Super Doomsday

Oh, no.

I knew Bernie Sanders was going to have a tough time on Super Tuesday in the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses, but I obviously didn't know how tough it was going to be.  He lost and lost big to Hillary Clinton in seven out of eleven Super Tuesday states, largely because they were in the South and he could not make a dent into Hillary Clinton's base of black support.  This despite his solidarity with black Americans, his well-known arrests at civil rights protests in the sixties, his support for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential bid, and the endorsements he received from prominent black activists and celebrities such as Cornel West and Spike Lee.

So why did blacks support Hillary?  Don't ask me, I'm still trying to figure out why whites support her.

Massachusetts hurt.  I thought Bernie would win the primary in Massachusetts, the home of the Kennedys and Elizabeth Warren, the one state where mass transit and expanded health coverage aren't considered foreign ideas, yet Hillary won that, too.  Maybe barely, but a win is a win.  (True, Bernie won the Colorado caucuses, but that state hasn't been important much in presidential politics since its favorite son Gary Hart last mattered.)  Needless to say, Hillary's smug minions are pointing to Sanders' Massachusetts defeat and telling him - telling him, not suggesting to him - to get out.  But he won't quit.  Even though he goes into the Michigan primary down two to one in the polls.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is well ahead virtually everywhere, and his status as the likely Republican nominee was assured by his Super Tuesday victories.  Sure, it was fun to see Chris Christie play the role of subservient lackey and look like he regretted his support fro Trump - so much that he looked like he wished he were somewhere else or had to go to the bathroom - while Trump was claiming his Super Tuesday wins in a victory speech, but the possibility that Trump could win the nomination is pretty nauseating.  Despite all the hand-wringing in Republican circles over the Donald, he could be very formidable in the fall, having brought in more voters for the Republicans than Bernie Sanders has on the Democratic side.

I'm pretty much resigned to what the 2016 general election campaign in the fall is going to be like.  The next President of the United States is going to be a phony from New York.  Now we have to decide on which one - a rabidly racist and xenophobic blowhard or a hack politico whose "record of achievement" looks good on paper but isn't worth what it's printed on.

It's going to be like choosing between Pat Buchanan and James Buchanan. :-O