Speaking of Catching Up

I'm finally working my way through a stack of old New Yorkers loaned to me by a lab mate, and I have to share this great sentence from last July by George Packer, on the subject of a Bloomberg presidential bid, back when some people -- not me, never me! -- were able to take the idea of such a thing seriously:

If a five-foot-seven divorced Jew with a nasal whine is taken seriously as a Presidential candidate, it would at the very least diminish the power of faux symbols in our political life; and a Clinton-Giuliani-Bloomberg race would so thoroughly explode the Sun Belt's lock on the White House that an entirely new kind of politics might be possible, in which evolution is not at issue, no one has to pretend to like pork rinds, and the past tense of "drag" is "dragged."

As the bloggers say: "heh."