A Winning Candidate for 2020

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

26 April 18

inally we see some spring in Minnesota, temperatures edging into the 50s, maybe 60s, snow gone except in the crevices, green grass, the miracle of going outdoors in shirtsleeves. It’s like the Rapture except that everyone gets to enjoy it, not just the select few. We who were brought up not to complain have been moaning for a month, and we feel bad about that and intend to atone for it by being good to people who have not been nice to us, if we can think of any.

James Comey has come and gone, an example of the danger of oversell. After seeing him everywhere all the time for a week, there was little need to buy his book. I own a bookstore and it only sold 24 copies: people had already heard six times what he had to say. As the gentleman knows, he did at least as much as the Russians did to elect No. 45, and he certainly has a right to try to make amends, but when he told The New Yorker at length about the “emptiness” of the man — good Lord, when did FBI directors acquire X-ray vision? Leave emptiness to the Buddhists.

This, you understand, is coming from a cranky old liberal who is tired of hearing about the #real and prefers to talk about the #imaginary. I go to dinner with Democrats and when I hear somebody say, “I can’t believe the way T—” I am out of my seat the moment their tongue hits the back of their teeth to make the T. There are plenty of smart people who are paid to talk about him and to say new and interesting things and I wish them well. But not at the dinner table, please.

But the other day, waiting in line to catch a plane to New York, a woman asked me if, when I look around at Democrats, do I see anybody I like as a candidate for president in 2020. I said, “Not yet. But I hope she shows up by the end of the year.”

No more Secretaries of State, please. It’s not a good preparation for politics. It’s a job that requires you to sit for hours listening to ceremonial speeches and so you lose your ear for English. Secretary Clinton needed to go after her opponent as a Russian patsy, a tax cheat and deadbeat, a draft dodger, and a man who never washed clothes or pushed a grocery cart or attempted parallel parking. Instead, she ran for president of the League of Women Voters.

The next Democratic candidate should be a Big Ten grad who played defense on the women’s hockey team, became a DA and put some CEOs in prison, is a liberal but hunts pheasants, has a husky voice, quotes Scripture, and knows how to put someone in his place in fewer than 25 words. Good-looking husband who keeps his mouth shut and a couple charming children. And she’ll have some interesting inconsistencies about her, such as one or two ideas that are just plain nuts. It’s a great way to get attention and it humanizes a candidate to put forward some utter hogwash. A sensible logical woman candidate only reminds men of their wives, and not in a good way.

So I think she should make a big issue of illegal Canadian immigration. The northern border is 4,000 miles long, twice the length of the Mexican border, and it is porous: in many places, you can walk across it and not even know it. A wall is the answer, and it needs to be built soon. It would run through Lake Superior, which has an average depth of 500 feet and so that segment of the wall will be the Eighth Wonder of the World. It will need to be a high wall so that Canadians can’t simply build catapults to hurl themselves over it.

The Canadian threat is more serious than the Mexican because they speak pretty good English and to detect them you have to maneuver them into saying “about/aboot” or “shout/shoot” to pick up the accent. How many Canadians are here illegally — we can only guess — let’s say, 75 million. They came here to escape winter and socialized medicine. They’re taking our jobs. And do they pay taxes? I don’t think so. A 400-foot wall 4,000 miles long is the answer to everything. If you are a smart Democratic woman politician, get in touch: I’ll write your wall paper.