Yesterday as I was finishing breakfast, I got my second telephone call of the day from Senator Raphael Warnock’s crew asking for money. At least they stopped with two calls per day—they usually don’t. Actually, though, said calls were for my wife. When I tell them she’s isn’t there, which I do even if she IS home (per instructions, of course), they either politely tell me their business and tell me they’ll call back, or they start into their spiel anyway.

Not that I’m off the hook (like the phone). It’s just that I don’t get phone calls from the Democratic candidates but my turn will come in another couple of hours when the post arrives. I think yesterday my final total of solicitation letters from the Dems was six, which is about the median. There was one from a man who isn’t up for re-election for five years, and another from someone who squeals that the Republican is going to be able to outspend her by an order of magnitude. I had just finished reading on cnn.com that she’s raised over 31 million dollars. Her opponent has raised $600K.

Among the constant correspondents I didn’t hear from asking for help for their impoverished campaigns were Adam Schiff, who inhabits probably one of the top ten safest seats in Congress, or the two Tammys, Baldwin and Duckworth, neither of whom is up for re-election.

My daily goal, though, is to fill out my bingo card by hearing from the Big Five: Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. And yes, it’s not unusual for me to attain this lofty status, nor is it unusual for me to receive two or three pleas from each of these groups.

So, do I give them any money? Sure. On the first of the month when we do our bills, I throw out the dupes, inventory what’s left, and have my wife pick a number between one and whatever (usually twenty-something) and the winner—occasionally two—gets my lavish donation of around thirty and forty bucks. I doubt that all told, they’re making any net gain from me, but it’s their business, not mine. In November, I shall watch the returns roll in with the reassuring knowledge that I did what I could to help them save American democracy. And that I can start pitching all this malarkey, at least for a while.

As with most bell curves, the broad middle interested me less, though, having come through the lower grades being indoctrinated with the hoary truism that we as Americans should treasure Honest Abe and The Father of Our Country above all other mortals, I was perplexed to find Washington in there with a shedload of Averages. Much, much later (like a couple of years ago), I learned from a semi-academic writer that this was attributable to his second term, when the departure of the great minds from his cabinet left everybody a peek behind the curtain and when he went all Dick Nixon against those who disagreed with his policies.

This line of inquiry goes back a long way. I’ve been following elections for sixty years now, and the tradition was old then. I came perhaps to political junkiedom a trifle early, as I was assigned to be Dick Nixon’s campaign manager by our second grade teacher, opposed by my prospective best friend—I had just changed schools—who was in charge of selling Jack Kennedy to our little band of tykes. We each had bulletin board space-- that I remember quite well-- and I seem to recollect, a little more dimly, having to give a campaign speech. For some reason, I was rather fuddled by a tradition I had heard of that candidates were supposed to be somehow ethical and vote for their opponent, and for the life of me, I can’t recall how I resolved that dilemma, though I do recall asking advice from several of my betters, and receiving nothing useful, invariably reducing to something about using my conscience. I doubt that I felt as though I had a conscience, perhaps had even heard of the concept, so I was, as would prove to be the rule rather than the exception during my life, at sea in a universe of ethical dilemmas.

Even in these days of the Web, one still has to dig a little to find out what’s going to happen on a given night, but I decided I would forsake the pleasures of They Might Be Giants conjoined with the fascinations of matching up the St. Louis Browns with the New York Highlanders, and watch. Two ex-presidents were to speak, as was the charismatic Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and there were hints dropped in passing that the rollcall vote to select a nominee might be in the cards. Yes, I would do my civic duty and watch.

Tuesday night, like most Tuesday nights, I settled in to watch election returns.  To my horror, there were no election returns.  Not, mind you, that I really expected the whole nine yards, with pundits pontificating, or boffins with their sleeves rolled up yelling about what the early returns from Door County told us about the Catholic vote, but I did at least expect that, even in this all-coronavirus all-the-time news cycle, there would at least be the reassuring little box up in the corner showing the percentages,  Nope.  Not even anything in the little cavalcade of minutiae which crawls along the bottom of the screen.  Well, this morning after much too much prowling around news sites, I discovered that all of this was, at least nominally, because there weren’t going to be any returns for a week or so.  Clearly, it’s already become tres gauche to care about who is the president of the United States, though perhaps we have another month or so before giving a damn will become an actual crime.

Since most of the moderate alternatives to Bernie Sanders’ radicalism are perceived to have collapsed (Joe Biden) or have no appeal to minorities (Pete Buttigieg) or both (Amy Klobuchar), the punditry have contented themselves with the media-driven late entry campaign of Mike Bloomberg as the Democratic establishment’s last hope of stopping the socialist juggernaut on its way to handing the republic another four years of the miseries of Donald Trump.

I’m not about to research this, but I’m guessing that this week’s International Court of Justice trial of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is the first time in history that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been tried for war crimes.

Like the moon this week, I find that my interest in these debates is waning. Thus I decided to liven things up this time a tad by playing Candidate Bingo. I made myself up a little card with all the clichés I expected to hear and that was my bingo card. That I had nobody to play with didn’t stop me, nor did the fact that I couldn’t (quite) think of enough clichés to make two cards. I simply settled on twenty-four clichés and wrote them down. I also handicapped myself a bit by attributing each cliché to a particular candidate. Thus, when Tulsi Gabbard was the first to bring up her combat veteran status instead of my pick of Pete Buttigieg, I blocked myself. And off they went.

All the Democratic candidates accept the science behind anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They all accept it is serious, and something needs to be done. They accept that at least some of this something will need to come from the government. They accept that they need to say something about it to keep the base happy. Some of them think we have 11 years, some think we have fewer. The candidates who claim we are doomed and dramatic action is required get dismissed as apocalyptic naysayers. The ones who say we can make changes that create new jobs and keep the economy sound are dismissed as unrealistic, calling for expensive new programs that will raise our taxes.