If we're talking about Sunday's Kingston gathering of Ulster County Democrats for the party's annual spring brunch, the correct answer is Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose appearance had been billed only as one of “possible surprise guests.”

The governor was joined by virtually every local Democratic (mainstream Democratic, to be clear) office holder and activist of significance. Co-headlining the bill were the party's Twin Towers, Congressional Representatives Pat Ryan (NY-18) and Josh Riley (NY-19), both of whom check in at enough over six feet tall to make a decent backcourt.

The governor was in fine form, down-to-earth and combative before a crowd that could not be more supportive. Retail politics she has down to a science, no question. “Outrage to action. I'm outraged. I'm downright pissed off and I know you are too,” she began, then offered a brief history of her journey from youthful protest to electoral politics and upwards through a series of offices in then-deep-red Western New York.

What is to be done, according to Hochul? “Take outrage and have action, not just talk,” she advised. “Not to give a flowery speech, not be really good on social media. What are you doing in reality? Are you going to talk to neighbors? Are you going into diners and actually rolling up your sleeves and answering questions?”

Ulster's Democrats got a big thumbs up in that regard from Yasmin Radjy, executive director of Swing Left which, as its name suggests, targets swing districts on behalf of the party. “I'm not from here,” she said. “I am a proud resident of [Washington] D.C. But we, from the outside, looking over you all, really see this county and your elected representatives as a model of a lot of the things that the party needs to be doing more of. … Your candidates all the way up and down the ballot don't neatly fall into the progressive and moderate buckets that a lot of think pieces tell us we fall into. I've never met a voter who neatly falls into those when I go out and knock on doors. People are idiosyncratic. They have all sorts of complicated, competing beliefs. And your candidates get that and live that in their work, and they do that in a way that reflects your collective values.”

Concluding speakers Riley and Ryan offered similar remarks, denouncing President Trump on numerous issues and exhorting the crowd to connect to working people.

“I'm worried about democracy,” Riley said. “It's hanging by a thread. What can we do? One of the things you've seen following Pat's work in Congress and what I'm hoping to do as well, is based on the idea that you cannot have a strong democracy in this country without a strong middle class. And that's why I've been so relentlessly focused on kitchen-table issues.”

“We're coming up, just a few months before critical midterms, on the 250-year anniversary of this great nation,” said self-confessed “history nerd” Ryan. “I really believe that we are going to marshal that same energy in a different way and figure this out — and I haven't figured it out yet, but when our founding mothers and fathers were being oppressed by a cruel, unaccountable, authoritarian — taxed without representation so that the king and the Crown could have more for themselves while everybody else paid — they stood up, they spoke out, and they fought back. … We are the patriots at this moment.”