Primarily, In Three Rounds

Every once in a while I get short of sleep, I mean, really short of sleep, to the point that I hallucinate. Once in that dark underworld of consciousness, a voice may say to me: "you really should explain your political views to people."

So hey. (Pause for musical intro.) Round one.

1) In the primary I intend at present to vote for Bernie Sanders.
2) This is primarily (get it? Ha! Pun!) because I expect him to lose. I often vote this way.
3) May. The Oregon primary is in May. We never decide anything anyway. It's all over by the time they get to us.
4) I expect him to lose because leftie white people comprise only about a third of the Democratic party, and we're the people who like him.
5) Conservative and moderate Democrats are not a mirage conjured up by the evil specter of Wasserman Shultz. They exist in large numbers.
6) Especially in states such as Florida and Ohio, which have been known to influence presidential elections.
7) But you know, a man likes to be counted. I think wealth inequality is out of control and rapidly getting worse, and I think it's the main driver of lots of bad things, and a vote for Sanders gets that out there.
8) Besides, if he's going to lose, no harm done.

Round Two. (Pause for complicated intermezzo, quick fiddle work, a little snappy snare drum.)

1) I like Hillary Clinton.
2) I'm not making this up. I like her. I want to bring her a beer and give her a foot rub at the end of a long day. Sue me.
3) I know she takes money from corporations. I know she thinks corporations are the foundation of American wealth, and that it makes sense to subsidize them, and that taxing their income puts them at a disadvantage against other national corporations. And actually I think that too.
4) (Most corporations are still decidedly national, not global. Did you know that? A lot of leftie white people don't.)
5) So I like corporations, actually. I'm with Sanders in that I think they have way too much political influence. I think giving business entities first amendment rights is preposterous. & I'm with him about breaking up the banks. But I don't think supporting corporations economically, when it's in our national interest, is necessarily Betraying The People And Being Unprincipled.
6) I know she's militarily aggressive, and I don't like that. She basically supports the American domination of the globe, and our fantastic levels of military spending. I hate that. See Round One. I'm voting for Sanders, remember?
7) She's taken incredible, continuous vilification pretty much all of her life, and she keeps working for the public, for peanuts. If you don't understand how much money someone like her could make, do a bit of research. She is not doing this political thing for financial gain. She's doing it out of a commitment to public service that's in her bones, so deep that she doesn't even know how to express it and would sound phony if she tried.
8) So I think she's fabulous. Yeah, I think she's wrong. But I like her.

Round Three. (Somber music. Dying Fall)

1) Nobody in this race is anything like so radical as I am. Have you looked at Sanders' tax proposals? They're depressing. They would not begin to address the inequality of wealth. Nobody seems willing to do the arithmetic on this. Redistributing wealth is not something you do with an upper income tax bracket below 70%. It's just not. And Sanders' most radical proposal (not that any such thing would get through Congress) is fifty-some percent. As is Clinton's.
2) Both candidates are Democrats of sorts we've known all our lives. They both believe in huge centrally controlled and administered government programs to address, well, pretty much anything you might want to address.
3) Both come from the land of Oz (i.e. immediately post-WWII-America, which controlled a staggering 40% of the world's GDP, and all of whose competitors had just spent six years bombing each other's infrastructure to bits.) In Oz, no one EVER has to worry about competition or unemployment, not in the long run.
4) We don't live in Oz any more.
5) Also: neither one of them gets it about the environment, any more than Obama does. They don't understand the scale of the disasters impending. They basically live in the "tweak a little here, regulate a little there" world of their political youth. (see Oz, supra.) 
6) Sanders has a history of endorsing embarrassing pseudo-science. Alt med, homeopathy, all that stuff. Like Obama. This is a minor point, but (living as I do in the belly of the alt med beast) it annoys me disproportionately. 
7) Not only has no one been able to convince me that Clinton mishandled Benghazi, or her email; no one has ever even been able to give me an intelligible summary of what they allege her to have done, that is different from any other secretary of state. 
8) Oh yeah. That electability thing. I do worry about it with Sanders. Not because of the "Socialist" label, which I actually don't think is particularly meaningful to anyone who might vote for a Democrat any more. But because, if there's a major terrorist attack or international incident in the run-up to the general election -- will he be able to sound bellicose enough to satisfy the American thirst for blood-vengeance? Will he even try? I doubt it. In which case he's toast, and Ted Cruz moves into the White House.