The Winnowing

So much for brokered conventions and draft candidates. Not gonna happen. Not this year, anyway.

With only a handful of states having weighed in, the field is down to four. And before the Borg commence with the swarming and pointing out that Ron Paul hasn’t dropped out, let me say that I am aware of this, but it is also irrelevant. His candidacy is going nowhere, and reasonable people realize this and will realign their support to the current reality.

So what do we have?

On the Republican side, we have Mitt “flip-flopper” Romney who was for all sorts of things before he was against them, calling John McCain a liberal (that word has lost a lot of it’s zip, hasn’t it?) yet he was moderate enough in a previous incarnation to be elected governor of Massachusetts, the most liberal state in the union. Then we have John “occupy Iraq in perpetuity” McCain, jumping up and down like Yosemite Sam and yelling about “waiving the white flag of surrender” – never for a moment stopping to let it register that 70% of the country realizes the folly of the Iraq misadventure and understand that you don’t “win” an occupation, you simply occupy until such time as troops are withdrawn.

On the Democratic side we have two left standing – a white woman and a black man. One has successfully pushed back against the right-wing noise machine for nearly two decades, and the other one seems, at least to this point, almost immune to it.

A while back a friend of mine said something in an email exchange that resonated with me at that moment and is still turning over in my mind. Real soon, the wall of presidential portraits is going to experience a shake-up. There will be 43 portraits of white men, and then there will be number 44 – and instead of another white male face, there is going to be a black man or a white woman smiling back.

Now that is what I call “change.”