This Week's Sneak Peek

In lieu of the usual swatch out of the coming cartoon, here's a rerun of the cartoon I drew eight years ago this week.

Toon: Yesterday's Gone, Yesterday's Gone

I confess: I still haven't made my way through my copy of Making History yet. So I'm not rushing out to buy Hillary Clinton's latest book, which joins a very short list of best sellers by electoral college also-rans explaining why they aren't living in the White House.

If Mitt Romney, John McCain and John Kerry have unsold manuscripts tucked away in a drawer about how they were mistreated by the media, the stock market, and the FBI, we've been graciously spared the spectacle of them hawking their excuses.

Al Gore, the last presidential candidate to come in first in votes but second in the race, wisely chose to write about Things That Matter when he decided to retire to the authors' studio. Bob Dole surely had a lot to say about the forces that kept him from reciting the presidential oath, but he chose to expose himself to ridicule by hawking erectile dysfunction remedies instead.

So, Mrs. Clinton, I'm really very sorry that you're not President of the United States. Believe me, I'm really, really, really sorry about that. But you've got a Clinton Foundation all set up that you could be running, and I'm sure the experience will give you lots and lots of material for a much more worthwhile book.

GOP Conventions Past

Since I've already posted about 1916 this week, for today's installment of Swerveback Saturday, I rummage through the dusty crate of my own cartoons.

The topic this week is cartoons about Republican National Conventions. I didn't draw national issue toons for a newspaper that published during the summer until 1988, so that's where we'll start. My George H.W. Bush caricature didn't quite come together until this second one:

My caricature of Vice President Dan Quayle never really came together at all, so I don't miss him as a national figure.

Skipping an entire generation, all I can find from 1992 to 2000 is this never-published one. It might have worked better in a vertical (portrait) orientation, so that I'd have had room to draw George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's with their arms raised.

As you've seen, these convention cartoons are usually about the candidates; but once in a while, the convention itself comes up for discussion. There was never any contest for the Republican nomination when Dubya ran for reelection in 2004...

...so instead I coupled the GOP keeping its LGBT supporters at arms length with its introduction of a "free protest zone" that year.

The party platform always gets a lot of attention at convention time, even if it becomes wide open to interpretation afterward.

Because...

Q Toon: Judging by Its Cover

Caitlyn Jenner is going to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing nothing but an American flag and an Olympic medal.

There's not a whole lot of point getting worked up about that, so let's talk about the West Virginia primary.

There's not much point in getting worked up about that, either. It's late in the primary process; the Republican contest has already been decided, and the state's Democrats have a history of voting against the front-runner.

Or do they?

Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton 51% to 36%; it's hard to imagine that coal mining enthusiasts who disagree with Hillary Clinton that there's little future in coal mining found much more in Sanders's position on mining to agree with. (On guns, maybe. Mining, no.) Indeed, an additional 9% of the vote went to a protest candidate, Paul Farrell, upset with the two candidates' attitude against coal mining, and 2% went to Keith Judd. In 2012, Judd, a felon who filed from a Texas prison to be on the Democratic primary ballot, garnered 41% of the vote against President Obama. And in 2008, Democrats there were just fine with Hillary Clinton, voting overwhelmingly for her over the presumptive nominee, The Black Guy.

44% of Sanders voters in West Virginia's open primary plan to vote for Donald Trump in November, even if Sanders somehow seizes the nomination from Clinton. There might very well have been down-ballot races of interest to genuine Democrats, but I suspect that a significant chunk of Sanders's so-called support could be chalked up to Trump voters making mischief in the Democratic race. (Trump himself told his supporters there not to bother to voting for him.)

I confidently predict that West Virginia will vote against the Democratic nominee in May and November of 2020. And 2024. And 2028. Even if any of those nominees are Donald Berzilius Trump.

The problem here isn't with West Virginia; it's with the presidential primary and caucus system. Come May, one or both parties have no contest remaining, leaving the voters in the late states — including the largest one in the nation — no voice in deciding who will be on the ballot in November. Who is more likely to bother to vote at this point: someone who is fine with the choice made by the early state voters, or someone who thinks that choice is full of crap?

Candidates spend a full year campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the whitest states in the union. Those states are followed by South Carolina, then "Super Tuesday" throughout the South, so moderate candidates tend to be out of the race by February. Any candidate running third in March is viewed as a joke no matter how serious his or her issues are. By April, at least one of the contests is usually in the bag, which is why the New York primary forces voters to declare way back in October which race they plan to vote in.

In a country the size of the U.S.A., I don't know what system would work better. A national primary would put lesser-funded candidates at an even greater disadvantage than U.S. v. Citizens United already has, and regional primaries would tilt the race in favor of the predominant biases of whoever comes first.

Maybe states should vote by month the same way voters do in line at the polls: states A through D in February, E through L in March, M through R in April, and S through Z in May. Four years later, rotate the order just to be fair.

Okay, fine, Iowa and New Hampshire can get to be first all the time. But at the conventions, their delegations don't get to cast their votes until after the balloons have dropped for the winner.

Q Toon: Mixed Nuts

Q Syndicate✒Mar 12, 2015

I'm arriving pretty late to this party — Dr. Ben Carson's ridiculous gays-and-prisons comment has been forgotten amid the furore over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and Republican senators' decision to notify Iran that they will never agree to any treaties while Barack Obama is President.

Dr. Carson, in case you've never heard of him before, is the GOP's token black presidential candidate — the guy a select few Republicans support for a while in an effort to show that they're not racist. Then, as with Herman Cain and Alan Keyes before him, they fall away when the rest of the party which hasn't nominated a new face since Wendell Willkie coalesces around some white guy with actual experience in government.

Since blurting out on national TV that homosexual sex in prisons proves that sexual orientation is something everyone chooses, Dr. Carson has apologized, which drove all of his supporters crazy. (A short trip, that.) He has promised never to talk about homosexuality again. He needn't worry; he isn't going to be on national TV much any more.

2012 in Headlines

Newsmagazines have made further inroads into this year's edition of my annual photograph of newspaper headlines.

While I've always had a row of magazines along the top, and have occasionally filled in the sides of the photo with magazines as well, there were some stories this year that just didn't make big headlines in my neck of the woods: easing of military dictatorship in Myanmar, for example, or election of a new leader in China.

And my hometown newspaper doesn't appear at all; the Racine Journal Times increasingly highlights local stories atop page one. And while they did scoop the Kenosha News by a day on Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the JT had to cram the story in as a two-column story on the edge of the page -- hardly legible in photos such as this one.

It's hard enough to read the Financial Times banner headline about François Hollande's election in France. That story didn't get as prominent play in the other newspapers available in my area, however. I remember buying this particular paper at the local Barnes & Noble; the cashier remarked that it was the first copy of the Financial Times she had ever seen anyone buy there.