My dad was over the other night, covering for me on the home front while I attended a couple of school conferences, and then, to my surprise, he expressed interest in hanging around to watch the Democrats debate. "I like that old guy, Sanders," he said at one point, before adding "and not just because he's old." He seems to be contradicting the CW about how people get more conservative as they age. I don't think he would have thought much of a "Democratic socialist" back in the day when he was denouncing Pete Maravich for dribbling behind his back. Hell, he was going to emigrate if there was a second President Kennedy.
The CW among the media commentators is that Hillary "won." I'm pretty sure that she helped herself more than Chafee or Webb advanced their long shot campaigns, although Webb got off one of the evening's best lines when he gently admonished Sanders, "I don't think your revolution's coming, Bernie." (Or something like that; I'm not going from the transcript.) Dad pronounced Webb "an interesting guy," an opinion with which I concur. Check this out. He's the only aspirant from either party who is probably a better novelist than candidate, a condition that four years ago applied to Newt Gingrich, whose novels are awful. One of the talking heads opined after the debate that if Webb had not years ago switched parties he would be "a thoughtful alternative" for the Republicans. This is just a way of saying that he's a conservative guy who's too levelheaded for the modern Republican party.
What's the word for Hillary's performance? I think her foes might go for "polished," with it's undersense of calculating insincerity, while still allowing that she's hyper-informed and articulate. I thought on one occasion she crossed a line into that inflated zone that beckons all presidential aspirants, when she claimed that she and President Obama had hunted room by room for the dodgy Chinese at a global warming conference. Overall, however, she deserves her good marks. For me, the bottom line on her candidacy is that she passes my Hippocratic-oath-applied-to-presidential-politics test. That is, I think she's smart and cautious and therefore unlikely to do anything monstrously stupid, like invade Iraq.
On the Iraq question, by the way, she, unlike Jeb Bush, had a solid, ready answer for an utterly predictable question. I think the people who hate her probably didn't like the smart kids in school who always did their homework, either. But it's not a bad trait for the president.
I thought O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, did well. He certainly had the best closing statement. The youngest voters are almost by definition our best hope, and it's true that they are trending Democratic, probably because, as O'Malley suggested, the rhetoric of a Trump, obviously so pleasing to Republican ears, is for them a huge turn-off. Well, good for them. It's a bit of a mystery why Republicans, as the country turns younger and browner, double down on pissed off old white guys. It's a losing strategy. If they've lost my dad, they're really in trouble.
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