The Island Of Misfit Toys

     I've been watching the milling throng of applicants for the job of 2024 Presidential candidate with mounting horror.

     Mr. Trump, the GOP frontrunner, well, quite aside from my opinion of him,* his past performance and likely future entanglements mean he's never again going to get the number of votes he did in 2016.  Granted, the people who like Donald Trump really, really like him and their enthusiasm has only grown with time, but the vast, muddy middle of voters, the people who were willing to give the business guy a try in 2016, had left him by 2020 and his indictments, messy spats and unhinged social media rants have done nothing to win them back.  Name-calling and fear-mongering are only the stick and the man's got no carrot left to dangle.

     Governor DeSantis, a distant second, has a people problem: he doesn't people well.  He whangs away with verve and aplomb at the same culture-war issues that thrill many Trump voters, but he cannot fire 'em up the way Mr. Trump can, so why should they look his way?  His campaign so far has revealed a taste for the high life that doesn't play well in middle America.  Worst of all, there's a strong case to be made that the man's a dead-eyed sadist.  It may or may not be true, but there's enough smoke there for opposing opinionators to set up the hue and cry.

     The rest of 'em might as well be Disney's seven dwarfs from Snow White and as campaign season lumbers on, Mr. Trump will undoubtedly give the more prominent ones similarly descriptive nicknames.  Lotsa luck, kids.

     Across the aisle, the Democrats appear to have distilled down their own Presidential-aspirant crazy into one man, the wild-eyed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has certainly shown that his party won't take a back seat to the Republicans when it comes to lunacy, and his blanket opposition to all vaccines, endorsements of fringe theories and bland denial of his well-documented antisemitism has established him as a personality beloved by conspiracy theorists and weirdos right across the political spectrum.  Electing him President would usher in a new Dark Ages, this one self-inflicted.  It's a good thing he doesn't stand a chance.

     If a rising tide raises all boats, a falling one will leave a few higher and drier than the others.  Amid the falling tide of Presidential aspirant connection to reality, Joe Biden stands out by virtue of not being batshit crazy.  The guy is what you get if you ask an AI art program to draw a moderate Democrat President, only older.  But he's sane, sober and has a clear understanding of how the Federal government works, which puts him head and shoulders above everyone else who's trying for the job.  Do I love him?  I do not.  But he clocks in on time and wears a suit, and nearly always picks up the right fork at State dinners.  His Administration has actually worked with a divided Congress to get things done -- not much, nothing very dramatic, but the stuff that had to get done, they've done.  Compared to the seething sea of nutjobs vying for the top spot, he's a giant, God help us.
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* I think he's the Three Stooges version of authoritarian thuggery -- except the Stooges were only playacting that degree of stupidity and incompetence, and he's living it.