Eric the Blue

Mostly politics, sports, literature, arts reviews

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Nerdy Minnesotan

  • Yesterday’s primary: some notes on some numbers

    I’m not the only one who must have noticed the wide partisan disparity in the number of voters in yesterday’s DFL and Republican primary elections in Minnesota. In the contests for US Senate, for example, there were about 697,000 ballots cast in the Democratic primary, and only about 406,500 in the Republican primary. The winning Democrat, Peggy Flanagan, did not quite reach 60% of the total Democratic vote, but she still got more votes than all the Republicans combined. Percentage-wise, the breakdown was 63(D) to 37(R) in the Senate race, and it was essentially the same in the gubernatorial one, where, on the Democratic side, there was barely a contest.

    My question is whether this is in any way typical and what it might portend for the general election.

    It’s hard to answer the question about whether the disparity qualifies as “typical” because circumstances can be so different. To take perhaps the most obvious case, it’s common for there to be an incumbent who is more or less unchallenged during the primary season and, on the other side, a spirited contest that generates a lot of interest. It seems foolish, in this scenario, to make very much of a turnout disparity in the primary. But this year in Minnesota we have a gubernatorial race and a Senate race, both without an incumbent.

    Searching the recent past for circumstances that align with those that prevail this election season, I see that, in 2018, the DFL governor, Mark Dayton, was not seeking another term, which resulted in a 3-way primary fight between Tim Walz, Erin Murphy, and Lori Swanson. Meanwhile, there was another competitive primary among the Republicans: Jeff Johnson versus Tim Pawlenty. In the Democratic primary, won by Walz, 583,735 votes were cast. On the Republican side, Johnson won a primary in which 320,914 Minnesotans voted. Crunching those numbers, it works out that 64.5 percent of the primary election voters were Democrats, and 35.5 percent were Republicans–similar, though slightly more tilted toward the Democrats, than this year’s 63-37 split.

    Walz won the general election by 54 to 42.5 percent.

    I’m not saying something like that is going to happen again, in both the Senate and gubernatorial races, but I hope it does, and it would be a prediction based on something other than wishful thinking and vibes generated by hanging out mainly with people who think as you do. We Democrats tend to be bed-wetters, and yes, the Republicans have an issue with fraud. You want to know what Minnesotans hate besides fraud? Trump. Operation Metro Surge. The war in Iran. The cost of gas, ground beef, health insurance, and day care.

    At least the end of the primary season might provide a brief respite from political advertising. My minority view is that the ads don’t have to be terrible (though in fact almost all of them are). If you hate the one I’m pasting in below, on behalf of Abdul El-Sayd, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, then you have my permission to give up looking for a good one:

    It is, in addition to being adorable, a spoof on the truly terrible ads attacking him that are no doubt in production.

  • Primary election guide: Minneapolis school board

    I plugged Naomi Kritzer’s blog, here, with the explanation that her coverage of candidates running in local elections is, besides just being enjoyable, briskly informative in a way that might save anyone from making a mistake, especially in a low profile race. Well, the primary election is upon us and, perusing my sample ballot online, I see a school board race and a field populated by only unfamiliar names. This could be dangerous, as it’s the sort of office for which an amibitious crackpot might file, perhaps in hopes of advancing their nutty religious beliefs in school science class, or maybe something even nuttier but less predictable. Naomi to the rescue! For the benefit of my fellow Communists here in the People’s Republic of Minneapolis, I’m just going to sketch in below, in Ms Kritzer’s own words, a summary of her summaries. First, though, this note: there are five candidates for two at-large seats, so you are instructed to vote for two. But, since the top four finishers will move on to the general election, Tuesday’s primary will have the effect of eliminating just one. The five candidates are Michael Baskins, Clifton “CJ” Henderson, Stephanie Johnson, Collin Beachy, and Christin Crabtree. Beachy and Crabtree have been endorsed by the DFL party. Here we go!

    Michael Baskins: . . . an engineer who previously ran for City Council in Ward 2. He was funded by We Love Minneapolis but not endorsed by All of Minneapolis, possibly because he spent 20% of his campaign funds on clothing and wound up in court over it. His school board campaign website does not mention his City Council run and he’s not wearing a suit in any of the photos. . . . I wouldn’t vote for him.

    CJ Henderson: . . . has no website, no Facebook, and did not reply to my e-mail asking if they had anything about their goals or campaign they wished to share (though possibly my e-mail went to spam). They do have a single Instagram post which . . . says: “I’m running to bring fresh leadership, stronger student support, transparency, and real community engagement to MPS [Minneapolis Public Schools].” The complete lack of other communication with the public about the campaign gives me a lot of skepticism about this person’s commitment to transparency or real community engagement. I would not vote for CJ Henderson.

    Stephanie Johnson: . . . came to the school board forum but does not have a website. When I e-mailed her last month she said she was working on getting one up. [This does not appear to have happened.]

    [Naomi then quotes what Ms Johnson wrote to her in response to the e-mailed query. It’s sort of long and, in my view, demonstrates actual interest and involvement in education, though at a pretty low level. It’s also full of the kind of pablum one alas expects in these kinds of communications. If you want to read it yourself, here again is Naomi’s post from which I’m excerpting.]

    Collin Beachy: . . . is a special education teacher who has served on the school board for four years and is running for another term. Everyone seems to genuinely like him. School Board member is a job that pays poorly, takes up a lot more time than it’s supposed to, involves getting yelled at a bunch, and is in general a factory for burnout, which means people rarely run for re-election and this creates real issues with institutional memory. So I approach Minneapolis school board races with a pro-incumbent bias when someone’s running again, and I definitely think Collin would continue to be an asset to the school board.

    Christin Crabtree: . . . was heavily involved in organizing against ICE this winter. She’s the kind of person who years ago I’d say “have you ever thought about running for School Board” and I’m excited that she’s running.

    I would vote for Christin and Collin. . . . Christin, Collin, Stephanie, and Michael are all going to make it through the primary because CJ does not seem to actually be campaigning in any way. If you’re unhappy with Christin or Collin I would pick Stephanie over Michael despite her lack of a website. This is one of the years where I think the DFL endorsees are both good choices and the obvious people to vote for, though.

    So there you have the view of someone who’s troubled herself to find stuff out. It does not appear that there are any young earthers, fighting fundamentalists, or dopey Whack Jobs from a more obscure phylum in the race. There is, however, one grifter, and someone else whose motivation for paying the candidate filing fee is somewhat mysterious. I plan on taking Naomi’s advice, unless before Tuesday I receive contrary advice from, say, God, though even in that case I’d probably conclude it’s more likely I was hallucinating than that God should speak to me about the Minneapolis School Board election. In Naomi I trust.

  • Theater of the absurd in Michigan primary

    Sometimes, the colorless prose of a New York Times article endows utterly ludicrous events with the veneer of grave propriety routinely assigned to political news. And sometimes, as with “Trump-Backed Republican Loses to Little-Known Rival Who Had Suspended His Bid,” the content is so bizarre that the style sheet cannot obscure it. The linked article is no doubt behind a paywall, which provides me with an excuse to summarize it–mainly, I admit, for my own enjoyment.

    According to the Cook Political Report, Michigan’s eighth congressional district, home to the mid-sized cities of Saginaw and Flint, is the median district in the country: of the 435 congressional districts, 217 are more Democratic and 217 are more Republican than Michigan’s eighth. It’s one of the few districts in the country that in 2024 voted for both Trump and a Democrat, Kristin McDonald Rivet, for Congress. Consequently, it’s a top target for Republicans as they struggle to find seats they might be able to flip in this year’s midterm election.

    Three Republicans were running in the primary, but one, Tom Smith (his real name), a small business owner from Flint, dropped out of the race in July. When Smith dropped out, he endorsed one of the other candidates, Al Lemmo. Trump subsequently endorsed the third candidate, Amir Hassan, a Black navy veteran. The Speaker of the House also endorsed Hassan because, as everyone knows, he does whatever Trump says. Neither Hassan nor Lemmo mounted much of a campaign, but Lemmo did produce some ads showing scary looking Black people in Muslim garb. Hassan isn’t Muslim, but he’s Black, and his name is Amir Hassan, so . . . close enough, I guess.

    The primary was Tuesday and Smith, to his surprise, won in a walk. If you’ve been following along, you’ll understand why he was surprised: he had dropped out of the race a few weeks ago. With almost all the precincts reporting, Smith had received a fraction over 50 per cent of the vote. Hassan had 33 percent and Lemmo had 16 percent. So the winner had more than three times as many votes as the candidate he had endorsed when he dropped out, and the candidate endorsed by Trump lost by 17 points to someone who left off trying about a month ago.

    The result requires an explanation, and the Times article mentions only the one put forward by Lemmo: voters, theorized the producer of anti-Muslim ads aimed at a non-Muslim, may have gone for “the plain-Jane American name.” I think he means to say that, seeing on the ballot the name “Amir Hassan,” Republican voters thought Uh-uh, and then went for Smith over Lemmo because “Smith” is farther from “Hassan.” If you accept that explanation, and I think I do, it follows that bigotry trumped Trump’s endorsement, and that the ads seem to have sunk Hassan without elevating Lemmo. The winner, then, was the guy who stayed out of it by quitting the race.

    There’s a little more absurd embroidery to the story–for example, Smith’s handwritten note, obtained by the Times, in which he reports to the FEC that his campaign has raised the sum of $1850. Beneath his signature he appended a postscript that reads: “I could not file this form electronically because I have had no success logging in and have not been able to get a response from the help desk.” Okay, Boomer, but maybe if you’re going to be in the House of Representatives you should hire someone who can prosecute simple tasks for you (and maybe a third person to help you raise money). In Smith’s defense, when he wrote the note he was poised to drop out of the race. But he’s now the Republican candidate. Cook Political Report rates the race “Leans Democrat.”

  • In re Fauci

    My theory concerning the vilification of Anthony Fauci is that the Coronavirus killed more than a million Americans, Trump was president, his performance as it related to the outbreak was dismal, and someone else had to take the fall–Fauci, it seems.

    I think my theory explains some things that otherwise don’t make a lot of sense. For example, most recently, all the to-do about Fauci’s diary, as if the mere fact of its existence confirmed his perfidy, even though as far as I can tell the gravest sin it reveals is that he was perhaps over bemused by the celebrity status he attained before segueing into the Great Satan.

    Also: why is the debate about the outbreak’s creation story so fraught? Is the idea that something going awry in the Chinese lab would show that they were brewing it up for us, and that Fauci was in on it? As theories go, it’s somewhat more likely that Obama’s birth certificate showing he came into the world at Honolulu was a fake.

    I believe that Fauci was an advisor, and had no power to enact or implement policy. Trump didn’t have to listen to him, or even employ him. He’s famous for firing people, right? Fauci’s villainy was discovered in the rear view mirror, and only when a culprit was needed to divert blame away from Great Leader.

    Republicans have way too many stories about Covid. That it wasn’t that big a deal, just another flu, and that Fauci is responsible for the 7-figure body count– a logician would say they can’t both be true. (Actually, neither is.)

    Fauci is taking fire for taking the Fifth. I’d like to hear what he has to say about Covid–what we now know and should have learned–but I think that puts me in the minority. The people sneering at him have no interest in the pandemic, science, public health, lessons learned, preparing for the next one, anything like that. They only want to make trouble for Fauci. Maybe he’d say something that would give them an opening. So, on the advice of counsel . . . .

    In the days of my youth a stand-up comedian could make people laugh just by saying “fuck” on stage. As a comic, you nowadays have to be a lot more “edgy” than that, but in congressional hearings it seems a performative way of signalling your regular-guy cred. Thus Senator Moreno, Republican from Ohio, can on national TV ask Anthony Fauci who the fuck he thinks he is while exercising comparative linguistic restraint when addressing his former son-in-law, a congressman, also from Ohio, who’s made a habit of assaulting the women in his life, most recently the senator’s own daughter (and probably his granddaughter, too). I nominate both Moreno and his former son-in-law, Max Miller, for the Hall of Shame. Fauci is more deserving of this:

  • Powers’s urbane Urban

    Reading J.F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban again. I do it every five or six years, which seems to be about the right interval for the memory of the deliciousness to have subsided enough for my enjoyment to attain its former height. Powers was born in Illinois in 1917 and lived for most of his adult life near Collegeville, Minnesota, where he taught creative writing and English literature at St. John’s. He died there in 1999. His great subject is Catholic priests, who, in a phrase deployed by diverse commentators, are on the receiving end of his “gentle satire.” I suppose that’s apt, assuming just two words are allowed: closer than “bitter satire,” for sure. You can see that “satire” is the easy part. Does “gentle” mean 90 percent “loving” and only 10 percent “unsparing”? Because that would seem inaccurate. None of these guys is the platonic form of priest, and many are real putzes. They aren’t able men. They are mediocre specimens of humanity. IBM probably wouldn’t take them, still less the Notre Dame law school, but the Church will.

    For me, part of the pleasure derives from the drawing back of the curtain. I don’t know anything about what a priest’s life might be like, but I once had innocent notions that, in Powers’s fiction, take a beating. Here are some things his priests don’t do. They don’t discuss with each other questions of theology. They don’t argue about the interpretation of a Scriptural passage. They exhibit approximately zero interest in their Church’s teaching and doctrines. They don’t labor over the preparation of sermons. (Maybe they once did, but by now they have one for every occasion, and “mail it in.”) They don’t make pastoral calls on ailing parishioners. To fill the space that might have been devoted to such activities, there is a great deal about the comforts afforded by their living arrangements–or the lack of comfort. Father Urban Roche, to whom the title Morte D’Urban alludes, hobnobs about town with rich Catholic businessmen, and has a taste for the high life. He’s also a skilled golfer. As a golfer, I can’t help noticing that, in American literature, being good at this sport is invariably a sign of moral taint. See also, for example (and most famously), The Great Gatsby.

    Anyway, as the novel opens, Father Urban is stationed in Chicago, capital of the Catholic Church in America, Midwestern Division. The attentive reader will notice that he stands somewhat above the general aura of mediocrity. Billy Cosgrove, the rich businessman he runs with, would have been bored by the other members of the Order, but Urban is good company. The relationship bears fruit: Cosgrove makes a valuable donation of real estate and the Order is able to move its headquarters from a dilapidated building downtown to a facility that, as Powers describes it, sounds more like the offering of a suburban office park. Urban is aware of his superiority and chafes at his position below that of the Provincial, a man who, appearing on stage for the first time, receives the following notice:

    The Provincial, a lean, pale, damp-looking Pole with a hairline winding up and around like the endless seam of a baseball, sat at his desk cleaning his fingernails with a letter opener.

    I said part of the pleasure is the pulling back of the curtain, but that’s behind the steady accrual of moments like this one: concise, closely observed, comic, memorably expressed. The damp-looking Pole soon banishes Urban to a backwater retreat house in rural Minnesota. Why? We aren’t really told, but we are told enough to surmise that maybe the Provincial, like a lot of mediocrities who are in charge, doesn’t like having around for an underling someone more competent than he. The Provincial, after all, wasn’t the one who secured the large gift. But let’s slow down and note: the Order is populated largely by dullards, but one man stands out for his abilities, and those abilities are not at the service of what some (like J.F. Powers?) might consider the proper object of a religious vocation. If the damp-looking Pole or someone above even him resents Urban, it’s for the wrong reasons.

    So Urban is off to rural Minnesota, and he’s a Chicago kind of guy. Likes all the good restaurants, the bustle and the pleasures. For the native Minnesotan, the novel acquires local interest. Here’s his first impression from the train window:

    The country beyond Minneapolis seemed awfully empty to him, flat and treeless, Illinois without people. It didn’t attract, it didn’t repel. . . . November was winter here. Too many white frame farmhouses, not new and not old, not at all what Father Urban would care to come home to for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Rusty implements. Brown dirt. Grey skies. Ice. No snow. A great deal of talk about this on the train. Father Urban dropped entirely out of it after an hour or so.

    Ah, my heritage–could have been driving to my grandparents’ place! He arrives at his destination and finds the retreat house in a barely habitable state. The concern with comfort seems for once appropriate. You can see why the priest in charge, Wilf by name, occupies a place below the damp-looking Pole on the organizational chart. On Urban’s first night, the curtain opens on this scene:

    Father Urban looked through some issues of Life, while Brother Harold, at the long table, worked at his show-card lettering, and Wilf, after putting pencils and scratch pads around at the other table, stared out at the night, fooled with the radio, which had a bad hum, and rocked himself.

    If memory serves, Urban will have many adventures here.

  • Slightly bent

    I think most everyone has seen the cartoon–maybe more apt to call it a meme–wherein the guy in his pajamas pounds at his keyboard while shouting into the next room, “I can’t come to bed honey, I disagree with someone on the Internet!” Well, having no honey, I’m a free man, so:

    At this point, “Heights Pride,” whoever that is–I think he’s prudent to hide his identity behind a screen name–stopped replying, which I think means he didn’t really want to “continue this discussion.” I assume it’s a “he” because, generally speaking, the Dunning-Kruger effect is more observable in my gender than in females.

    But notice how quickly his sneering, pugnacious attitude evaporates when challenged on the facts. What a chud.

    I also had a back-and-forth with the supporters of a congressman who posted, “It’s time to put Fauci in an orange jump suit.” For breaking what law, I asked. The congressman was the execrable Randy Fine; if you want, you can look him up on Facebook and find the post and the comments. It’s sort of fun comparing the pages of the people who “like” my comments with those who put a saddle on their hallucinations and charge. The former are filled with pictures of the account-holder’s gardens, their vacations, their children, their children’s children, their pets, etc., etc. With the latter, excepting the occasional motorcycle, muscle car, or posed picture with a large, antlered, dead animal, it’s all nutbaggery all the time.

  • Women and the Republican party

    It’s perfectly obvious that, in the Minnesota races this election season for governor and US Senate, the Republican party has declined to endorse its only two candidates who have any chance of winning. Since Michele Tafoya and Lisa DeMuth are both women, a natural question concerning the m-word, for misogyny, arises. Do Republicans hate women? What evidence would support an indignant No? I’m trying to remember the last time the Republicans sent forth a woman to vie for either governor or US Senate. Amy Klobuchar has been elected to the Senate four times, and her losing Republican opponents have been named Mark, Kurt, Jim, and Royce. Tina Smith beat Jason. Tim Walz has vanquished Jeff and Scott. You might be tempted to say that Republican men are proven losers.

    By the way, speaking of losers: one of Royce’s exes has a restraining order against him, and he has also been dogged by courts attempting to force him to pay delinquent child support. Neither of this year’s Republican-endorsed candidates for the top-of-the-ticket races has ever held any public office, or is even of sufficient public stature to have inspired someone to write them up for Wikipedia. These are the fellas Republicans preferred to Tafoya and DeMuth–who, I admit, are awful, but a couple grams of discriminating intelligence should allow a person, including even a Republican, to detect differences of degree.

    For an informative and entertaining tour of this year’s Minnesota races, I cannot recommend highly enough the blog of Naomi Kritzer. She will make you smile and, if you’re not a junky, possibly save you from making a grievous error in a primary, or in one of the lower profile general election contests. I learned from her that, on the subject of gun policy, Tafoya supports red flag laws, so from a Republican perspective maybe the problem with her isn’t that she’s a woman but, rather, that she has a toe nail protruding into the realm of the sane. It’s more than you can say for the boys. Trump has endorsed for governor Pillow Guy, naturally.

  • Twins win, girls giggle

    Watching in agony and then cathartic relief as the Twins eked out a 12-inning win in Cleveland, while teen-aged pitter-patter drifted in from the next room, brought to mind W.H. Auden:

    About suffering they were never wrong,
    The Old Masters: how well they understood
    Its human position; how it takes place
    While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . . .

    Or while titters about someone's Insta post mix with a dejected sounding Cory Probus as yet again we make the first out of an extra inning without advancing the ghost runner to third. 

    Just want to point out that the sense of that fourth line is reinforced by the long march of simple words. Really a great poem. The whole thing is here. The painting Auden interprets, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," is above. The line in which a horse scratches its ass on a tree on Good Friday must be one of the high points of the last century's poetry in English; also, entirely consistent with the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who has a painting of what the world will look like to me if the Twins can't win most of their next six games, against the A's and Royals, American League weaklings:

  • Daffy

    When I was a little kid, my parents gave me for a gift The Story of Baseball, “a Random House book for young people” by a guy named Rosenburg. It looked like the above, which I just found in an ebay ad: apparently, if I still had the book, I might be able to sell it for around fifty bucks. Or maybe not, because the pages of mine were worn and smudged, and anyway I’d want to keep it. I thought of one of the book’s chapters today, on the Daffy Dodgers, a name applied to the Brooklyn team of the late 1920s, when their inept play, in the field and especially running the bases, made them a fixture in the second division of the National League. In one incident described by Rosenburg, a Dodger, batting with a runner on first and less than two outs, drove a ball deep into the outfield and, thinking he for sure had a double, charged around first base and sprinted toward second with his head down. But the base runner, after advancing most of the way to second, saw that the ball might get caught, so he retreated toward first. The two runners crossed each other between first and second bases while headed in opposite directions.

    In the Twins game today, something too much like that happened in the ninth inning. With the Twins trailing 6 to 2, our first two batters, Josh Bell and Victor Caratini, reached safely and were occupying first and second bases when the next batter, Brooks Lee, hit a ball into the right center field alley. Of course the camera follows the ball, so you could see the center fielder make a diving effort to catch it, which failed. When the ball was quickly recovered and thrown into the infield, both Caratini and Lee were near second base, and Bell was near third. It seems that Lee, imitating the Daffy Dodger of old, had put his head down and run to second base.. Meanwhile, Caratini, seeing that the outfielder might catch the ball, had stopped near second to see whether he might have to head back to first. Lee ran right up to him. I think that when the ball wasn’t caught, Bell first thought that Caratini would solve the crowding problem near second base by trying to advance to third, so he rounded third and started home. But then he saw Lee head back toward first, so he tried to duck back into third, but was tagged out when the outfielder’s throw was relayed to the third baseman. Then the third baseman threw across the diamond and Lee was tagged out, too. Instead of the bases loaded and no outs, there were two outs, a runner on second, and the same old 6 to 2 score. The next batter struck out to end the game.

    As a teenager, I had a summer job coaching tee-ballers, and I distinctly remember one game in which the batter dribbled the ball toward first base. The first baseman charged in, fielded the ball, and was going to tag the batter as he ran past him on the way to first base. But the kid who had hit the dribbler just stopped, and he and the first baseman contemplated each other for a second or two. Then, instead of going back to tag first base for the out, the addled first baseman ran toward the kid who’d hit the ball. The play ended as the runner retreated toward home and the first baseman threw to the catcher, who tagged the boy who’d hit the ball as he slid into home from the first base line. This was around 10 o’clock on a weekday morning in the summer of, I think, 1975, and the moms watching the game loved it. You have to pay good money to see that kind of stuff in the Big Leagues.

  • Trump’s thumb in Minnesota

    Will Rogers famously remarked that he did not belong to an organized political party–he was a Democrat. I thought of that yesterday after Trump endorsed clownish Pillow Guy for governor of Minnesota. The chairman of the state GOP responded by putting out the following statement:

    We were surprised by President Trump’s endorsement of Mike Lindell. We strongly support the President and his agenda, but Minnesota Republicans must choose the candidate best positioned to defeat Amy Klobuchar.

    When the going got tough under Tim Walz, Mike Lindell left Minnesota for Texas. Now he wants Minnesota Republicans to overlook his serious financial baggage, public records showing tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent property taxes, significant electability concerns, and unanswered questions surrounding his running mate. Minnesota cannot afford to nominate a ticket that gives Democrats an easy target and creates the very real possibility of another DFL trifecta.

    Other Republican candidates have spent years strengthening our party, supporting candidates, raising resources, and doing the hard work required to win elections.

    Republican delegates considered Mike Lindell at the State Convention, and he finished third. We believe that is where he will finish in the August primary.

    These are serious times, and they require serious, disciplined leadership. Minnesota needs a governor who can unite Republicans, earn the support of independent voters, and defeat Amy Klobuchar.

    That’s a lot of words from the state party chair without mentioning the name of the party’s endorsed candidate! Embarrassed of Pillow Guy, and less than proud of the guy selected by the delegates. That leaves the candidate Joe Soucheray spoke with recently:

    Only outsiders are allowed to say that the emperor is obviously naked. Why is the state chair “surprised” that Trump endorsed clownish Pillow Guy? Clownish Pillow Guy is the biggest Trump sycophant in the group, therefore . . .

    The most notable aspect of the chairman’s communication is its barely suppressed undertone of desperation. The desperation arises from the rule against spitting out poison. Pillow Guy has swallowed it and begged for more, thereby earning the president’s endorsement. Soucheray’s guest opts for swishing it around in her mouth for an indeterminate period. I don’t know what to say about the candidate selected by the Republican party’s activists. It might be the only thing I have in common with the party’s state chairman.