It used to be that the only people I had to ignore on my walk home were the bums and the scientologists. Now I have to ignore bums, scientologists, and campaigners for the democrat party. I'm tuning out a litany of "Can I have a dollar?" and "Would you like a stress test?" and "Have you registered to vote?" The answer to everyone is "no." But at the end of the day I'm tired and I don't want to make eye contact and I don't have the energy to be polite when inside I'm snarling at them.
The state primary is coming up, and the democrats are hard at work devouring each other and trying to take as many people with them as they can. I dislike both candidates but not as much as I despise the people dispatched by legion on foot to my city park. They are literally swarming, these blue-shirted people carrying clip boards. These people who've found Obama are more annoying than the people who've found Jesus, although to listen to them you wouldn't know there was a difference. The lobotomized mania of the Barack campaigners is nicely offset by the twitchy urgency of the Hillary supporters, but all of them are starting to panic...just a little. They took for granted that a democrat would be elected in 2008, but they also took for granted that their party would not self-destruct in that same year. And suddenly, hating Bush isn't sufficiently rallying, and longing for universal healthcare isn't sufficiently unifying, and being a member of a "persecuted minority" isn't sufficiently inspiring, and day by day they are making it more inevitable that yet another rich old white man sweeps into the White House. Which is fine by me, because at least the rich old white men don't constantly yammer on about how they are rich old white men and thus, specially qualified to serve as commander-in-chief. (Although I would love it if they had the balls to say something along those lines.)
The Democrat party seems to view "diversity" as some kind of magical qualification. If you are in the minority, you are by virtue better than those in the majority. The only majority Democrats love is a majority vote...for a Democrat. In fact, if you were a blind wheelchair-bound Native American lesbian scholar of Islam, you could probably win the primary nomination just by showing up at the Democrat national convention.