Election

 I'm probably going to sit this one out.

The choices are pretty dismal and bring to mind Bukowski's comment on the Presidential race of 1968--the first time I could vote for a President--that it was a choice between warm shit or cold shit.

It's difficult for me to even look at Obama now. Watching him speak yesterday on C-SPAN to a sympathethic crowd in Pittsburgh or someplace like that, I felt a little something of what I felt in 2008, but the feeling quickly went away. My beef is that Obama's not what he seemed to be; instead of being bold and transformative, he's clever and ambitious. He hasn't done even a tenth of what he said he was going to do. In the speech broadcast on C-SPAN, he kept saying that he was 'seeking' another term as President, as if the search was Homeric. Obama's spiel now reveals him to be running on the coattails of Lyndon Johnson and the Clintons, not particularly good coattails.

Romney seems like a nice guy, but he's a Republican (so far). To date, his performance brings to mind Al McGuire's line, that "the world is run by C students." Obama's vulnerable, but not to this guy.

The Republicans are really vile (perhaps that's why Romney doesn't fit into their narrative). Eric Cantor? It's hard to believe this guy actually exists, much less Mitch McConnell. These guys are in charge of a Congress that has a 10% approval rating. This is the party of Abe Lincoln?

I was raised in a slightly left-of-center family, with mostly Republican neighbors. Charles Chapel, a California (R) assemblyman for years, lived across the street. He was a nice guy, smoked, drank and didn't mind fetching our baseballs that sometimes found their way into his yard. Once, Charlie let me get on top of a pink elephant his publicist trucked in for a photo shoot. They spray-painted the poor thing, but I could see real elephant hide beneath the paint and whiskers growing up through the pink.

(Cantor by the way is in trouble. You can google him and see for yourself. He's up for re-election in his home state of Virginia. I'm giving money to Cantor's opponent, Wayne Powell, as I've given money to Elizabeth Warren, who's asked that I call her Liz.)

C-SPAN is wonderful, especially during election cycles. Link TV is new and pretty good. CNN, which was an avant-garde piece of high-grade performance art when first conceived by Ted Turner, isn't any good anymore. It's gone as corporate as The New York Times. I miss the reporting of Elizabeth Drew, who used to write for The New Yorker. She at the New York Review of Books now, which I just might have to buy.

I'm interested. I care. I'm disappointed. I wish I had somebody to vote for.