Still a miserable field!

About a month ago I wrote a piece about how miserable the field of presidential candidates was, both Republican and Democrat. A month on things look, if anything, even worse.

On the Democratic side, Hillery Clinton's campaign continues to implode as her cadre of loyal but apparently inept advisers and hired media experts (she has spent million on them over the past couple of months) continue to try to reshape her image, first one way and then another. A president's advisers matter, because they shape the president's policy, perceptions, and reactions to events. Set aside Hillery's own faults (of which there are plenty) - her advisers, apparently chosen, as in her last campaign, for loyalty above competence, are not the ones I would want shaping the White House's actions in the world.  And of course the polls show her losing support day by day, so that by now even a renegade, poorly-funded unknown (but authentic) Socialist like Sanders is even with her in Iowa.

On the Republican side, while Donald Trump continues to clown his way to the top of the polls, most of the rest of the field  are trying to outdo themselves chasing irrelevant "moral" issues, like defunding Planned Parenthood or defending a Kentucky County Clerk's right to ignore the law. From the point of view of campaign strategy, it would be stupid to do even if these were legitimate issues, but the Planned Parenthood issue has no basis in fact, and the County Clerk in question is a poor sap being used by an anti-gay organization to get some free publicity.

Set aside the candidate's positions on issues that matter (to the extent one can even tell what they are), none of the candidates in either party are showing the sort of good judgement and competency one would like to see in a president of the worlds most powerful nation..