The polls begin closing soon, and I'm tired of making predictions. Why don't you make some?

How do you think this will go?

President Obama is to confer in the Oval Office on Tuesday with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, about filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. If everyone maintains previously stated positions, it might be a very short meeting.

My advice? He might want to bring this up:

One aide to a vulnerable Senate Republican, who requested anonymity, jokingly suggested that there might be another, very different source of pressure as early as Tuesday night. “I’m not sure we want to be in the business of telling voters that we’d rather risk having Donald Trump nominate the next Supreme Court justice,” he said.

Will every Republican senator promise not to vote for a Klansman (or Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III) should President Trump nominate one for the Supreme Court?

It would be irresponsible not to get people on the record on this, would it not?

When the idea of intervening in Libya first arose about exactly five years ago, I immediately and vociferously objected and warned of “tribal rivalry and chaos” in a post-Gaddafi world.

Initially, I was concerned that we’d start off small and get sucked into a larger effort when Gaddafi didn’t immediately fall. But, all along, I had the aftermath in mind.

Let me say this again. We don’t know what kind of leadership would emerge from this opposition if they were to prevail, but they don’t even appear to have operational leadership in the field. We have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to this fight. It’s a mistake. And the president has been pushed very far out on a limb here, probably through a false sense of momentum arising from the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. It will be painful to walk this back, but unless Hillary Clinton discovers a compelling, organized opposition in Benghazi when she arrives there this week, our commitment to regime change in Libya should be scaled back. It’s not our problem. Obama is in the process of making it our problem. We should stand ready to prevent massacres and offer asylum, but should not commit our military to do what the rebels cannot do themselves. If we want to pursue other angles, like seeking out potential alternatives to Gaddafi from within his circle, that seems to me to be unwise but still preferable to getting into a civil war on the side that our intelligence director says is likely to lose. Once we commit a tiny bit, we’ll wind up doing the fighting because we can’t afford to lose.

But what will we have won? Good will? Don’t be silly.

I was relieved when Russia agreed to authorize a United Nations resolution (which they later bitterly regretted) and the president made it clear that we’d be “leading from behind” and letting the Europeans take on a lot of responsibility. By October 2011, I was willing to give the president a little credit for taking out Gaddafi without too much expense, no casualties, and without doing too much arming of the rebels. Things had gone better than I feared they would.

But this was temporary and basically an illusion.

A year ago, I recapped my opposition to and evolution on our intervention in Libya, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. My position at the outset can be summed up as “it isn’t humanitarian to arm a country up for a prolonged civil war that kills many more people and leaves more destruction than anything that you prevented in the first place.” I was opposed to doing regime change in Libya, but was mostly concerned about arming Libyans to do the job. In the end, it didn’t matter because Gaddafi had so many weapons that, when he fell, my nightmare scenario came to fruition even without our arms.

The covert coals-to-Newcastle effort to arm the rebels during the revolution was the least of it. The dictator had stashed an astonishing quantity of weapons in the desert.

“We knew he had a lot, but he had 10 times that,” said Jean-David Levitte, then a top aide to Mr. Sarkozy.

While the C.I.A. moved quickly to secure Colonel Qaddafi’s chemical weapons, other efforts fell short. “There was one arsenal that we thought had 20,000 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles, SA-7s, that basically just disappeared into the maw of the Middle East and North Africa,” recalled Robert M. Gates, the American defense secretary at the time…

…The weapons that had made it so hard to stabilize Libya were turning up in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Gaza, often in the hands of terrorists, insurgents or criminals.

In the fall of 2012, American intelligence agencies produced a classified assessment of the proliferation of arms from Libya. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” said Michael T. Flynn, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We’ve not had that kind of proliferation of weapons since really the end of the Vietnam War.”

Look, I take no pleasure in saying “I told you so” on something like this. The only reason I bring this up is so people can’t use the Condoleezza Rice excuse that “no one could have predicted” that things could (and most likely, would) go terribly wrong in Libya after Gaddafi left power and that we didn’t want to be responsible for that.

How much responsibility does Hillary Clinton have for this fiasco?

I don’t think her supporters really want to start looking at that question. In my opinion, the president’s instincts were right and things would have been considerably worse for us if he hadn’t been aggressive in limiting our investment. But the pressure was overwhelming for us to intervene. And we can’t ignore Clinton’s role:

President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.

In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya…

…Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

It’s beyond the scope of this piece to discuss Clinton’s recommendations on Syria that the president thankfully rejected.

I hear people make all kinds of arguments. Some say that Clinton is far to the right of the president. Others say that they are clones of each other. But, where it really matters, like on issues of military engagement, they are unquestionably different people. Clinton is more interventionist.

For many, many people, this was the decisive distinction between them in the 2008 campaign. And, for a lot of those same people, it’s the big nagging doubt that is preventing them from getting wholeheartedly behind her candidacy now.

Well, one group of individuals that has not given up is Sanders's army of small donors. The Sanders campaign just announced that they raised more than $40 million in February and are now trying to get to $45 million by midnight.

In case you don't know, those are insane numbers. If he accomplishes little else, Sanders has proven the concept that you can run a presidential election funded by regular folks.

I don't even know what they can do with all that money. But he's got no reason to drop out.

I'll tell you, it makes sense to want two seemingly contradictory things at the same time. You might want Clinton to be the nominee and still want Sanders to have as close to half of the delegates at the convention as possible. In other words, you may want to vote for Sanders even if you don't actually want him to win.

Why would you want this?

Because you want a progressive party with a progressive platform and progressive rules changes, but you're not ready to roll the dice on Sanders as the nominee.

If the polls are anywhere near correct, it's a risk-free proposition with no downside.

One thing I used to debate with Ed Kilgore about was whether or not we’re stuck in a 40-40 nation where any major party candidate will be assured of finishing relatively close in a presidential election or whether we’re entering into a turbulent time where one party may utterly lose the political argument and go down Goldwater-McGovern-Mondale style.

I was more open to the latter possibility than Ed, but that was last year and things have gotten steadily crazier since.

Not too long ago, I was criticizing Nate Silver for discounting Trump’s chances of winning the Republican nomination. Now he’s talking realignment.

So, things change.

Rather than do another deep analysis here, I want to start a discussion.

I have a theory that the Republicans rely heavily on their ability to stay on message and keep united behind narratives. Obviously, they have their own cable news network and they dominate political radio, so they have some advantages over the left in terms of their ability to promulgate their messages. I think, however, that the effectiveness of their politics depends heavily on the cohesiveness of their movement. If all their media platforms are rowing together, it works so well that they can convert their voters to climate change skeptics overnight. But, when they start suffering from internal divisions, I think the hive (colony?) mind gets disrupted like when you kick over an ant hill.

My theory is that they’re so reliant on this ability to move people from message to message that they can’t operate without it.

Now, things are always messy during a contested primary season, but if the Republicans can’t unite around a nominee then this problem won’t go away after their convention in Cleveland.

This is kind of how I see the mechanism of their collapse working. If they are about to lose a realigning election, this is going to be one of the prime reasons why.

In other words, it’s not just defections for reasons of ideology, but an inability to campaign coherently and with focus.

So, do you think I am on to something?

In 2014, nearly 20,000 people in this country died because they overdosed on a prescription opioid. Nearly 30,000 people died because they overdosed on any kind of opioid, including the illegal types like heroin. The numbers are not in yet for 2015, but everyone expects that they’ll be even worse.

Politicians are finally noticing that we’re experiencing a health disaster that’s been as deadly or deadlier than the AIDS and crack cocaine epidemics of the 1980s. The Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to work through the process of marking up and sending the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act [CARA] to the floor. They’re scheduled to have a bunch of votes today, and unfortunately the whole thing has become politicized.

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis reported last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer is getting involved in a way that’s making supporters of the bill uneasy.

The root of the problem is that the lead author of the bill is vulnerable Republican incumbent Rob Portman of Ohio. While there are official denials all around, some anonymous sources on both sides of the aisle are accusing Schumer of being reluctant to give Portman a political win that he can take to the voters in November. If true, it’s the same kind of nihilism that Mitch McConnell has been pilloried for authoring in response to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

The dispute, at least on the surface, is about funding levels in the bill. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has an amendment that would authorize $600 million on an emergency basis. The Republicans aren’t willing to spend that kind of money, so Schumer is arguing aggressively that they aren’t serious about the opioid problem.

This might be considered Basic Politics 101, except that the gambit threatens to kill the bill in its entirety. And that’s not something organizers (or even Senate Democrats working on this issue) are interested in seeing. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was reportedly upset enough with Schumer’s posturing that he skipped a press conference with him on the funding amendment.

Senate Democrats and drug policy groups pushing for a strong response to the heroin epidemic are growing increasingly concerned that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is dangerously politicizing the issue, risking what has been steady, if slow, bipartisan progress…

…The bad news is that some of the states that are in the most desperate need of help also happen to be home to some of the Republican senators Democrats would most like to knock off in 2016. And if the Democrats pick up enough seats, Schumer is poised to become Senate majority leader…

“[M]eaningful progress on the opioid and heroin epidemic is only possible when policymakers commit to moving forward in a bipartisan fashion,” the letter [to the Senate] from the Harm Reduction Coalition reads.

“We have appreciated the bipartisan spirit of collaboration with which Senate Committees have thoughtfully approached these issues, emblematized by the strong support in the Judiciary Committee and amongst the broader community for [CARA]. Harm Reduction Coalition requests that you honor this bipartisanship as you work to advance this bill to the Senate floor,” reads the letter, which was sent this weekend to Senate leaders and provided to The Huffington Post by a Senate source.

Sen. Whitehouse seemed to get with the program later on.

Democrats want to add the money to a smaller bipartisan measure negotiated by Portman, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and others that would authorize grants for prevention and treatment programs. The bill is set for a Senate procedural vote Monday.

“There comes a time when something has taken enough American lives that you have to take it seriously,” Whitehouse said in an interview at the Capitol. “It would be unfortunate if they insisted on passing a bill that addresses this issue without being willing to put a nickel behind it. I think that’s really dishonorable and I hope they won’t do that.”

Honestly, the funding here is of secondary importance for a variety of reasons. First, the most important thing is that Congress come to a consensus that this is one of the biggest problems facing the country and authorize a response. Second, while a problem of this size certainly requires substantial resources, the money being discussed here is insignificant whether it’s appropriated or not. Third, much of the money under discussion isn’t even devoted to tackling the emergency. Research is nice, but what’s needed is tens of thousands of beds for people who are addicted to opioids and require long-term intense treatment. Other monies are devoted to law enforcement, which is also potentially useful but runs counter to overall thrust to get people to treat this as more of a public health fiasco than a criminal one.

To his credit, Schumer has been talking about the opioid epidemic for a while now. I’d hate to see him screw this up because he’s so reluctant to give people any reason to reelect vulnerable Republicans.

Let’s get Congress to agree that something must be done.

Once that’s done, the brutal facts on the ground will eventually lead even the blind to better solutions that are more sensibly targeted and more proportionate to the enormous task at hand.

Iran has voted. The reformers had huge victories. The hardliners were crushed. According to President Obama's critics, this shouldn't have happened.

More later, and "Thanks, Obama."

Here’s a snapshot of America in February 2016:

Sometimes words fail me.

As best as I could ascertain the thinking inside the Sanders campaign, they thought that if Bernie could do better than 35% in South Carolina it would indicate that he had a fighting chance to win in some other southern states. Well, he barely topped 25% and now he has to abandon the entire South to Clinton.

Super Tuesday could easily now became a wipeout that effectively eliminates Sanders from serious contention. As Nate Cohn notes in the New York Times, even in the increasingly unlikely event that Sanders pulls off multiple wins on Tuesday in states like Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Vermont, the delegate math is going to look much worse for him at the end of the night. If he doesn’t pull off these wins, his campaign will no longer be something that should be considered a threat to win the nomination.

It seems to me that black folks got the message loud and clear from the president that he prefers Clinton to Sanders, and anyone who thinks that they aren’t going to come out in huge numbers to protect his legacy is completely delusional.

She has won South Carolina in a rout, 73.5 percent to 26 percent, exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. Black voters represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The county’s most progressive and loyal Democrats have spoken.

Maybe you agree with their decision or maybe you don’t, but you ought to respect it.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I may write a piece about the nominating process, including my thoughts on things like caucuses and superdelegates. I just want to make a kind of general point right now, however.

There’s nothing remotely democratic about how the two parties pick their nominees, and it’s basically a complete misconception to think that these processes are even close enough to democratic to be violating the spirit of democratic elections.

To give one obvious example from the Republican side, states that hold their contests prior to March 15th must award their delegates proportionately to candidates that meet a non-uniform minimum threshold. So, in one state a candidate may need 15% to get a single delegate and in another state they may need twenty percent. Then, on March 15th and thereafter, states have the option to award their delegates on a plurality-win-all basis. So, Rubio could win all of Florida’s 99 delegates by getting a single vote more than Trump, but Trump would have had to share a lot of South Carolina delegates with Rubio if Rubio had met the minimum threshold there in a proportional election.

This is just one of several examples I could provide of how the votes in one state are in no way equal to the votes in other states. Another important example that I’ll mention is how the delegates are divided up among the states. It’s not evenly, by population, as the Electoral College imperfectly attempts to do. States that voted blue last time get more delegates in the Democratic contest and states that voted red last time get more delegates in the Republican contest.

We can add in that the nomination is usually decided before most states even get a chance to vote, and certainly many of the candidates drop out quickly because they couldn’t win over voters in early unrepresentative states, which means, e.g., that Christie voters in 48 states never got a chance to cast a meaningful vote for him.

The correct way to think about these nominating processes is as a quest. The candidates embark on a long journey with arbitrary rules and random obstacles. Their only advantage is that they are given a map well ahead of time and this gives them the chance to strategize and anticipate the most obvious obstacles that they’ll find in their paths.

They can therefore come up with plans, although the very arbitrariness of the schedule and rules will disadvantage some candidates…some fatally. Rudy Giuliani can say that his plan doesn’t involve winning before Florida, but that doesn’t mean that his strategy has any hope of success. If the first primary had been held in New York, maybe Giuliani could have gotten some traction and some money to run a long campaign. Whatever his personal flaws and weaknesses, with the way the game was played, Rudy never had a fair shot.

So, it’s basically an odyssey where some heroes have an easy path and others must slay one dragon after another. Superdelegates are one dragon. Caucuses are another dragon. For candidates whose base of support is in the North, the SEC Super Tuesday primaries are even another dragon.

The reason the process works at all is because it’s a rigorous test. If you can run the obstacle course and reach the end first, you’ve shown skills in organizing, staffing, fundraising, debating, schmoozing party big-wigs, retail politicking, speechmaking, and working with media. You’ve demonstrated superhuman personal stamina. You’ve taken multiple punches and either shown an iron chin or gotten up off the mat.

It’s not a democratic process and it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a trial by fire that hopefully prepares you to hold the most powerful office in the world and also demonstrates to voters that you’ve got what it takes.

We could scrap this whole system root and branch and just have one national primary day when the whole country votes. That would tell us who had the most support on that one day, but it wouldn’t tell us who is tough enough to stand in the Oval Office.

Our system has all kinds of flaws and it can certainly be improved. But it also has merits.

You won’t understand the flaws or appreciate the merits if you think the process is supposed to be democratic in the same way as our general elections are, however.

Idiot Klansmen tried to have a White Lives Matter rally in Anaheim, California. Dolts got kicked in the face.

Klansman gets kicked in the face for being a racist. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

They also managed to stab a couple of counter-protestors, reportedly with the end of a flag pole.

My favorite part was this:

Brian Levin, director of CSU San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said he was standing next to the man in the Grand Dragon shirt when a crowd of protesters carrying weapons swarmed the Klansmen.

A brawl broke out and one of the Klansmen was knocked to the ground and kicked. Levin said he later saw the man’s arm bleeding.

Levin said he pushed the Klan leader away as the violence continued and a protester was stabbed.

Levin said he asked the man, “How do you feel that a Jewish guy just saved your life?”

“Thank you,” the man replied, according to Levin.

The Grand Dragon got a well-deserved beat down, got saved by the Jewish guy who directs an anti-hate center at CSU-Bernardino, and then had to thank him.

Call it a teaching moment.

Wow. Scalia croaking has already cost Dow Chemical $835 million.

In his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett didn't name specific candidates or issues, but noted that the negative drumbeat about the economy, health care reform and income inequality may get voters down about the future.

"It's an election year, and candidates can't stop speaking about our country's problems (which, of course, only they can solve)," he said, adding later, "that view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history."

Oh those lucky duckies being born today. Imagine the wonderful world into which they are being born! To paraphrase Heath Ledger in his role as the Joker, Buffer wants us to see the sunny side, and to hell with all this damn negativity. I can;t imagine why they feel the need to campaign on the issue of economic injustice, can you? Seems like a loser to me. More happy talk by Presidential contenders is definitely in order.

But seriously, it's easy to see why Buffett doesn't want discussions about income inequality that have struck a nerve with the electorate. He is one of the richest men in the world, and the wealth of people like him is doing just fine, thank you very much.

The top 0.01 percent of Americans -- fewer than 14,000 households -- received 5.6 percent of adjusted gross income in 2012, according to data released Wednesday by the IRS that underscore the increasing concentration of income.

It was the biggest share of income clustered at the very top of the distribution scale since 2007. Those in that group had a minimum income of $12.1 million, up from the $8.8 million it took to reach that club in 2011.

I'd feel great about the economy too, if I were higher up in the economic food chain. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people income growth has stagnated, if not outright declined. All one needs to do is look at how the median income level in America is trending over the past few years to understand why many, many people in the US might not be so sanguine regarding an economy that works so well for millionaires and billionaires.

The Sentier Research monthly median household income data for November came in at $56,746. The nominal median rose $75 month-over-month and is up $2,812 year-over-year. That's an increase of 0.1% MoM and 5.2% YoY. Adjusted for inflation, the latest income was up $58 MoM and $2,574 YoY. The real numbers equate to increases of 0.1% MoM and 4.8% YoY.

In real dollar terms, the median annual income is 1.8% lower (-$1,052) than its interim high in January 2008 but well off its low in August 2011. [...]

[R]eal median household income ... spent most of the first nine years of the 21st century struggling slightly below its purchasing power at the turn of the century. Real incomes ... hit an interim peak at a fractional 0.7% in early 2008, far below the nominal illusionary peak (as in money illusion) of 27.2% six months later. The real median household income is now at -1.1%. In contrast, the real recovery from the trough has been depressingly slow.

Shorter version: A good economy for the Warren Buffetts of the world turns out to be not so wonderful for millions of Americans, many of them deeply in debt, with limited if any savings. The rise of Bernie Sanders (and to some extent Trump, as well) is, in my opinion, attributable to the fact that so many of us are struggling to just barely get by, living from paycheck to paycheck, while the wealthy make out like - well, like bandits.

It is also one of the main reasons for Sanders' appeal among young people, who don't feel like they are living in great economic times at all. Quite the contrary. Because their economy sucks.

[M]ost Millennials are struggling in the current economy. The Millennial generation leads the way in the amount of student debt it carries. Many are stuck in low wage jobs earning so little, they are living with their parents deep into adulthood. How broke are Millennials? Pretty broke when you look at the data.

[...]

A very high number of Millennials don’t even work or if they are working, are stuck in a low wage job. Close to half of recent college graduates are working in jobs that don’t even relate to their undergraduate degree. Not a problem when you pay little for college but this can be an issue when you are going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to finance your studies.

No wonder Sanders' campaign, which has maintained a laser focus on income inequality in America has found an audience, despite the relative lack of media coverage of his campaign compared to Trump and Clinton. It's a message Warren Buffet and others of his ilk would prefer not be told because it is true. And often the truth is damn depressing.

So forgive me if I side with those candidates, like Sanders, who are speaking out so "negatively" about the US economy. The truth hurts, and at this moment in time, as more and more of us watch our incomes decline or job and career prospects diminish or never get started in the first place, we need the truth, not happy talk, from those seeking higher office.

We saw House Majority Leader Eric Cantor get taken out in a primary by a political novice. We saw John Boehner resign as Speaker of the House because he couldn’t control the mouth-breathers in his own party. Now we’re seeing Donald Trump roll over eleventy-billion other Republican candidates to most likely seize control over the party of Lincoln. It’s incontestable that the Republican Establishment has lost control.

And I think it would be a mistake to see this as quarantined on the right. While the president remains relatively popular, and extremely so on the left, the power of Bernie Sanders’ challenge shows that discontent is widespread among liberals.

As for the rest of the electorate that is either weakly aligned with the left or right, or that is typically disengaged from the political process, they’re dismayed with the gridlock in Washington and unhappy with all our leaders. Some are attracted to Trump’s angry nativism and others are drawn to Sanders’ call for revolution, but they’re not looking for more of the same.

This leads many people to conclude that Hillary Clinton is the wrong person to put up against Trump. And it’s hard to avoid seeing why this argument is compelling. Running for Obama’s third term without a theory for how to break the gridlock that stalled progress in Obama’s last six years is not very inspiring for liberals, and there’s a huge block of voters who don’t want a third term for Obama’s policies.

But there’s a counterargument.

For starters, the country’s bipartisan Establishment may be on its heels, but it’s still incredibly powerful. They’re never weaker than when they’re evenly split, but should they collectively decide that only one candidate is acceptable, they can really bring some huge guns into the fight.

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, check out Ryan Lizza’s new piece in The New Yorker where he lists out the many influential and powerful Republicans who have already pledged not to ever vote for Donald Trump. You may also want to take a look at the piece I wrote for the Washington Monthly earlier this week: How Will Trump Unite the Party?

It’s true that Trump got a boost yesterday when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie endorsed him, but less noticed was the response from a former Republican governor of New Jersey. Christie Todd Whitman, who served as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency in President George W. Bush’s first term, answered Christie by endorsing Ohio Governor John Kasich. But she also said that she’d vote for Hillary Clinton before she’d ever support Trump.

First, she says she’s planning to vote for Hillary Clinton if Trump gets the nod. She’s keeping her options open, in case we find out something new and horrible about Hillary. But that’s her plan now:

“You’ll see a lot of Republicans do that,” Whitman told me. “We don’t want to. But I know I won’t vote for Trump.”

The real juice came when I asked her about Christie’s move:

“I am ashamed that Christie would endorse anyone who has employed the kind of hate mongering and racism that Trump has,” she said. “I would have thought being from a diverse state would have given him more awareness and compassion.”

Whitman’s sentiment of shame is identical to mine, which shows that New Jerseyites think a lot alike even when they’re implacable political foes. I can understand the political calculation behind Christie’s move, but it’s just not consistent with the values of New Jersey.

Now, Christie Todd Whitman isn’t going to move a lot of voters, but she doesn’t have to. She already speaks for a large swath of the right in this country. Too often, the left is so busy being offended by the right that they characterize all their political opponents as subhumans who have absolutely no character, standards, or sense of moral decency. That’s a very big exaggeration. It’s simply not true that everyone will hold their nose about Trump because they see Clinton as the greater evil. If you don’t believe me, go read that Lizza article, seriously.

When you look back at why George McGovern fared so poorly in the 1972 election, it’s because the Democratic Party was badly split. And it was, like today, a time when the nation’s Establishment was largely discredited. McGovern’s success in the primaries was entirely due to this anti-establishment feeling, and it had a lot of juice that would carry over in the decades to come. But it was nowhere near powerful enough, or consolidated on the left, to avoid catastrophe at the ballot box in 1972.

McGovern, like Trump, was able to roll over the party leadership and the country’s opinion leaders, but all the talk of him bringing out the youth vote (18 year olds could vote for the first time in that election) never came to anything.

We live in different times with a much different electorate and no incumbent on the ballot, but 1972 is a warning sign that you never want to go into an election when your party is divided and the Establishment is against you.

Why, then, would the Democrats want to go into the election divided when they are already nearly assured of the Republicans being so?

Like Trump, Sanders doesn’t have endorsements from more than a small handful of officeholders. His hostility to corporate America should remind us of Mark Twain’s admonition to: “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”

It’s true that there is real energy behind Sanders and that the left is split over who would be the better nominee. But the party apparatus and power brokers are not split. They are about as unified around Clinton as they’ve ever been around any non-incumbent in our nation’s history. Should Sanders nonetheless prevail, the party will begin to look a bit like the basket case we’re seeing on the other side.

So, these are the two arguments.

The first is that the country is in an antiestablishment mood, and if the election is between the antiestablishment Trump and the establishment Clinton, Trump will win.

The second is that a united party with the support of the Establishment will crush a divided party that is opposed by the Establishment and that is suffering massive defections.

Like I said, you can quibble about how united the Democrats will really be under Clinton. I know that some disillusioned Sanders supporters will stay home and a handful will even vote for Trump. Overall, however, I have to say that I’d place my money on Clinton over Trump.

Of course, this is almost strictly an electability argument. And that’s not the only argument worth having. Perhaps, either of the Democrats can win, and win easily. If you believe that, you probably ought to go with your heart. If your heart is with Sanders, and you think he can thump Trump, then support him now while he still has a fighting chance.

But, be clear, the argument that Clinton can’t win is highly contestable and not very convincing in my view.

That’s not to say that Trump doesn’t scare me. He does.

He scares me a lot.

That’s why the electablilty argument is important to me.