carbajal is a politician, or maybe more accurately, I had chosen to forget he was a politician, and that facade ended.

Carbajal’s job is in politics. He is a politician. I have always seen myself in him, and I took that and formed in my mind a relationship and familiarity with this figure. On Wednesday, he wasn’t a friend of a friend; he was a politician, and a good one. He did his job at the event: he stayed on message and was personable, charismatic and kind.

Carbajal didn’t do anything wrong on Wednesday; he behaved like every politician on a PR tour, and he did it well. He made appearances across the county on Wednesday before Cuesta’s event, all focused on local and national affordability issues. But Wednesday’s talk at Cuesta was just a stop on the tour. Any air of intimacy seemed performative and practiced.

After the event, one of the student participants said, “It was just like every other politician I’ve ever met,” followed by a shrug.

As a member of the House, he is up for re-election every two years. By the time House members are sworn in, they are already fundraising and preparing to campaign again. The reality is that the constant need to run and re-run takes away politicians’ ability to truly connect and spend time fostering genuine, intimate relationships with their constituents. It’s the name of the game, and even the most well-intentioned politicians are subject to the reality of our political system. Fighting the good fight is a long game; change doesn’t come quickly. To keep up the fight, politicians have to play the game; they have to fundraise and campaign. They have to reduce themselves to talking points to explain what they are doing under serious time and location constraints. 

I have no doubt that Carbajal actually cared about talking to students. The fact that he even included Cuesta College’s Democrats Club in this tour is a meaningful attempt to get the student perspective and is a move that should be applauded. I truly believe he cares and that he is fighting for the people. The fact that I felt a personal connection with him until Wednesday proves he is good at his job. I still believe he is the best representative I have ever had, anywhere I have lived across the country. 

On Wednesday, though, I realized that my connection with him as a human is based on the idea of who he was, as shown to me through the media and past events. In those larger and impersonal realms, I felt a connection with him as a person. However, in the most intimate setting I’ve ever been around him, I felt the least connected with him.

I realized that Salud Carbajal is not my friend. He is a politician and my representative. There is nothing wrong with that. However, it did make me realize my own biases and my desire to truly connect with my representatives. Unfortunately, that connection and intimacy are rare, not because politicians don’t want them, but because they ultimately have to play the game to change it. Even though he is a politician playing the game, Carbajal really does his best to connect with his constituents and represent us accurately, even if he sometimes misses the mark.

I will continue to vote for and support Carbajal, but I will do so as an informed constituent, not with the same narrative bias that drove my support for him before.