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Persistent Mess and Act Two


New Hampshire voted last night.
Bernie Sanders won big, and
Donald Trump won, almost as big.
John Kasich was the happiest loser.
Hillary Clinton was the unhappiest loser.
Marco Rubio is trying to figure out what he did wrong, what he did wrong, what he did wrong.

Just between you and me and a few other people,
I think Donald Trump is a political scoundrel and a shame,
so I hope he never becomes the president of anything except
Trump Enterprises and Bingo Parlors.

I think Bernie Sanders is about as much of a revolutionary
as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, but he calls himself a Democratic Socialist,
and that causes lots of Americans to soil themselves,
even though most of us are democratic socialists about roads and parks
and social security and Medicare and financial regulation and lots of other things.

We are long overdue to have elected a woman to the presidency,
but even as a lifelong Democratic, I freely admit that
she is the epitome of what traditional politics is all about, and more,
that there is something less than candid about the Clintons.

I think that is a nice way to say it.

When Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama, I wanted--both--
that we elect somebody other than a caucasian to the office,
and that we elect a woman.  Of the two, I preferred Obama, and still do.

We still ought to elect women to office--it is shamefully overdue--
but that is not the only important issue at stake.
What is also at stake is that we despise what government has become:
it has become shameful, in itself, in its impotency and indecency.
It is for sale, not only to the highest bidder, but to almost anyone.
It has the vision of the blind, and the integrity of well-dressed beggers.
Politicians have lost what it is to form a more perfect union in their lust to hold office.

They have to sell themselves to be elected,
and having done that,
have nothing left to offer.

Donald Trump bluffs and blusters and promises everything and nothing.
He is the epitome of our worst impulses, but he is not a typical politician.

Bernie Sanders says we have gotten our priorities all wrong;
that we have allowed a few people to control most of the wealth,
and the most wealthy to buy and control what government does.

The issue, this time, is not whether women should be elected,
but what we want government to be about.
Sad to say, Hillary Clinton is part of what is wrong about politics,
not because she is a woman, but because she is part of the old system.

Trump is wrong about what we should become, but he is right about what politics has become.
Sanders makes us uneasy because Americans are afraid of the way he talks, but he is right about what politics has become.
Clinton sounds like an old-fashioned politician, because she acts like one.
Kasich is an old-fashioned politician, although he may be one of the best of them.  

I watched the returns come in from New Hampshire,
thinking about how it must have old English roots--New England--
despairing of the crude meanness of Donald Trump,
despairing of what I think will happen to Democratic Socialists
when the American electorate gets its slogans turned loose on him,
and concluding, nonetheless, that something good was happening:
it might be that politics as usual was going to get an overhaul.

Disgust is not an adequate political motive:
real revolutions--real changes--require a vision of what is better.
It remains to be seen whether we can agree on what is better.

The mess might persist for a while.
The next act might be better.


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