Jeb! Bush — or maybe that's just plain old "Jeb" now, sans exclamation point — got on the horn today and apologized to his major donors for being such a pathetic failure at running for President.
We cats can't begin to imagine how surreal and excruciating that must have been. But on the other hand, 10+ years ago, Jeb Bush gave Terri and Michael Schiavo a different lesson in "surreal" and "excruciating." So our sympathy is limited. What goes around comes around, they say.
And yet we can think of another group of people that deserves a mea culpa tonight from the denizens of the clown-car-infested GOP. That would be the responsible citizens who participate in the Democratic caucuses in Iowa and Nevada.
Why? Because the Democratic caucuses are really — well, caucuses.
Here's how they work: You gotta give up an evening on which you would otherwise be fixing your clunky radiator or helping Junior with his homework or playing the slots on the Strip and hang around for hours instead in a high school gym, publicly committing yourself to the Presidential candidate of your choice. First you stand around with others who support your gal or guy — and if, after the counting, he or she doesn't get 15 percent of the vote, you have to disband and go elsewhere. That means listening to the arguments of the other candidates' supporters, and then deciding which one is your second choice. And then you go and stand there.
It's an hours-long process that involves a lot of give-and-take with your neighbors and, inevitably, a real substantive discussion of the issues. Democracy at work!
At a Republican caucus, on the other hand, you can show up drunk, grab a handful of out-of-date paper ballots from a caucus volunteer wearing a Trump T-shirt, vote two or three times, and promptly decamp to a nearby game of blackjack. No hanging around, no in-depth conversations with your fellow voters about the minimum wage or immigration or whether Apple should help the FBI with that dead terrorist's iPhone. And you don't even have to show an ID! (Really? Tell that to all the minority voters the GOP's disenfranchised.) What a farce.
So, journalists and others who are blithely describing what happened in Nevada last night as a "caucus" — please. The good Democrats of the Hawkeye and Silver States know better. And like us cats, it's probably making them HISS.
No comments:
Post a Comment