Orndorff: Notes from a Super Tuesday Party Pooper

By Craig Leroy Orndorff

Tuesday’s primary was such a Sophie’s Choice, in both parties in my estimation, that I only choked up a *little* when I let Alice put in my ballot like my dad used to let me pull the voting machine lever when I was a young lad with an uncanny and precocious interest in politics for somebody still in short pants. They did give her a Future Voter sticker though — never lucky enough to get those, but I wouldn’t have needed that cheap thrill.

(Ballot integrity enthusiasts should note that while Alice carried and placed my ballot in the scanner, I kept my hands on her shoulders the entire time, ensuring the chain of custody — and for sure explained why she could not cast a vote of her own, especially on my already filled out ballot.)

A non-insane Perot type could be cleaning up right now, I’m all but certain. Broadly speaking, the two big parties will take any opportunity to increase the ever widening supposed ideological chasm between them to a degree that threatens to dehumanize members of the opposition in the eyes of their supporters. But when it comes to ensuring that they are almost always the only two viable options on any given ballot? They can be guaranteed to find ways around to bipartisanship to ensure that 1992 was just a “blip.”

That leaves us with an RFK Jr. who definitely does NOT fit the adjective for my hypothesized Perotian figure trying to fit his rather round self into the incredible square of the Libertarians, the only third party that anymore comes close to perennial 50-state ballot access.

This is the year of local reorganization in both parties, but I would guess (numbers are almost impossible to track down) that, where the meetings even happen (the Republicans have a cancellation clause if candidates for precinct slots and other offices elected by the biennial reorganization meeting do not exceed the number available — I suspect that will be the case in many places except where there’s a “all politics is local” effect — but even that aphorism is melting into meaninglessness in the Pax Trumpana/Fourth Reich, depending on your agenda), in both parties.

I mean, on the Democratic side it’s, “Floyd, you good to cover Toms Brook for the 33rd term in a row? Floyd? He is breathing, isn’t he?”— which is as it was likewise on the Republican side for decades until recently in part due to yours truly (I dream anyways), though for very different reasons (but perhaps not to the degree as was made out to be).

Yet nowadays, even those not quite of the establishment who might have aspired seem to have thrashed out their own path, sometimes intersecting with the GOP’s, at first within boundaries but at times and increasingly to a degree approaching outright deception and defiance, because we seem to live in what should truly be called the “Who’s Party is It Anyways?” age, as there are no rules and the points don’t matter (see: a local committee —COMMITTEE, not officer or elected — endorsing the erstwhile President Trump in direct contravention of the state party plan — and the Dean of the local political press not even returning my email alerting him to this prohibition after he wrote an entire article about the meeting where it happened, presumably because his coin operated computer was out of time and he had no quarters, and far be it from him to keep an ongoing to-do list — because at Ogden Newspapers, the 24-hour news cycle means they only think about it for 24 hours).

And don’t even get me started on the giant, near-literal steam engine that seemingly appeared in the dark of the night (har har, both for my strained metaphor and the idea this was any real “surprise”) and is about to jump the grade (goin’ ninety miles an hour) that is the status quo’s (perhaps too quick) of the current “It Girl” of public works projects, rails to trails. Somehow that hasn’t been colored by MAGA — from your seat, anyways — but give it time. But I digress.

I simply got bit by the political bug BIG TIME long, long ago, so I endure, because I cannot be disabused that this IS somehow “my circus,” after all, and at least one of these monkeys is tattooed with my initials. It’s gonna be a long, long slog to November, but I suppose it’s the journey, not the destination, even though at this stage in the last lingering thread of my political “career” I’m basically out of fuel.

Happy primary day, fellow suckers.

Craig Leroy Orndorff is a recovering GOP politico, viewing the arena from the rarefied vantage point of an activist who has grumbled about staffers and a staffer who’s been grumbled about by activists. He resides in the “lower” Shenandoah Valley (which is actually the north — look it up!), his family’s homeland for over seven generations, with two daughters, his beloved and brilliant (if bewildered and put-upon) educator wife, and a cat so lovey she has a death wish. Though still a passionate political observer, he mostly satisfies himself now working with students with disabilities, documenting his family and their Valley’s history, and striving to put right what once went wrong, hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.