the prospect of a hillary-donald matchup in the fall is unbelievably depressing, and i must say that i still cannot reproduce in my mind the structure of motivation that gets someone to vote for hillary clinton. she's meaningless, is one problem. and contrary to some, i think trump will destroy her in a two-person general election. she's the only candidate who approaches his numbers for 'disliked,' and lord there is infinite twitter ammo.
at any rate, what i'd hope for now is a free-for-all that breaks the two-party system. that's definitely not impossible, and it's a wee bit hard to imagine reince preibus and john mccain coming around at this point after the trump takeover of the party. it would have to happen fast; it almost has to happen now; but it is not impossible that they'd use whatever machine they still control to run someone else: kasich or rubio, maybe. i hope that they've gotten realistic: trump is almost certain to be nominated at the convention on the first ballot, i think. they need to be meeting today to develop an alternative.
sanders is in burlington, reflecting, and what i hope he is reflecting on is that hillary clinton is in fact the very essence of what he most opposes: a straight representative of the oligarchy. she's as 'progressive' as the poll numbers at any given moment, and her words mean nothing about her policies. she serves the super-rich. so then i hope that he feels duty-bound to run as a third-party candidate.
and then i'd like to see rand paul look squarely at all four of the candidates and realize that they agree extremely on one thing: the state should control every aspect of everyone's life, and feel duty-bound as well. if the two-party system breaks, party loyalty this time is going to lose its value for the long haul. but if rand doesn't hop, i think in that situation gary johnson could do pretty damn well; he'd have my vote, for sure.
i'd love to see a situation in which timothy egan or hillary clinton or michael tomasky can't just mechanically vilify republicans all day with the broadest brush and call that a strategy, in which the hypersimplistic partisan identity of these people faces a complex situation. i'm telling you that if it sticks to two parties each spending all day talking to themselves about how insane and evil and stupid the other one is, we'll head toward a partition in this country. a more complex politics where you have to vilify in multiple directions simultaneously, confusing yourself, would be the only route to the kind of contentious unity that could hold a democracy together.
