Popular Front

Someone somewhere pointed this out, and given the avalanche of pixels and glyphs I attempt to ingest on a daily basis I'm not really surprised that I can't remember if it was on twitter or facebook or any of the other services that are proper nouns but we're not allowed to capitalize, but in 2004, Howard Dean shouted a little bit too enthusiastically, a little bit louder than the roar of the crowd he was wading in seemed to dictate, and that was that. The Howard Dean Scream was his Pickett's Charge, the high water mark of his campaign right before he was sloughed off by a fickle electorate who decided they would prefer to ultimately fail in the general election under someone else and were thus seduced by the pre-embalmed charm of John Kerry.

My oldest son will be 17 when the general election hits next November, not old enough to participate yet obviously but old enough to be engaged in the cycle. Because he was raised properly by people not prone to jump at shadows or the inevitable looming Leviathan-like amalgamated creature made up entirely of Mexicans,* he was confused and horrified at the concept of and initial rise of the Trump campaign. A seasoned observer now, I tut-tutted and ho-hoed and assured him, no, don't worry, these types of things never last. The closer we get to people casting actual votes, they'll remember that the country can't be run by an animated marionette with selective Tourette's.

And well, here were are, 52 days from the Iowa "caucus" and 60 days from people casting votes like adults for the first time in the cycle in New Hampshire and still, there's more Trump than not. He's survived insurgencies from Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, now Ted Cruz... basically everyone except sad-ass Jeb Bush, but he sort of shot himself in the foot way back when he decided to marry an immigrant.

I'm still not 100% convinced Donald Trump actually wants to be a public servant who makes $400,000 a year and has to deal with press scrutiny of his every move. But I'm starting to wonder... the appeal to a narcissist would be pulse-quickening and palpable. And so far he's gone out of his way to insult, caricature and belittle essentially every group of people in the United States who aren't penis-having white folks and survived, even flourished. 2004 was a long time ago. Not sure what Howard Dean can do at this point but shake his head and shrug. Today screaming like a lunatic for a few seconds at a rally might just win you a 24-hour news cycle, not disqualify you from office.

For Democrats, I think the worst case scenario is Republicans come to their senses and figure out a way to keep the Trump from translating his flourishes of sparks into full party immolation. And it looks like they might even be thinking along those lines already. And then theoretically he mounts and independent run and takes all his people with him, including the, shall we say, un-silent minority on the obvious fringe. That would, in a single jab, lance the boil that is modern Republicanism and leave whatever compassion-challenged electo-bot left standing to automatically look reasonable if only by comparison. Ideally some of them neutrals take a look and decide they don't hate Hillary as much as they thought. But hahaha, no. Like Jeb Bush, she screwed up her appeal to that group a long time ago, when she made the impertinent decision to be born a lady.

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*Or I guess Syrians. Or no, now it's all Muslims. If I learned anything from Harry Potter books, it's that the bogeyman is very fungible, depending on the input of the scaredy-cat observer.