Barbara Boxer for President

Yeah, I know it's too late and there's a 99% chance Hillary will be the Democratic nominee for president ( Bernie has about a 1% chance now after those Nevada and South Carolina results ), but hear me out; I've got a point to make.

Now that Donald Trump is ( remarkably ) the favorite to win the GOP nomination, I find myself worrying that the Democratic process to pick a nominee ( the process by which they pre-ordained Hillary as the nominee, and threw all their resources behind her ) is going to pick the wrong kind of candidate to run against Trump.  However, before we discuss the wrong kind of democratic candidate to run against Trump, let's discuss the right of candidate to run against Trump.

The best kind of candidate to beat Trump is actually no candidate.  If you polled all Americans on whether or not they wanted Donald Trump to be president, "No" would win in a landslide.  However, the opponent matters a lot here.  If Donald Trump was running for president against David Duke, Trump would win in a landslide, and all of Trumps fiercest liberal critics would line up early in the morning on Election Day to vote for Trump.

No, the Democrats can't run "nobody" for president, but they would have been a lot better off running a relatively anonymous politician, who isn't disliked by a large portion of the country.  Let's make no bones about it, Hillary is disliked, and not just by conservatives who always vote for the GOP anyway.  Just go to facebook and see what Bernie Sanders supporters have to say, and consider that a certain percentage of them will stay home in November if Bernie is not on the ballot.  Also consider all the undecided moderates who are not big fans of Hillary.  Trump's certainly unpopular, but so is Hillary.  She's a little bit less hated than The Donald, but the margin between Trump's unfavorable ratings and Hillary's unfavorable ratings isn't enough to allay my fears about November.

This is where Barbara Boxer comes in ( or would come in, if it wasn't too late, which it is ).  Barbara Boxer has been serving in the Senate for more than 23 years, and I really only know two things about her.

1) She was one of the two women elected to the U.S. Senate from California in 1992.
2) She's not Dianne Feinstein.

I don't say this to diminish Barbara Boxer's career.  I'm sure she's done a lot of fine work in the Senate since January 1993, but unlike some people ( I'm looking at you Chuck Schumer ) she's not on TV every 5 minutes talking about it.  My point is that if a person like me ( who writes political blog posts for fun ) can't tell you much about Barbara Boxer, she hasn't been in the spotlight too much.

And for a Trump-vs-DEM match-up in November, having somebody who is not too famous on the "DEM" side of that match-up is actually a good thing.

Anyway, it's too late to do anything now, but it's something that might be fun thinking about ( in a masochistic way ) as you pull your hair out worrying about Hillary's unfavorable ratings over the next 8+ months.

Rich

Things I Used to Believe

When I was a child, I believed the following things ...

Age 4: Mommies stayed home and Daddies went to work.
Age 4: All doctors were men and all nurses were women.  Women couldn't be doctors.
Age 7: That it would be best if somebody other than Bella Abzug won the race for New York mayor, because running a government was a man's job.

Age 4: It was cool when cowboys shot Indians.
Age 4: The only "Indians" in the world were the people who wore feather headdresses in the Americas.
Age 4: All "Indians" who has not yet been shot by cowboys still wore the feather headdresses ( just like the crying "Indian" in that pollution commercial ).

Age 4: It was OK to start my writing career by writing a war story ( which I titled "Men at War" ) about American soldiers killing Japanese soldiers with authentic Japanese names like "Private Choo Choo" and "Private Chee Chee."
( If I could find this story, I'd post a picture of it, but alas, I think it has been lost to the ages.  To be fair, this probably wasn't an example of my childhood racism.  I think I had learned about World War II, and had decided to write a story about the USA fighting Japan.  Yeah, the names I choose for the Japanese guys were really questionable, but I probably did not know any real Japanese names.  Anyway, what 4-year old white kid didn't have fantasies about killing Asian people? )

Age 5: The "Ancient Chinese Secret" Calgon commercial was in no way racist.
Age 5: The crows in Dumbo were in no way racist.
Age 6: The depiction of Buckwheat in the The Little Rascals was in no way racist.
Age 8: "The Mandarin" character from Iron Man comics/cartoons was in no way racist.
Age 10: The "Ming the Merciless" character played by Max von Sydow in the Flash Gordon movie was in no way racist.

Age 13: Michael Jackson and Boy George were both straight.  I though they were cool, so I didn't want them to be gay.  I also thought Paul Lynde and Liberace were straight, because I always wanted to think the best of people.  I didn't want to think that anyone was gay, because being gay was bad.  Being gay was very bad.

Age 13: It made perfect sense for the USA to commit resources to building a space defense system to shoot down Soviet Nuclear weapons.
Age 14: Ronald Reagan was the most awesome president ever.

Yeah, so the child version of me was pretty much a future Tea Party member in the making and would have loved a lot of what Donald Trump has been saying.  Of course, the world has changed a lot since I was a kid, and more importantly, I've changed.

My point here is that I think a lot of the people who love Trump really haven't grown up.  A lot of us grew up a culture full or sexism, racism, and homophobia, but most of us grow up, learn about the world, and realize that our childhood views were idiotic.  These people didn't ...

Rich