"With the elections just around the corner its time to bring back a candidate who embraces the challenge of this modern world. This is from the Smothers Brothers 20th Reunion Show in 1988. Pat Paulsen again leads the way in American politics."
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According to Nate Cohn in the New York Times: The Most Important Primary Is ... Wait, Indiana?
It may be Indiana or bust for Donald Trump.
If the polls are right, he will dominate in New York on Tuesday and in the coming races across the Eastern Seaboard. He could win nearly all of the delegates at stake — keeping him on a narrow path toward the Republican nomination. That would set him up for what will probably be the most important test of the race: Indiana on May 3.
It may sound strange, but when you start gaming out the rest of the primary contest, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his quest to reach a majority of delegates before the convention could all turn on Indiana.
Hitting closer to the heart of the matter ...
Two despised frontrunners, two dying parties and a deeply broken system: How did we get here? by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon)
Our political system is profoundly broken, and although many of us have understood that for years, this has been the year that fact became unavoidable. Both political parties are struggling through transparently rigged primary campaigns that have made that ludicrous process look more outdated than ever. Nobody cares about the Democratic vote in Wyoming and it’s not going to matter, but when Bernie Sanders dominates the caucuses in that empty, dusty and Republican-dominated state and wins seven of its 18 delegates, doesn’t that sum up the whole damn thing?
Both parties are also struggling to control long-simmering internal conflicts that have come boiling to the surface this year, and in both cases the leadership caste is wondering whether it’s time to burn down the village in order to save it. In the larger analysis, both parties are struggling to ignore the mounting evidence of their own irrelevance. One of them is struggling with that in a more public and more spectacular fashion at the moment, but the contagion is general. In my judgment, Democrats would do well to cancel the Champagne and refill the Xanax.
Despite the unkillable Whack-a-Mole candidacy of Sanders — who, as I argued this week, has channeled an insurgent and quasi-revolutionary class-consciousness that other politicians didn’t even know existed — we are likely to end up with a general-election campaign between the two least popular major-party nominees in political history. OK, I suppose we can’t know that for sure: We don’t have polling data to consult from the infamous election of 1828, when Andrew Jackson accused President John Quincy Adams of procuring hookers for the Russian czar and running a gambling den in the White House. (Adams accused Jackson of being a bigamist and an adulterer, and also hinted that he might be partly black, despite his overtly racist views.)
"I feel that it is too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation, carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction. However, to get to the meat of the matter, I will come right to the point, and take note of the fact that the heart of the issue in the final analysis escapes me."
-- Pat Paulsen (1927-1997)
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