As an Iowan, I suppose I should offer some reaction to the news that our former governor Tom Vilsack has dropped his presidential ambitions.
That reaction would be ZZZZ.
It was a quixotic venture from the start. The Democratic Machine had put its money behind Hillary a long time ago, and even in his home state, people are more excited about the occasional Obama sightings than they ever could be about Vilsack. And we know him here, whereas in the rest of the country he's a non-entity. Since he's actually less charismatic than late seventies pop star Rupert Holmes, and since his stump speeches pretty much stuck to the usual say-what-you-think-people-want-to-hear template, the rest of the country had no reason to want to get to know him better.
Still, as he dropped out, he made a valid point. There came a point when he realized that it just wasn't possible for him to raise the kind of money he'd need to continue. (Again, the lack of personality and inability to say anything remotely interesting may have had something to do with that, but still...) He could raise money, he said, but he couldn't raise Big Money, something that only the well-connected can do, and that only the chosen few can even afford to run for president these days.
Which is hardly news, but it's still painful to hear. Times are troubled, and as the American people cry make it clear that they are fed up--with the war in Iraq, with lack of affordable health care, with escalating debt--it becomes more and more obvious that our elected representatives don't care about us, don't care about the things we care about, don't have our best interests at heart.
And more, it's obvious that we had nothing to do with electing them, that money and influence and connections got them into office, and the elections were a mere formality. The Democrats won the midterms, but has anything changed?
So we've been cast adrift, manipulated by forces beyond our control, and we fixate on Anna Nicole Smith not because we care, but because it makes us feel nominally better about ourselves, makes us feel...no, not good, but maybe slightly better about our own lives, slightly less helpless.
