Since the beginning of this election season, I’ve been writing debate re-caps for friends on Facebook. They seem to like them, and have suggested I share them more broadly. However, during the last Democratic debate, I had a conflict and couldn’t do a legit re-cap, so I wrote a little piece about the two candidates that summed up how I felt about them. I hope you like it...
People say New York City has been cleaned up. Ever since America’s Mayor hit this town in the ‘90s, the hookers have disappeared, the drug dealers have moved upstate and the mobsters are now just a convenient device for screenwriters that need an antagonist who isn’t brown.
But crime never goes away. When you eliminate one threat, a vacuum is created. It must be filled.
Now, the big Investment Banks run every racket in town. You want your business to succeed? A reservation to Per Se? You have to go through them. The hookers are gone, but someone’s gotta screw this city. The big banks are more than willing to take your money, but unlike the hookers they get you to bend over.
Detective Hillary Clinton has been on the beat for a long time, just a few years from retirement, and she’s seen it all. Mobsters? Check. Drug Dealers? She took ‘em on 90s and lost. Big Time. Hookers? Just ask her husband…
The new guys? Yeah, she’s taken money from Wall Street. It’s just what was done. You didn’t think about it. It was part of the job if you wanted to survive and make your pension when you got out. IF you got out.
However, the last few months have been a bit of a pain in the ass for her. She was recently assigned a new partner…a kid from Brooklyn that graduated from the academy just a few years earlier and only recently made detective. The fresh-faced ‘kid’ is 74-year old Bernie Sanders. He’s as squeaky clean as they come, but he couldn’t find a comb if his life depended on it.
The problem for Hillary is that Bernie’s an idealist, and Hillary hates idealists. You know how it is, the thing you hate the most is usually the thing you used to be and were forced to abandon…especially if it was something you liked about yourself. Yeah, she was a dreamer too. Back in college. One of the biggest. But she got that beat out of her a long time ago. It was probably the drug dealers. Single-payer was the last real dream she had.
Bernie, however, grew up watching the sunrise and dreaming about distant lands on the other side of the Atlantic. That’s where his idols live. Particularly, that’s where Sven Olof Joachim Palme lived. Palme was the 26th Prime Minister of Sweden from ‘69-‘76 and again from ‘82-‘86, until he was assassinated at age 59…shot in the back while walking home from the movies with his wife. While he was in office, Palme was the primary architect of the Swedish Social Democratic model…the king of the Nordic models. Bernie fell in love early on with Palme’s mix of free market capitalism with a comprehensive welfare state, aimed at enhancing individual autonomy, ensuring human rights and stabilizing the economy. There was a purity to it and it even worked. Bernie’s plan was to bring it to his town or die trying.
But before this secular Jewish kid from Brooklyn could transform the U.S. into the Nordic countries he so admired, he’s gotta take down the powers that be. He’s gotta take down the banks. Hit them so damn hard that he breaks ‘em up into tiny pieces. Single-handedly if he has to. And he believes he’s the guy that can do it. Maybe the only guy, because he’s the only one that’s clean. He’s never touched their dirty money. He’s never capitulated. There was never any room for a middle-ground. That’s where the devil lay, if he you believe in that mumbo-jumbo. He doesn’t.
While the two of them are driving around town in their cruiser, Bernie likes to share his plans with Hillary. He loves to talk big, but Hillary just laughs. It’s that bitter, all-knowing, Hillary laugh. She remembers being that innocent and full of ambition. She marched for revolution when she was a kid. But that’s when she had a kid’s understanding of the world. She knows now that revolutions are for suckers. The only revolutions that have ever worked were the ones in Central America funded by the Republicans, which meant they were funded by the big banks. You just can’t escape those guys and their deep-pocketed power. But even with all that power, even those revolutions didn’t last.
But that doesn’t stop Bernie. He keeps dreaming out loud as they drive around town. And, every once in a while, Hillary starts to dream with him. She remembers a young girl in a print dress with oversized glasses that shared those dreams. She starts to think…what if?
But reality always brings her back. She knows that change only comes incrementally. She’s said it before. You can’t change a person’s heart. You have to change the laws and eventually, the people will get there. Revolutions are great for the Beatles or Tracy Chapman, but real change only comes incrementally.
Meanwhile, the rides continue. Bernie keeps dreaming – louder and louder – and Hillary tries to talk him down. Ultimately, whether she retires this year isn’t up to her. It’s funny. For someone that has always seemed like she wanted to be in control of everything, it’s amazing to her how much of her life has been completely out of her control. But she doesn’t like to think about that…
