Early Take on the Presidential Primary Candidates

Trying to see where I am, if I am anywhere at all at this point, and making note of any local gossip I may have overheard about any of these present or future celebrity candidates. It is not very serious or well-informed, but of course I live in the first primary state, and the candidates have already been around for months now, and many people are passionate about the upcoming election, so I feel like I should make an attempt to figure out where my mood is. I am still registered as a Democrat, increasingly wary of them as I am, and I will probably vote in that primary.


Wikipedia has the candidates lifted in alphabetical order, so I will do them in that order, with the exception of a few which my mind considers to be paired with another candidate further down the list.


Michael Bennet:  I had not heard of this guy until the other day, when he appeared on a local radio program. There is nothing objectionable about him, I guess, but he didn't say anything much different from the other Democrats who have more star appeal so I am not sure what his plan to get more attention is going to be. I don't have a lot of faith (yet) that any of these people can really accomplish what they say they want to accomplish--increasingly these elections are taking on the character of desperate gambles in which the electorate prays it will be lucky in its choice as far as the direction they hope for their lives to take. I don't sense that Michael Bennet is the vessel in which that fortune is to be found. He did make a Don Quixote reference which indicated a possible familiarity with the actual book in his radio interview, but I need more than that to go on.


Biden and Sanders: We are already being warned from some quarters of the respectable press about being ageist, but I don't care, I think being on the doorstep of 80 is too old to be beginning the presidency, especially at this hinge of history which we seem to be struggling to negotiate at present. I think Churchill may have hung on as prime minister until he was 81, but even in his case--and his second stint as P.M. was, after all, something of an anticlimax--Britain in the mid-50s was pretty sclerotic, though possessed of a certain literary charm. The only appeal of Biden, that I can detect, is that he has been close enough to the Presidency to have some idea of how the office is supposed to function, which I guess is important to a lot of people now. Otherwise, I never thought he was particularly smart even when he was younger, politically he's a fossil, it's not clear to me that the struggles of younger people, which at this point includes anyone under 45 or 50, which is going to be a major issue at least underlying this election, is even on his radar. I suspect his high poll numbers are a smokescreen, that people are marking or giving out his name to the pollsters because they haven't figured out who they really like yet.


While I like Bernie Sanders's public persona better than almost any other politician on the contemporary scene (which isn't hard), I think he's a more divisive figure within the Democratic ranks than is widely acknowledged. The more diehard of the Hillary people, who are still numerous (and whose intractability when it comes to hearing any disparaging words with regard to their champion even now is I think a problem) hate him, not perhaps as much as Donald Trump in substance, but probably more in consequence. Of course we are assured constantly that any one of his pet policies if adopted would almost instantaneously destroy the country, though attempting to gauge which aspects of this catastrophe the naysayers actually are worried about is a telling exercise, which is why his supposedly terrible ideas can still get traction with the electorate, because it is far from clear that anyone representing mainstream power is dealing with them on the level. But I can't see him winning anyway, and I'll be surprised if he retains his following in the face of other at least potentially intriguing younger candidates.


Cory Booker:   I haven't really figured out what his angle is going to be yet, at least in New Hampshire, where I don't expect there is a lot of enthusiasm for slavery reparations, though I could be wrong. His campaign actually called my phone regarding an event, though they were looking for my wife. When they found they had gotten me, they said sorry and hung up. Hey, I'm a registered Democrat, can't I come to your event too? Seriously, the last campaign that got me when they thought they were getting someone else and actually asked me questions and invited me to something was Bill Bradley's in 2000. I was severely chastened in the last election by one of Hillary Clinton's young workers who got me when they were (again) trying to reach my wife, whose participation in this process seems to be much more coveted than mine is. She was however occupied with something at the time of this call and didn't wish to come to the phone. I told the person calling that my wife was busy, but assured her that she was all in for Hillary, etc, apparently in an overly paternalistic voice, as the volunteer(?) proceeded to snarl at me, "I think your wife can speak for herself."


I have been hearing about Cory Booker as a potential future president since I was in college, and I thought when he was still in college, though perhaps he was in law school by that point. There was a story in the newspaper about how Bill Clinton had personally contacted Booker, having identified him as one of the most promising young men in the country, to encourage him to consider getting involved in Democratic politics. My takeaway from the article at the time was of course, "Hey, why isn't Bill Clinton calling me?"


Steve Bullock: I haven't heard of him. Governor of Montana apparently. When I lived in the D.C. area I knew a girl who was the daughter of a congressman from Montana. She was like half a Gen-X grunge person, half one of the sisters from the Waltons. She was cute.


Mayor Pete and Andrew Yang: Representatives of the under-45 meritocratic class. I find both of these guys kind of chilling, since in spite of their best efforts to be empathetic and inclusive, they clearly consider the mass of the population to be so limited due to their lack of intellectual and other useful talent as to be practically retarded, such that they will require more aggressive tending and managing going forward. Yang is the really scary one to me since he is so persuaded of the inevitability of the future as envisioned by the technology oligarchs that he allows for no alternative possibility or rival faction that those currently in ascendance would ever need to take seriously, and it seems like a decent number of people who at least consider themselves to be coldly rational and unsentimental agree with him. Now I do not think he will move much beyond the 3% or so he is polling at now because his message is not inspiring in the tradition of American political heroes like John F. Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt (to say the least), who, whatever one might say about them, had a genius for making their supporters feel like they had a significant and even exciting part to play in making both the present and future life of the country, which is the complete opposite of Yang's core message that at least half the population is about to become totally redundant without any recourse or hope of contributing, while the technocrats and the hyper cognitive elite continue to rule and amass enormous fortunes completely unchallenged. Personally I still don't think the ruling class could get off that easily, without any unpleasantness, forever if these sorts of blows keep raining down especially upon the former middling orders, though I suppose it is possible that they have amassed enough high-tech weaponry to deploy remotely against discontents without needing the support of a human police force or military that resistance really is futile. These are still proud people, some of them, the provincial old Americans, even if you think this is impossible because they haven't got anything to be proud of. Dismissing them too off-handedly and humiliating them too much I think is a dangerous game.


I overheard some old ladies at my church who had gone to see Mayor Pete in person gushing about how--I can't remember now whether the exact word they used was "wonderful" or "fantastic"--he was. Perhaps I am just jealous of his relentless brilliance, but something about this guy smells just a little phony. Maybe all of the stories about his language prowess are real, and he is a prodigiously gifted linguist, though most of the testimonials raving about him do not seem to be coming from quarters who would be able to tell. The one that set off alarm bells with me was the story of how he happened to be passing though an emergency room where a family of bewildered refugees with a sick three old were waiting, unable to communicate effectively with anyone on the hospital staff, and Mayor Pete with his Arabic ability was able to step in and comfort the child and effectively set the process of care in motion. Obviously I cannot disprove the story, and I know nothing about the situation in Indiana or wherever this took place, but I do work in a hospital and in my state there are regulations regarding who is qualified to serve as an interpreter in a medical setting and so forth, and interpreting is considered a good source of employment for immigrants who might otherwise struggle to find professional work. Also cultural sensitivity in the healthcare setting, generally not considered a strong suit of white Americans especially, is currently a big issue throughout the medical field. So it strikes me as incongruous that a white guy passing through the ER would be able to interject himself into this situation so readily. However, he was the mayor, and he apparently radiates a kind of genius, which I have not really paid enough attention to to pick up on yet, so perhaps the usual rules did not apply in the case. But if Mayor Pete hangs around in the race I'm sure I will come back to him...


Julian Castro: I have heard of him, though unfortunately mostly on alt-rightish sites which consider his role to be comic relief. That said, I have not read anything else about him that is able to serve as an effective counterweight to this impression.


John Delaney: I don't know anything about him.


Tulsi Gabbard: I've come across a few things about her in passing that sounded interesting, though I have not done any real research on her. I assume that if she hangs around in the election and says more interesting things that she will at least make it onto my finalists list, since there is nothing about her that I am aware of yet that is a big turn-off.


Kirsten Gillibrand: Superficial impression: she is tall, icy, blonde, and her base is affluent women around my age who drink wine and went into such deep depressions when Trump was elected that they absent-mindedly crashed their cars into houses and didn't talk to their husbands for months. I'm actually interested in this demographic, though the candidate doesn't seem to be getting much traction thus far. Her proposals seem the dippiest of the bunch that I have encountered as well.


Mike Gravel: This guy has run before, multiple times. He got 91 votes in the primary here in 2008. The internet says he is 89 years.


Kamala Harris: Seemingly the choice of at least some segment of the Establishment, she is not, coming in, a well-known figure in New Hampshire, or in the northeast generally I think. The main reputation she brings is that she is a strange combination of pro-corporate and strongly pro-immigrant to the extent that she identifies more with this population than with the old Americans. She is also coming out of California whose politics over the last 20 years look, from afar, to have resulted in disastrous, bordering on apocalyptic, outcomes. That's going to be a lot for her to overcome here, at least, I think, unless people just don't care about these things and determine that she is somehow what is needed at the moment.


John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee: Total blanks on these guys.


Amy Klobuchar: Here is what I know about Amy Klobuchar: she has been accused of being verbally abusive to people who work for her, she was a childhood fan of Fran Tarkenton and the 1970s Minnesota Vikings, and there is a guy on my Facebook page who thinks she is the best candidate (along with Swalwell) to actually defeat Trump and run a serious, mature White House that accomplishes something positive for the American population. The verbal abuse business I really shouldn't care about, and it may well have been exaggerated or was in no degree different from how any of these other people treat their staffs. However the fact that it was one of the first things that came out without a countervailing image (as yet) that is equally vivid might be difficult for her to overcome, unless a not wholly aboveboard source and motivation for the story coming out can be, or has been, identified. Also I am bitter because I lack the capacity to deal forcefully with anyone myself, and I am always resentful of having to submit to or at least quietly endure people who can.


Wayne Messam: Who? This guy has the name of a quality control coach on a football team.


Seth Moulton: This guy sounds like the kid you went to high school with who didn't seem like he was all that much smarter than you were but evidently was.


Beto O'Rourke: I like what I've seen of his wife, I will give him that. Normal, attractive married couples in their 40s have become something of an exoticism, apparently. The circumstance of their being billionaires is kind of strange, since outwardly at least they don't appear to be preternaturally hard-driving or ambitious or desirous of re-organizing or correcting society. He has raised a lot of money. Who wants him and why? Why am I supposed to like/vote for this guy? I feel like he is not going to go away, that he is going to be buoyed up insidiously and people subliminally confused into thinking they ought to consider voting for him.


Tim Ryan: Has a similar name to a number of other people with whom I am more familiar. I am not familiar with him at all.


Eric Swalwell: As I said above, I have a Facebook friend who is a fan of this guy. My problem, and I suspect that of many current voters, is that the suggestion that someone is "competent" sets off alarm bells. Competent at what? I associate the word with having the capacity to frustrate and stifle the ability of the middling type of people to thrive and live at home in the world, and perhaps these people should be stifled, but since I seem to be one of them the competence is not reassuring. I should really look up his program and see if there is anything interesting in it.


Elizabeth Warren: I don't dislike Elizabeth Warren. She is the only person in the field who genuinely seems to care about addressing some of the difficulties that the present system wreaks on families with children--even the fathers!--which obviously would be important to me. She also still comes off as not really being of the 'ruling class', even though she has obviously achieved some degree of acceptance within it. It is not clear whether she has any powerful allies on her economic issues.


The Republicans seem determined to make an issue of her claiming to have been Native American despite her only being (apparently) genetically 1/1024, native blood, but I don't think most people care about that particular issue. On the contrary, for most people (rightly or wrongly) I think it highlights how ludicrous many of the avenues for advancement in the country have become for sort of regular middle class white people. Elizabeth Warren was clearly perfectly capable of succeeding at Harvard and using that as a springboard to even greater prominence and achievement, but to get a foot in the door, apparently, she had to claim to be a Native American, which in her case was about the least significant thing about her. I think people have moved beyond the stage of being angry about that sort of thing and are increasingly wondering how they can possibly work the system to benefit themselves a little.


Marianne Williamson: I seriously thought this was Marilynne Robinson the celebrated author. It is not though.


(Late Entry) Bill de Blasio: I assumed this must be a joke since he has managed to pull off the rare feat in this age of bi-partisan unpopularity among his own constituency. I cannot see any substantial part of America being interested in what he is selling right now...


Of course this is a dashed off post...I will revisit some of these people if anything more comes to me about them.