“The dogs don’t like the dog food.” I don’t remember where I encountered this pithy remark, which referred to unpopular offerings by Washington politicians to the citizens they supposedly serve. But it came to mind when I read of a recent opinion poll suggesting that about seven out of ten Americans polled expressed dissatisfaction with the prospective presidential election in which the only two candidates who will be actual contenders are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I am certainly one of those seven. In my view, the situation is one that would seem to be the inevitable result of our two party system as it has now developed.
Officially our country is a broadly based egalitarian democracy. Millions upon millions of our citizens—I’d guess at least fifty million--meet the constitutional requirements to present themselves as presidential candidates. It must be only by coincidence that our sixth president was the son of our second president and our forty-third the son of our forty-first; and that the entire governing class is only slightly more “diverse” than the House of Saxe-Coburg. These days our country has a population of well over three hundred million. Anyway, you can humor me in my estimate of fifty million potential presidential candidates. Let us further estimate that of this constitutionally eligible pool, a scant two percent are of marked intelligence, social and professional competence, moral probity, and in vigorous physical health. That very parsimonious estimate would leave us with only the tiny reservoir of about a million outstanding men and women from among whom we might choose two as major party presidential candidates. So you may want to wonder, as I do, why our choice right now must be between two geriatrics who, despite the very marked differences between them, share crucial inadequacies and debilities. You might further wonder why the voices of the Democratic Party establishment keep saying “Move on folks, nothing to see here!”—and the Republican Party establishment keeps saying, well, essentially nothing, except “Yes, sir, Mr. Trump, right away!”
This is one of the reasons that I am one of the dogs who doesn’t like the dog food. Even humble citizens like me can recognize Alpo advertised as steak Chateaubriand. More to the point, perhaps, I think my own life experience gives me a useful insight into the circumstances of the two candidates. I am a man eighty-seven years old (and, no it is not eighty-seven years young, as the makers of Hallmark cards want to insist.) Leaving aside my marked difficulties with balance and ambulation, born of serious disease and the powerful remedies applied to overcome it, my physical strength is not what it was thirty years ago, not by any means. I have most of my original marbles, I think, but certainly not all of them. There is a difference between losing a chess match to a superior player, and losing one by blundering, as I now commonly do. I have trouble keeping straight the characters in novels if there are a lot of them. I forget where things are all the time. One hardly earns bragging rights by being more articulate in extemporaneous speech than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but I am that by a long shot. However, I certainly don’t have the verbal dexterity I had at fifty. And while I acknowledge that one size does not fit all here and concede that the ravages of age manifest themselves differently in different people, the clear and unsurprising suggestion of my own eyes is that neither of the presidential candidates is exempt from visible signs of the aging process, some of them acutely familiar in my own personal experience. Putting this in the vernacular, they are losing it. It is questionable whether one of them ever had all that much of it in the first place, but I shall let that pass. That aspect of the situation among others may make a voting decision easier for me, but it does not make me happy with the choice. Nor does all the whistling in the dark by prominent Democrats to the effect that behind the scenes, beyond the trees where nobody sees, their candidate does the work of three ordinary mortals, is as active as Atlas and as eloquent as Demosthenes. He is a well-meaning elderly man, as someone or another recently said. That is a judgment in which I myself would find a compliment. It is very different from being a malevolent old man.
The hyper-liberal, hyper-articulate, and hyper-intelligent columnist for the Times, Ezra Klein, set the cat among the pigeons last week by suggesting that, in order to achieve their applauded goal of electing a Democratic president, the Democrats should even now replace the presumptive nominee, Biden, with someone more likely to win. Klein did not write this piece merely to cause a sensation. If you read his essay, you know that his motive, far from dissing Biden, whom he admires and respects, is actually to win the election for Democrats. The suggestion nonetheless is awkward in the extreme, being born of what Klein is not alone in thinking is an emergency situation. Klein may be wrong or unrealistic or wishful in making it. But from the way what I will call the Democratic Party establishment has reacted you would have thought that he had farted in church or had donned a MAGA hat. As for the Republican Party establishment, I must invoke a comment of my dear old dad’s. What would embarrass them would shame a hog to death. Klein didn’t say that the emperor had no clothes, only that the clothes were ragged and threadbare. That seems to me an empirical reality that the most wishful of wishful thinking cannot in honesty banish.
I see in the press increasing criticism of the way the press itself is treating the campaign. That is, as a “horse race”. This puzzles me a little since presidential elections are in effect horse races. Two people “run” against each other in a national poll. One of them wins. One of them loses. But I think I see the rationale behind the criticism. Instead of obsessing over who is up or down a couple of points in the volatile public opinion polls, we need to be thinking a little more deeply, and about fundamental structural aspects of the national political life. One possible topic that occurs to me is party politics. Many of the Founders were skeptical about political parties, and with very good reason as it almost immediately turned out when the drafters of immortal political theory actually started to govern in actual fact. It is of course today’s Party establishments—both of them—who are the kennel-masters dishing out the dog food that at least this dog does not fancy. One hears a great deal at the moment about the assaults on our democracy; but I have not noticed listed among the contributing negative factors the current state of the “two-party system”.
Politics is supposed to be the art of the possible. Okay. Even though there seems to be little spirit of compromise in either of the political parties, ordinary voters will be forced to adopt it. This means accepting the value of certain compromising principles. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, or even of the minimally acceptable, for that matter. Beggars can’t be choosers. Half a loaf is better than none. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The nearly blasphemous “lesser of two evils” comes to mind. You may want to supply other useful old saws from your own family traditions. And all of us may want to try to think a little more deeply, realistically, and patriotically about our political circumstances. It might turn out that the possible or alleged inadequacy of the candidates presented has something to do with the possible inadequacy in the procedures by which they are anointed as candidates.
