Saturday, April 02, 2016                                          1:41 PM

Trump and Cruz announced today they will unite their tickets under a platform of increased police patrols of female neighborhoods.

Well, I can’t speak for everyone here—oh wait, I’m here all alone—yes, I can! So let me just say—we all have a lot to be grateful for. First off, we’re not Trump-supporters—so we know our brains are still functioning. More importantly, we know we aren’t Trump himself—oh my god—what a nightmare to wake up in that guy’s skin, huh? Best of all, we know that even if hundreds of thousands of the zombie-electorate show up at his rallies, there are still millions of sensible adults who will vote for virtually anybody else (I call it the Cruz effect). I like to think that principle applies to the GOP in general, too—meaning there are far more voters who want an educated, experienced adult to be the leader of the free world—so it doesn’t matter—Trump or Cruz, there’s no way we end up with a GOP caveman in office come November. And—bonus—first lady president! Or is that first ex-first-lady lady president?

What do we call Ms. Clinton anyway? She was the first lady, she was a New York State senator, she was the secretary of state—pick one, or mix-and-match for a zesty new title, i.e., First Lady Senator Secretary Clinton—I like that one—that’s almost better than President Clinton (after all, we’ve already had one of those). But I don’t know—after all the years she’s served, all the attacks she endured, all the campaigns she’s run to become our political queen-of-the-hill—maybe we should just take a page from the Brits and call her, “Your Highness”. What the hell, she’s earned it.

Bernie, you say? Okay, let’s take a hard look at Senator Sanders. He’s run a one-issue campaign—and, yes, that issue is central to most American families—it strikes home like nobody’s business. And it’s long past time we looked for politicians who would stand up to the wealthy and the corporations—I can only applaud his dogged opposition to the status quo—everyone knows things are broken and the income gap is transforming our democracy into a shadow-puppet government. Personally, I would go even further and attack Capitalism itself—it has metastasized into a suicidal paradigm that threatens the very ideals that supported its growth.

But I can agree with Bernie Sanders without assuming he’d make a better president than Hillary Clinton. By running a one-issue campaign, he avoids being scanned for weaknesses on other issues. Let’s take the most obvious—the President, whoever he or she may be, will have to work in concert with the Congress. As a lifelong renegade, Bernie Sanders has always stuck to his guns—and, as a senator, that’s a good thing—we want senators who stick by their principles. But a president has to compromise, form a consensus, and mitigate adverse influences—a knee-jerk idealist may not be the best person for that position.

Then there’s ‘international affairs’—things are fluid, globally—change is the only constant—and the changes become consistently more sudden. We don’t want a newbie going through training days while the world falls apart—not when we have an old salt like Hillary waiting in the wings.

Mostly, though, it’s the breadth of the challenge that makes Hillary the stand-out choice. Yes, we have to reform our financial regulations and enact laws that promote economic fairness. But we need to do other things too. We have to keep our present economy from collapsing while we make those adjustments—and that means working with the very financiers that Sanders so persistently villainizes. Yes, we need to make college more affordable—but we also need to keep our colleges and universities the pre-eminent centers of global learning they have been. And we need to keep our colleges from becoming de facto trade schools for the big donor corporations. We need to maintain national security and we need to continue, however unwillingly, being the world police. We need to protect our environment and ourselves from pollution, toxins, and complete extinction. The list of things a president has to do, and the things a president has to deal with, is a list too long for me to write here.

Suffice it to say that becoming president solely to regulate Wall Street and to make college tuition-free—is like becoming a mother so you can breast-feed. Yes, breast-feeding will be involved—but there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Besides, how often do you get to call the President of the United States grandma? Vote for Grandma Clinton—who knows? There might be some fresh-baked cookies in it for all of us.