"The nomination is, obviously, his to lose. But the presidency will not be won if he doesn’t learn that the only way to reach the high-minded conversation he wants, and the country badly needs, is to figure out how to maneuver his way through the gutter." -- Joe Klein, Time Magazine

"We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believed it must depress the level of culture and of public life." -- Marilynne Robinson, from a lecture published in Harper's

The Democratic nomination carnival grinds on to IN and NC, and more than anything else in these last few days, the two quotes above caught my attention.

The latter speaks to our inevitable tendency to treat our politics as spectacle:

The inane debate questions about flag pins.

The beaten down cliches—"If you can't close the deal, get out of the kitchen"—or something like that.

The sinister and cynical advertisements, complete with Osama (Obama? no, wait, Osama...) climbing out of a hole in the hills.

The shameless fund-raising for hrc.com on the air during a primary night. (Hillary is broke...Hillary needs money...send money now or this will end soon and our ratings will suffer.)

The parsing of numbers (was is 10%, or 9.4? Who has more superduperautodelegates? Who leads the popular vote? Hillary does, cause Michigan counts, even though it didn't count at the time of the vote. Why does the popular vote matter, because Hillary says so, you schmucks, don't you get it? She is ready to obliterate Iran on Day 1!

It makes me tired, frustrated, and fed up with the broken and rigged system the Clintons game so well. Exhausted to the point of lethargy, which is exactly the point, isn't it? It reminds me why I cursed the DNC and swore off politics several times before, like a nasty addiction, getting sick of what makes me sick.

As for the first quote, this may be most depressing. The one candidate who has managed to inspire a new generation to believe in mainstream politics as an agent of change; who mobilizied a financial support network composed of real, actual, living, and breathing citizens; who crystalized what was depressing and ailing our democracy and catalyzed a movement to fix it...this candidate is being asked to follow his bowling ball into the gutter. You gotta be cruel to be kind, and dirty to be clean, I suppose?

How dreadful that it has come to this...again. Back in the gutter with the snakes and sleaze merchants who won't let us rise up.