The field, unwinnowed

  The withdrawal of Pete Buttigieg 

  does not leave the field of can-

  didates for the Democratic nomin-

  ation properly winnowed, so much

  as it sustains his renown for a

  shrewd appraisal of his position.

  He's left before he'd be crushed.

  Lest we forget, a winnowing is

  supposed to dispose of the chaff,

  not the grain, but the reverse

  befalls us all, in the resulting

  concentration of expectation up-

  on alternatives perfectly matched

  in dispiriting unacceptability:

  a noisy, confused fundamentalist

  for justice, and a maudlin wreck

  of a vapid egotist. Yes, our own

  support for Mrs Warren survives,

  intact, but its intactness looks

  like a symptom of being ignored.

  Our responses are already be-

  ing assiduously shaped to pre-

  serve Buttigieg as the polite

  and valiant spokesman, for a

  future he was allowed more to

  embody than to rally, having

  argued (assiduously) for con-

  geniality over conviction, if

  the latter requires more than

  goodwill toward an inoffensive

  outcome. Betting all one's

  chips on one's private life, 

  to evince a capacity for com-

  mitment, turns out not to be

  so winning as he'd thought. 

Has our political history ever presented us with such a striking case, of a candidate who so squandered the virtues of youth as to campaign against them all at every turn: naïveté, fire, fecundity, iconoclasm,

all suppressed as if by Tom Dewey's little man on the wedding cake?

He campaigned as the knight of the managerial class he was hired by McKinsey to be, not as the knight of the risk-welcoming class of the politician he most disdained, Elizabeth Warren. To think: in a single generation, everything we learned from John F. Kennedy, Robert Ken-nedy, and Ronald Reagan, submerged in a porridge of bland calculation, was offered as the tocsin of a "new generation of leaderhip." Yes, he did it ingratiatingly, and yet why, therefore, did our connoisseur class fail to tell him what the winner would be serving? 

The field is the loser, for this gainless occlusion of the qualities of youth, but for the persistence of Elizabeth Warren. One fine day she, too, may be counseled to do the noble thing, but I think it is likelier that she would be defeated by others' flight from nobility. 

Bruce Davidson

Whitby

ca 1960

Harris Dickinson