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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Myself Be Excited about Mayor Pete
Way back in 2016, I found myself in something of a quandary. I was genuinely excited about the candidacy of one Hillary Clinton, and not just because I thought it was past time that we had a woman in the Oval Office (though that was a part of it). No, I was excited because she was a genuinely great candidate, and I liked the fact that she had actual plans to see a progressive agenda put into action, rather than a series of promises that could never be met.
Unfortunately, I also had the misfortune to be in an English graduate program. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the typical political bent of an English department in a university, let’s just see that they’re very leftist in orientation, and they sometimes let their utopian desire for the way the world should be blind them to the realities of politics (in all of its various senses). Small wonder, then, that most of my academic friends were decidedly not in favor of Clinton and very much in favor of Bernie.
Nor was this phenomenon limited to my fellows in the English Department; it seemed ubiquitous across campus. I remember I was on a date with a guy, and he made a remark to the effect that he knew I didn’t really support Clinton. I was just supporting her because she was a woman or because I felt obligated to. At the time, I just laughed it…
