My state ghosted the primary.

Well, not everyone did, but more than enough did to make turnout historically low. Nearly four out of five registered voters in Chicago, for example, skipped the election. (That’s to say nothing of the folks who never registered in the first place.) The figures are a bit embarrassing, but I can’t help shuffling at least some of the blame onto the plate of the politicians from which we had to select.

It’s not a problem just in Illinois. Voters everywhere are fishing in tainted ponds.

Admittedly, politicians aren’t all duplicitous or demented. They’re also sometimes hapless.

An example: I once saw Sen. Bernie Sanders in O’Hare Airport. It was a long time ago, before he’d run for president, and it took me a second to place him.

Boy, that guy looks a lot like Bernie Sanders, I thought, as he squinted at the flight information board, and I squinted at him.

But he was, in fact, a U.S. senator, wandering alone, with the air of a man hunting for his reading glasses. He looked like he needed help but was darned if he was going to ask. Behind him, he dragged a rolling suitcase, a raggedy thing that looked to be held together by Black Jack chewing gum and the goodwill of the world’s patchouli wearers.

It wasn’t the suitcase of a hedge-fund liberal but of a true socialist, of a man who, if you suggested he spend some of his $174,000-a-year-salary on new luggage, would snort, “All it needs is a little more duct tape.”

But Sanders, principled and authentic enough to carry beat-up luggage, couldn’t win the presidency.

Later, I realized that I’d seen Sanders in town campaigning for mayoral candidate Chuy Garcia. If you know anything about Chicago politics, you know that Garcia would win first prize in the most-likely-to-be-endorsed-by-Bernie-Sanders beauty pageant.

Garcia’s an intractable, labor-loving liberal, with so many principles he’d feel bad about taking a cent from the “need a penny take a penny” tray at the gas station.

And that’s why Garcia lost to Rahm Emanuel, the most terrifying ballet dancer ever to hold elected office.

Garcia (and Sanders) never really stood a chance. Not when it came to making a major impact, anyway. And that political reality — the reality of entrenchment, of corruption, of whatever you want to call it — disillusions voters.

Voters know that no sane, principled person can win high public office. And if, somehow, politicians start out that way, either their principles get beaten down or they do.

So, voters are left to fish from a pond full of psychopaths and octogenarians, fish like Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has strokes in the middle of press conferences and then gets shuffled away to his cave, only to be wheeled out for crucial votes about whether to make the congressional dress codes more stringent. McConnell will step down from the Republican leadership, but there’s no way he’s getting out of the pond entirely, no matter how prune-y his fingers get.

President Joe Biden’s acuity seems to be fading and he, also, refuses to leave the water. Biden recently made it through the State of the Union Address unscathed, but you get the feeling he might have been more hopped up on NoDoz and coffee than a college junior cramming for finals.

I’m still voting for him, though, because I have no other choice. If it’s not Biden, it’s Donald Trump, and diminished and genial beats diminished and crazy any day. Trump (no spring chicken himself) is a catfish, bottom-feeding on voters’ worst instincts — fear, love of celebrity, nativism, anger.

But even I can’t avoid the hard truth, that a rematch between Trump and Biden is as distasteful as a bite of Chernobyl fish stew.

The pond, in other words, is full of junk.

We all have more pressing concerns — our families, our health, our jobs — and when candidates offer us nothing to get excited about, I don’t blame anyone for taking their fishing rods and going home.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Newsletter