I hope you are all just as excited as I am for the coming Presidential election season. Actually, I hope you are more excited, or God save the Republic. It's not that I don't feel any sense of civic duty, it's just that once again neither major party candidate is terribly interesting.
Now that John McCain and Bill Bradley are long gone, it just seems there isn't any excitement anymore. I mean, if you elected John McCain President, politics would always be compelling--or at least a little nerve-wracking. Suppose he went off to negotiate more open relations with Vietnam. That would be worth watching on C-SPAN just to see if, during his speech, he ever thought he saw Charlie hiding in the corner with an AK-47 and wigged out. And if you elected Bill Bradley, you know that during his tenure the U.S. would never face the embarrassment of losing a world leader pick-up basketball game. "You got nothing, Gerhard Shroeder!" Bradley would say, as he soared by for the dunk.
Even if the current Presidential prospects aren't quite as exciting, luckily for our nation's future both Al Gore and George W. are at least pretty smart guys. I mean, the Ivy League accepted them, for God's sake. And we all know those Ivy admissions offices have never stretched the criteria a bit to admit rich alums' kids.
So at least regardless of who wins, we'll have a good, smart, possibly inbred Ivy League boy leading us. This is comforting. And it's not that the two candidates aren't reasonably interesting in their own right either.
Al Gore, for instance, has that attractive pathological liar quality about him that I always look for in a President. They certainly were some pretty interesting lies he's told also--you know, how he and Tipper wandered hand-in-hand around Love Canal looking for barrels of toxic waste, planning the Internet and figuring out how to best illegally raise cash from Buddhists from within the White House. Maybe at the same time some Hollywood people who were hiding in the bushes finally got that needed inspiration for "Love Story."
W. is also a pretty interesting guy. Especially if you've just been to see "The Skulls," the movie that is (quite) loosely modeled on the ultra-secret society of which he and his dad were members while at Yale. I can just imagine W. 30-odd years ago when he was inducted, got the cash, the Ferrari and the hooker. (I have a somewhat harder time imagining former President Bush with the hooker.) Anyhow, it's kind of interesting to imagine an aristocratic secret society working behind the scenes to elect two of its own as President. I mean, if the election's already been decided, no point writing for the absentee ballot, right?
Since I'm from New York, I think I will vote anyhow so I can get in on Hillary's Senate race. It was nice of Hillary to want to come serve the people of New York in this capacity. Or perhaps better put, it was nice of our profoundly Democratic state to have a Senate opening the year the Clintons are leaving the White House. Either way, Hillary can pack her carpetbags and hitchhike back to the Ozarks as far as I'm concerned.
Not that I'm saying Rudy Guiliani would be a terribly better alternative. Things haven't been going quite, shall we say, constitutionally lately in the city. It's just that I would rather vote for, say, Genghis Khan than Hillary, notwithstanding the fact that whenever Genghis disagreed with someone in a Senatorial debate, he would probably return with a horde of Mongol warriors and kill everyone, and then you'd have to elect the other 99 Senators all over again.
So all of you New Yorkers should be excited for this fall, however you plan to vote. All the rest of you should be too--after all, even if the Presidential alternatives are less than compelling, whomever we choose, that person is our future. All the same, part of me is a little bit sad we'll never get to see the pick-up games or Charlie with the AK-47.
