As Mike Marland puts it, we got quite a surprise Tuesday, at least the “we” who were basing our expectations on the horse-race coverage and the polls.
So, pretty much all of us.
But that includes the people who were complaining that letting Iowa and New Hampshire go first wasn’t fair because they’re not ethnically and racially diverse.
Which is true, but then you can’t turn around and be surprised when more ethnically and racially diverse states don’t choose the people who emerged from Iowa and New Hampshire in front.
Well, Super Tuesday sure unleashed the whinging and the whining and the ‘splaining of all sorts, which brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
It was the Establishment, dammit.
Q-Anon and other rightwing loonies have the Deep State to blame everything on, but the Establishment has a longer tradition behind it, and also it isn’t the result of paranoid pizza-parlor fantasies.
But that only makes it slightly more real, which is to say that it’s not so much that there isn’t an Establishment so much as it is that the Establishment is whatever you want it to be.
There are times when it seems you could shift it down to middleschool level and say, “I wanted to watch TV last night, but the Establishment made me do my homework.”
And those of us who are old enough to remember the real Mayor Daley and his crew at the 1968 Democratic Convention — not the beating of protesters in the streets but the control over which delegates got seated inside — might have had a sense of deja vu in 2016 when, golly, it turns out that only one Democrat even wanted to be president, if you don’t count Martin O’Malley.
O’Malley kind of wandered into the campaign as if by mistake, said “oops” and backed out of the room, and if you believe in the Big Bad Establishment, you might suspect that there’d been a mistake in his address such that the horse’s head everyone else received hadn’t made it to his house.
And, y’know, the whole address book thing and the superdelegates and such.
That’s the “Establishment.”
Majority rule is something else, but those who still need to blame the Establishment are concocting conspiracy theories.
Well, I like Lisa Benson’s Big Fat Tree metaphor, because it’s been there forever, and I have to chuckle at Horsey’s analysis, because, as noted above, everyone said it would be different when more African-Americans got to vote.
It sure was and be careful what you wish for, or, at least, be a little cautious in assuming you know what “they” want.
And, especially, in assuming you know what “they” ought to want.
I’m sympathetic with the poor Mississippian in Marshall Ramsey‘s cartoon, except that there’s probably a sane spot somewhere between only having two candidates and having a dozen.
Nobody really had to choose among a dozen. My first choice dropped out before New Hampshire, by which point my second choice was so far out of it that I went with my third choice in some faint hope of boosting her chances.
To the extent that there is a real Establishment, it’s like, after shoving Herself down our throats in 2016, they responded to the criticism by saying, “Okay, we’ll show them!” and opening the floodgates.
Though I’d add, almost parenthetically, that this only explains the Democratic Dozen.
The actual ballot featured a huge roster of choices, and while some of them were probably sincere if quixotic Harold Stassen hopefuls, a lot of them had to be more along the lines of Vermin Supreme.
Vermin didn’t make the ballot in New Hampshire, I would note, but I’d also note that Trump wasn’t alone on the GOP side.
If there is an Establishment, it’s grip seems a little … flaccid.
And now for something completely different
I’m not sure if I’m liking today’s Rhymes With Orange too much by happenstance and synchronicity, but I suspect it would have made me laugh anyway.
The coincidental element is that I just remarked to my sister yesterday that, while I have no bucket list and few regrets, I do wish I’d gone to a state university, for the diversity as well as a more blue-collar atmosphere.
And that was back in a much more sink-or-swim world, even at the private schools. We were kind of outraged when they carpeted the dorms shortly after we left, which is to say that we started screaming at those spoiled little snots before we were out of our 20s ourselves.
And don’t get me started on comparing the take-it-or-leave-it slop lines in our dining halls with the food court cuisine of modern colleges.
But, to take it seriously for a moment, one of the oddities we became aware of in the Mai Juin riots of 1968 was that European college students were a whole lot more bluecollar than even Madison or Berkeley.
Well, at least some of us became aware of it.
Some things never change
The Lisa Benson cartoon is actually Lisa trying to create division by stoking the grievances of Bernie supporters – as though she actually sides with Bernie.