My poor old Mother and I have been in Iowa, campaigning for our Democratic candidate. Our candidate is running a really positive campaign and we find him or her to be an inspiration (we are not taking reports on our candidate’s gender at face value), and so, even though we are from Southern California and really don’t have proper clothes for Iowa in deep dark December, here we are!
I managed to pick up a nice cloth coat for my Mother at the Goodwill, before we set out, but I could tell from her pursed blue lips that she wasn’t as comfortable as she might have been back home on the patio back home in California drinking mai tais and doing internet-based research to see if she can help Dennic Kucinich identify that previously unidentified flying object. Right now, Mom thinks it was just a paper plate on a string. But who was holding the string? Who was holding the damn string? Set up? That’s the question.
Anyway, we walked up to a nice little house –or what was probably a nice little house (we tried to envision what it must be like when the flowers were NOT dead and the house wasn’t surrounded by three feet of muddy, slushy, snow), but as soon as we did, the place went dark, like the house of our cheap party pooper neighbors back home on Halloween. We left our candidate’s literature in the mailbox, and as we were leaving, we heard some dark, Mahleresque orchestral music coming out of nowhere and saw a black limousine across the street.
Hillary Clinton got out of the limousine, ran over, ripped all of our literature out of our hands, tore it to shreds, laughed and shrieked "THAT’S what Iowans think of YOUR candidate!" She wasn’t very subtle about it.
My mother and I just stood there and shivered as Senator Clinton strode back to her limousine, cackling maniacally the entire way. What disturbed my Mother is that Hillary was wearing a spotted coat: pure white, with black spots. We can't quite put it together, but we feel like we have seen that coat somewhere before.
Now, we don’t want to cast aspersions, but our candidate is running a really positive campaign. Or at least we thought she was.
That was her literature she tore to shreds.
I do hope that we can all circle our wagons around the eventual nominee, even if this process and our collective approach to it makes it more and more likely that that nominee will be Mike Gravel. By the way, just to be fair, I saw Mike Gravel campaigning in a pet shop in Des Moines. That’s where I smelled the rat.