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“Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?”
The debate started as a Casey Stengel night and turned to Yogi Berra.
Twenty days out from the Iowa caucuses, the herd has been thinning itself, so most of us were expecting, at least, a debate easier to follow. Maybe there would be opportunities for all candidates to swing at tough and important questions rather than just the first couple. When they couldn’t even get everybody up there on one night, Yogi might have been describing the Democratic Party’s primary election when he said:
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
Before the thinning out, there were already two “lanes” into which candidates were sorted — whether they wished to be sorted or not. The lanes have remained but the lines are shorter.
The progressive lane is naturally led by the Senator from Vermont who taught a lot of folks to “feel the Bern” in 2016— while the Democratic Party leadership was cheating, something we are supposed to forget while remembering that we call another cheater “President” (when we must).
The rest of the progressive lane is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and perhaps — subject to both whether he’s in the progressive lane and whether he’s still in the contest when he did not qualify for the TV show —…
