One thing we can say for this crazy election year, as awful as it’s been, is that at least the weather has been unusually perfect here on the Kansas plains. A mild and almost snow-free winter made the desultory results of the early primaries somewhat more tolerable, then an early and warm and eerily storm-free spring provided a pleasant distraction from the ominous clouds that continued to gather on the political horizon. The summer had just enough of those stifling hot days to feel like summer but mostly provided ideal conditions for long walks through the lush local parks as the two worst presidential candidates in American history wrapped up their party’s nominations, and a glorious Indian summer of a fall has stretched clear into November and the final week of a crazy election year and its incongruously stormy political climate.
There’s a chance of storms for today in the weather forecast, with a weeklong drop in the temperature expected after that, which somehow seems appropriate, but the storms aren’t likely to be severe, the next week’s temperatures will probably only drop into the not-bad-to-this-time-of-year 60s, and after that we can hold out hope for another mild winter. The political forecasts are all over the place, though, with that awful Republican clearly gaining on that awful Democrat, and that awful Democrat still clinging to a slight advantage in the national average of the polls and a slightly better advantage in the average of the polls in the states that everyone thinks will decide the matter, and all the partisans clearly quite nervous about how it might turn out.
All of the more mathematical pundits are calculating the odds for all the various possible scenarios, including the popular and electoral votes once again disagreeing, or neither nominee getting an electoral majority and the matter being settled in the House of Representatives, where that guy from Utah that nobody’s ever heard of would have at least a one-in-a-million shot because at least nobody hates him the way both of the their majority party nominees are hated by a majority of the country, not to mentioned the even more far-fetched possibilities. We have a friend who plays harmonica and does pen-and-ink sketches well and is willing to bet money that there won’t be an election next Tuesday, another friend who is one of the better heavy metal drummers in town and agrees that a reptilian race of super-human alien invaders have already rigged the results, and we have a Republican nominee who has intimated that a former primary rival’s dad had President Kennedy offed and also says the election is rigged, and a Democratic nominee that makes it all very plausible, so at this point in such a crazy election year we can’t dismiss any possibility.
What doesn’t seem at all possible, from our perspective here on the Kansas plains, is any sort of happy outcome. The one thing all the polls agree on is that either nominee would be the most unpopular president ever on Inauguration Day, all the pundits on both sides of the partisan divide have made clear they keep this crazy election year’s fights going, but from our position in the middle of the country and on neither side of this awful race we’re just hoping for a mild winter and storm-free spring.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 