Dear America,
We are still in excess of a year from the next presidential election and the nomination process has already waxed into an intense imposition on common sense and civility. The Republicans have allowed their nomination process to become a circus that may go into periods of dormancy but it is always active to some degree. I feel as if I have been inoculated against it, but in its omnipresence it cannot be ignored. But the Democrats seem to be lapsing into the same excess as characterizes everything Republican, and it bothers me. Usually, the Democrats exhibit a kind of moderation that the Republicans eschew in favor of hyperbole and prevarication, but that now seems to be the style for candidates of both parties. I saw John Kasich, the Ohio governor, on some news program last night bragging about how he brought the state from its $8 billion budget deficit to a $3 billion treasury surplus...apparently alone...and that he thus generated 350,000 new jobs during his tenure and saved the state from a Democratic cataclysm...again, single handed. But I also saw Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, waxing rhapsodic about his administration's record of the best median income in the nation, though he at least redeemed himself with a declaration that he favors reenactment of the Glass-Steagall Act, which did a far more comprehensive job of regulating the financial industry that Dodd-Frank does, thus insulating the people of the country from the greed of the big money people that has now twice sent this country reeling into economic depression. Of course, there is Hillary Clinton and her server, which she has now...finally...given to the FBI for examination, though it has no doubt been wiped so clean that it couldn't be distinguished from a brand new one. Mind you, the "scandal" that Trey Gowdy and Lyndsey Graham are trying to fabricate over this and the Benghazi attacks of a couple of years ago is so transparently political and without substance, even if in reality there was some misfeasance that could be exposed, that to a large extent she can't be criticized for the place her private emails occupy in the current news cycles Still, if she had just done the smart thing with regard to her emails in the first place--that is do her public business within official channels and her private ones...well, privately, none of this would be happening. It wasn't smart, and it wasn't even necessary, which makes me somewhat skeptical about her capacity to run a nation, but as they used to say out in the hustings, I'm a yellow dog Democrat. I'd vote for Cujo over any Republican I've seen since Nelson Rockefeller.
But we do have Bernie Sanders to be thankful for. He just keeps chugging along, quietly--you have surely noticed that he almost never gets even mentioned, much less covered by the major news outlets--pulling in crowds of thousands who cheer him enthusiastically and vow support no matter what other factors people try to pry them away with: Bernie can only siphon votes from Hillary Clinton but he can't win, he's a socialist so no one will want to elect him in America, etc. In my opinion, the reality is that Bernie becomes more viable as the Democratic nominee with every passing day on which his opponents fail to dispatch him, much the same way that Donald Trump does. You may remember candidates like Herman Caine, whose lechery brought him down as fast as he had risen, former Texas governor Rick Perry, who became the poster boy for dim wittedness in one "duh" moment of forgetfulness about his own, anti-government manifesto, Newt "the futurist" Gingrich, who wasn't satisfied to wear a tin foil pyramid on his head in public, he had to make tin foil pyramids a part of his platform, Michelle Bachman, who has no more rational, non-political thoughts in her head than does Sarah Palin, and if you do remember them you also remember how quickly and far they fell from being number one in the polls. Then you remember what the Republicans' nomination process left them with: Mitt "Mr. 47%" Romney. Add the fact that he proudly declaimed that Cadillacs were good cars and his wife owned a couple of them and Donald Trump seems that much more viable...and durable as a candidate. Once you do that, Bernie Sanders looks pretty good.
So, to the extent that this whole spectacle is going to go on for another year until the nominations are in and then two and a half more months after that until the election, it is a huge inconvenience. We have to watch these twenty people make public spectacles of themselves for more than fourteen months before we can expect a year or so of relief before campaigning against the winner starts for his first mid-term election. But I guess we can all stick it out...as if we had a choice.
Your friend,
Mike
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