The good news from yesterday's New Hampshire Primary is that Democratic participation was higher than the record 2008 season, which shows what I've been harping about, primaries are far more democratic than the anti-democratic caucus. It's disgusting that the modified Yankee-swap game of caucuses are legal to make any political decision in a democracy. So there is hope of voter activation against Trump that Iowa's dismal performance had the media talking down last week. Iowa, or at least Iowa Democrats, are certainly better than their caucus led people to talk about them. They should prove it by getting rid of the caucus and adopting a really democratic primary process.
What they mean otherwise, damned if I know except it's clear the voters, so far, have rejected Biden, the one that the polls and the media had marked as the unbeatable one who this was to lose. Well, he lost it, apparently. He will hold on till after South Carolina which, I hope, is the end of his political career. I cringe to think what will come out of his mouth in the meantime.
Another thing that is clear, is that a majority of the voters want change, whether that is in the utterly disastrous form of Bernie Sanders who just about certainly will not be president but who proves he is willing to put Trump in that office, again, or in the longest of shots on the other end of the age demographic, Pete Buttigeig who will almost certainly not this time become the first openly gay president.
I will not hide my fear that those two men and the people behind them are an ever more definable disaster for Democrats, the choice of the unrealistic idealists. In the case of one, the kind of person who is wildly popular among the college-kids but who will not sell in almost every state in the nation, in the case of Bernie Sanders, someone far more suitable to play that role than George McGovern was in the closest example from history. Sanders has far more baggage to sink his chances than McGovern did and McGovern was far more accomplished than Sanders.
That Sanders' majorities this time are far smaller than the numbers of votes he lost by last time, that has me far more skeptical of his chances than I was in 2016. If he is the nominee, I am expecting 1972 only far, far worse, this time. Nixon faced a Democratic congress and a Supreme Court not packed with actual fascists. Democrats have got to get shut of the play left that is stupid enough to hitch its wagon to Bernie Sanders. It has needed to all along, the real left will have to find a way to win without it, they are too unreliable and too prone to being led down the path to disaster.
In the case of Buttigeig, I'm afraid that there are too many people who support him who like that woman in Iowa, don't know the first thing most of us heard, that he is, in fact, a gay man married to another man AND WHO ON THAT ALONE WANTED TO TAKE HER VOTE BACK. And if there are those among his supporters, there are a very large number of voters, especially concentrated in enough states, who know it and would not vote for him on that basis, he has far more of a potential to drag down Democrats all down the ticket due to the fact that Republican-fascists will guarantee there is no one who doesn't know that most obvious feature of his identity.
Why my favorite candidate, Elizabeth Warren isn't going farther is a mix of Bernie Sanders ruining her chances - the chances of someone without his baggage and who could win the election - and, I suspect, her decision to go with mainly small-donor support instead of going for the big money. The civil-liberties industry and the Republican-fascists have made big-money corruption an inherent part of American politics using "the First Amendment" to destroy electoral democracy.
Being a fan of history who is now old enough to have read a bit of that as it was happening, I'm remembering that it was that jackass hero of the play-lefties, Eugene McCarthy who, finding out that the voters didn't have the same inflated view of his greatness as he figured he was entitled to, was an enemy of getting big money out of politics, joining up with the ACLU and a few of the putative "liberal" state parties and the fascist Buckley to get Buckley v Valeo through the court, making the protection of electoral democracy impossible. You can thank that dream candidate of the largely college-town - lefty-magazine based, secular-left c. 1968 - until Bobby Kennedy decided to take over that wagon - as one of those who have gotten us here. The secular-atheist-college town-lefty media have proven themselves, over and over again, to be friggin' stupid. That is a left the Democratic Party, the party that has some chance of winning elections and governing, the real left, has to get shut of. They are idiots who never, ever learn a single thing. They have had us in the political wilderness for a half a century and they want to stay there. We can't afford to waste any more time on them.
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