Ohio Governor John Kasich voted for Arizona Senator John McCain in early presidential voting. Is the former Republican presidential hopeful confused? Does he think this is 2008 and not 2016? Has he spent so manly hours mulling over his perceived injustice of being sidelined by the GOP faithful, of only winning his home state of Ohio in the primaries and of being so utterly whipped by a man like Donald Trump that he has simply become detached from reality? Or is he merely the walking embodiment of Never-Trumpism and an ideal caricature of a Twilight Zone campaign?
During his ego-driven primary run, he kept telling anyone who would listen that he “was the only guy who beats Hillary in every poll” and when it finally came to time to vote in that election, he selected someone who wasn’t even on the ballot – anywhere in the present age. If Kasich wanted to vote for a Republican who wasn’t running, he might as well have selected someone who actually won the election. Why not vote for Eisenhower or Reagan? At least he could feel like he was voting with history.
It was another absurd moment in a Twilight Zone campaign where it is difficult to discern reality from fantasy.
We move to Barack Obama’s latest television adventure. This president knows, deeply and profoundly, that he is just so overwhelmingly cool that few Americans will ever truly appreciate that they lived on the same planet and breathed the same air as the did. There he was appearing on the latest waste of airtime, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. It was a Halloween special and perhaps that is why Bee appeared to be so frightfully unfunny, constantly smirking at her own dull comedy and pandering to the celebrity president who is never so at home when being thrown friendly softball interview questions by inane celebrity hosts for the benefit of a vacuous television audience.
Seated in front of a backdrop of glowing jack-o’-’lanterns, which served to remind us that Obama will continue to haunt our collective memory long after he finds a redundant job at the United Nations, the president dazzled the nation with his perspicacity and revealed exactly why Hillary is encountering so much resistance in this last vital week of the election campaign. It’s because she’s a woman!
“When men are ambitious, it’s just taken for granted,” Obama said. “Well, of course, they’re ambitious. When women are ambitious, ‘why?’ That theme, I think, will continue throughout her presidency and it’s contributed to this notion that somehow she is hiding something.”
Sure as shooting, she’s hiding something. Why not start with all those missing emails and how she’s lied about 25 times about their content, or how the millions of dollars just appeared in her bank account after she and Bill left the White House “broke.” Hillary’s secretiveness has nothing to do with the gender but everything to do with her character.
But leave it to the ever-prescient Obama who actually predicted that people will continue to distrust Clinton throughout her presidency. Well, I can get the same level of prophetic accuracy from the message inside a fortune cookie. Predicting that Hillary will continue to inspire distrust is like banking on the sun coming up tomorrow.
And Hillary continues to lead a bankrupt campaign that has begun to define denial. Faced with the ghost of emails past with WikiLeaks and the ghost of emails to come from disgraced Democratic Anthony Weiner, Hillary increasingly resembles a ghost of election present, resorting to parading her favorite martyr, former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, at her moribund rallies.
She made a pusillanimous attempt at humor this week, suggesting that “intervention” was required for anyone thinking about voting for Donald Trump. One might take the politically correct path that Hillary’s acolytes would undoubtedly trod if Trump had joked so insensitively about intervention, a recovery strategy to shock addicts from their denial. But we’ll allow her some fun because, in truth, it’s the Clinton campaign that is praying for some intervention at this point, when the accumulation of lies, obfuscation and chicanery is weighing her candidacy down like an albatross.
The voter’s intervention will have to wait until next Tuesday.
Follow David on Twitter @DavidKrayden