My sample ballot arrived…
[If you’re looking for “Monday Words of Wisdom,” you’ll find them at the end of this article.]
…and it tells me a lot about the NJ primary election. First, the top line corresponds to NJ’s Dem establishment—the slate of officially sanctioned NJ Dem committee blah-blah-blah’s candidates. I’ll ignore that whole line and not just because Mrs. Bill Clinton leads that linear parade. I have no use for the Dem establishment anymore. It’s shown it’s true colors. Arrogant, entitled, presumptuous, anti-progressive—those are the best adjectives I have to describe it. The worst ones aren’t appropriate for a PG-13 blog post.
Second, Mrs. Bill Clinton gets top billing over Sanders. The town fathers can argue for that as simple alphabetical order. Or maybe it was decided by a coin toss—like those “fair” coin tosses Hillary won in many of those silly caucuses. I know a lot of people see Democrat and vote the top line. NJ is a blue state, the Dem establishment always wins here, so nobody bothers to look at the issues anymore. The leading local Dem group is called the Blue Wave—read “DNC Annex.”
Besides, Clinton is a well-known face, it’s time for a woman to be in the White House, that Sanders is just a spoiler, yadda-yadda-yadda. This is assuming Dem voters even bother to show up. NJ’s is among the last primaries, people have better things to do (the NBA championship games are in full swing and the irises are in bloom in the local Iris Gardens), and summer has already started so the South Shore beckons.
I hear that “spoiler” criticism about Mr. Sanders a lot. The electorate has no memory. Mrs. Bill Clinton won the 2008 CA primary over Mr. Obama in 2008—she was a “spoiler” by Sanders’s naysayers’ definition! How dare Feinstein and all her old Hillary cronies call for Sanders to drop out. Sexism can go both ways, old Dem has-beens! How ‘bout asking yourselves which candidate is more likely to beat Satan aka Mr. Trump? Mrs. Bill Clinton is going to struggle—you can bet on that. But Mr. Trump chickened out on debating Mr. Sanders. So did Mrs. Bill Clinton.
That’s another thing wrong with that NJ primary ballot. Mr. Trump has been trumpeting during the whole primary season that he’s the Republican anti-establishment candidate. Not in NJ. He’s at the top of the GOP list—sort of belies that alphabetical argument the town fathers might want to make for putting Clinton there. Guess that line is always reserved for establishment candidates. Trump’s line is also filled with the officially sanctioned NJ GOP committee blah-blah-blah’s candidates. In NJ, he IS the GOP establishment candidate.
More worrisome is that the non-official establishment can’t find candidates to fill the rest of their primary ballot lines. Forget Cruz and Kasich—they’re no longer running. But Sanders is. Is the Sanders campaign so badly organized that they can’t fill those spots? The Dem candidate for U.S. representative is on the officially sanctioned Clinton line. (I’ll do a write-in there.) If you want a progressive revolution in this country, Bernie, it has to occur at all levels. Or maybe they just figure rich Montclair, NJ, will automatically go to Mrs. Bill Clinton? That’s a defeatist attitude. A lot of journalists, people in the publishing business, TV personalities, doctors, and lawyers live here. They can’t all be for the GOP; and at least some of the Dems must be seeing Clinton as a flawed candidate.
I’m a recluse in this town. The local bookstore has shunned me (can’t have that self-publishing riff-raff who write genre fiction upsetting the applecart). We moved here from out-of-state—in MA we were called “push-ins”; God knows what they call us here. We don’t have any kids in the schools. We have dared to speak our minds in some town meetings. Bottom line: no one will listen to me. But if anyone from Montclair, NJ reads my blog, I wish they would consider writing in candidates for those other “offices.” I have no idea what a “surrogate” is. I’m guessing such a person is a sub for one of the presidential candidate’s delegates. If so, Mr. Sanders needs one, so do a write-in there. Same for those other slots on the ballot. Don’t let the establishment win in Montclair.
It’s odd. Mr. Sanders has generated some fervor in NJ although he hasn’t campaigned here a lot. Too late now, I guess. How the Montclair town fathers pretty much guaranteed he loses the primary in Montclair seems unusual in these circumstances, to say the least. Tip O’Neill said all politics is local. Here Mrs. Bill Clinton will win. I guess suffering the ills of establishment politics is local too. But I’ll be doing a lot of write-ins in both the primary and general election. Idiots would say, “Don’t waste your vote by voting for Mr. Sanders or doing write-ins.” My answer to that? My other option is not to vote and not do those write-ins. That would be wasting my vote!
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Monday words of wisdom: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt
