Personal Musings category archive

The Washington press corps loves to talk about the “pivot.”

They have a fanciful notion that a candidate can be one person during primary campaigns and turn into someone else, or “pivot,” during a general election campaign. They are waiting anxiously for Donald Trump to pivot, to become “more presidential” (whatever the hell that is–maybe refraining from insulting peoples, cultures, races, and communities for a day or so, maybe not threatening to rain death on foreign peoples as causally as others discuss baseball scores, maybe just not wearing baseball caps indoors–who can say what they mean?).

We recall how well the “pivot” worked for Mitt “Etch-a-Sketch” Romney and John “McMaverick” McCain.

The notion of the pivot highlights the ultimate hollowness of a certain style of political reportage, one that holds no truck with substance. Rather, it believes that strategy is not just everything, it’s the only thing. They care not that somebody’s drugging the race horses and bribing the jockeys, so long as the horse race is exciting. Hell, they’ll quite happily drug the horses and bribe the jockeys themselves if it makes the race more exciting.

They also clearly believe that the voting public is incapable of remembering anything that a politician said or did prior to the most recent pivot. Furthermore, and this is the truly craven part, even as they pat themselves on the back for their “journalistic excellence,” they forsake–nay, they flee–their journalistic responsibility to remind the polity that what some politician said or did yesterday directly contradicts what he or she did or said today.

The true noxiousness of the narrative of the pivot, though, is that it reveals empty souls, souls with no substance and no values, souls which believe only in appearances, which eschew fact, which pay no attention to the men and women behind the curtain.

Aside:

I don’t have any secret methods for identifying who these “journalists” are other than paying attention to the discourse and reading Driftglass, who specializes in analyzing dis coarse discourse, but a good starting point would be a list of the “journalists” who most frequently appear on the Sunday talk shows.

I was at a political function this past weekend. One of my acquaintances was kvetching about complaints from Sanders supporters about some primaries, specifically, complaints that they “had not been allowed to vote,” when, in fact, the issue was that they had not ensured that they were properly registered to vote.

Virginia is an open primary state, but many states have “closed primaries,” which means that, if you wish to vote in a party primary, you must be a registered to vote as a member of that party. If you wish to vote in the Democratic primary, you must be registered as a Democrat; in the Republican primary, registered as a Republican; in the Green Party primary, registered as a Green, and so on. Delaware, where I used to live, was a “closed primary” state.

This is nothing new.

Sanders supporters who were not registered as Democrats were not allowed to vote in Democratic primaries in closed primary states, and, frankly, that was their own damn fault.

“How simple would it have been,” fumed my acquaintance, “for Bernie to tell his supporters to register to vote.”

For more about rules, see Balloon Juice.

I rather get a kick out persons who talk about a “real” Republican Party as if such a thing magically mystically exists on some plane separate and distinct from actual voting Republicans.

My real car is a 2016 Lamborghini. The 13-year old pickup truck is not my real car. It’s just not.

One element that seems to be missing in discussions about the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is this: Supporting Bernie Sanders does not ipso facto mean repudiating Hillary Clinton. I suspect that the great majority of caucus- and primary-participating Democrats could vote quite happily for either one in November.

The “repudiate Hillary” meme seems stronger amongst Sanders supporters, but is not, in my opinion, indicative of any quality unique to them or their candidate. Rather, I think it’s reflective of his position as a long-shot underdog.

Supporters of long-shot underdogs tend to see themselves as crusaders. They are more likely to “crusade” than to “campaign,” and “crusading” tends to excess.

Spend a quiet evening.

Tomorrow morning, get out of bed, bring in your newspaper, and look at it.

You will see the results in an instant. I promise you, they will not change overnight.