As Bernie Sanders’s chances of being the Democratic presidential nominee dwindle, Bernie is more and more showing himself. Turns out that he’s a cranky geezer who really just wants to whine about how unfair things are. As a fellow geezer – geezerette? – I can say such things.
He is now about one step away from telling Hillary Clinton to get the hell off his lawn – even if she’s not a whole lot younger than he is. And the lawn is more naturally hers than his.
His latest beef is that the Democratic nomination contest is “not fair.” Southern primaries – where voters have been strangely immune to Bernie’s crabby charms – are unfair. Closed Democratic primaries, where only registered Democrats can vote, are really unfair. And having superdelegates, essentially the worker bees of the party, is really, really unfair. Unless, of course, they can be persuaded to back Bernie.
Well, boo hoo, Bernie. The Democratic Party – like its Republican counterpart – is a private organization that can play by any rules it wants. Always has been. Candidates in the past have become pretty good at using the same rules to their advantage, which the Obama organization did brilliantly in 2008.
Maybe if Bernie actually had been a Democrat for all those years – instead of sniping from the sidelines at the office holders and regulars who keep the party going – he would have known that. By the way, he did figure out how to use the byzantine rules of various caucus states to further his cause, so he’s not really some guileless naif here. And caucuses are a whole lot less democratic than just plain ballot voting in private.
Casino and reality show magnate Donald Trump is another candidate crying piteously about the unfairness – to him – of the even more complex delegate selection process of the Republican nomination battle. The primaries are “rigged,” “corrupt” and “crooked,” he fumes. Poor Donald!
Well, if the multibillionaire had actually self-financed his campaign from the beginning, spending big bucks to hire the party technicians who know how the system works, he might not have been so thunderstruck when the odious-but-organized Ted Cruz began to outmaneuver him so brilliantly. Instead, the notorious cheapskate thought he could save his precious money by hiring a bullyboy campaign novice like the Koch brothers’ acolyte Corey Lewandowski and sail into office on the strength of his great mind and personality.
Uh, shortsighted thinking, Donald. You reap what you sow – and you sowed almost zilch.
And speaking of Cruz, the Texas politician – widely acknowledged to be the senator most hated by virtually all his colleagues – can throw a pretty big pity party for himself, as he vividly demonstrated in a fundraising letter he blasted throughout cyberspace the other day.
Running for president, he moaned, is hard.
“I face a constant barrage of political and personal attacks daily,” he wrote. “Time with my family is non-existent. . . . Health and sleep are limited. . . . Personal time is not possible,” he whined.
“You see, running for president of the United States is a significant sacrifice. Only by the grace of God – and with unwavering help from my wonderful supporters like you – have we reached this point – on the verge of capturing the Republican nomination.”
My husband, the recipient of the email, was strangely unmoved. “Personally,” he said, “I think God has decided that She wants Trump to be the nominee. She has always had a bizarre sense of humor. She also has New York values!”
Sounds like a good theory to me.
Look, I know that running for office is hard and can be uncomfortable. In another life I was appointed to fill a vacancy on a dysfunctional city council and ran to hold the position. I won, but I hated it, and I was happy to retire after that one full term.
Running for president is many leagues above seeking a seat on a city’s legislature. It is infinitely harder. It also, I came to believe after years of watching presidential campaigns from the cheap seats, requires the hide of a rhinoceros. And a massive ego – or, if you prefer, almost preternatural self-confidence – to convince your own self, much less others, that you would, indeed, be the best person to run a country of some 320 million people.
That in itself is not a bad quality to have in a person who believes he or she is ready to go toe-to-toe with unprincipled international bullies and thugs like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
That supreme confidence hardly fits, though, with a tendency to wallow in self-pity.
Not every presidential candidate pulls the poor-little-me routine. To his credit, Ohio’s John Kasich has not been playing the part of an abused, put-upon candidate. In fact, he sounds like the only grownup in the GOP race.
And neither has Hillary Clinton. Over the years I’ve been less than enamored of the Clintons, and I’ve criticized them both in columns over the last 16 years. But I find myself in sympathy with her now. Hillary has for the most part not portrayed herself as victim. Nor did she in 2008, when she was out-campaigned by newcomer Barack Obama.
Instead, after a short time she spent getting a lot of much-needed R&R, she headed back on the campaign trail. Working for that same Barack Obama. Starting, we should all remember, in the tiny town of Unity, New Hampshire.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)