Wondering, on Wednesday (v47)

Add Rand Paul and Rick Santorum to the list of the fallen on the Republican side.

Paul announced today that he's suspending his campaign, and will go back and fight in earnest to keep his Senate seat - because only in America, or maybe only in Kentucky, do we allow a person to run for two different offices at the same time.

Santorum, who last time out was the favorite of the evangelicals and the winner of the Iowa caucus, never garnered any fervor for his message which, I think, was basically that he was an evangelical, too. Once, that was enough - but now, not so much. This time out? Dead last. He's thrown his support behind Marco Rubio.

Jeb! is reduced to asking people for applause, and may soon be asked to step aside by the same folks who put $100,000,000 into getting him elected, and that won't be pretty.  I'm wondering, this Wednesday, if the Bush example will make people think twice about investing millions and millions and millions in someone before a single vote has been counted?

Meanwhile, the rest of them meander acrosss New Hampshire, at least for a little longer. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Carly Fiorina gives up before, or shortly after, the voting next week.

Living here in reliably blue New York, I don't get to see any of the presidential candidates. The Ds trust they don't need to ask for our votes, and the Rs don't bother asking for them.  Doomed to irrelevance, I wondered if my New Hampshire brother was going to make a point of seeing any of the candidates this time around.

He's much more quietly political than I am; it's not that he doesn't care as much, he cares differently. For more years than I can remember, he's been in plastics, working at companies large and small, owned by Americans, by Germans, by Chinese. He's worked to keep other Americans working, sometimes successfully and sometimes, less so - and he understands what it's like to have his own job disappear, leaving him scrambling to find something so he could pay his bills.

If I were him, I'd be out there trying to see all of the candidates, listen to what they have to say about our economy, and good old fashioned American jobs, the kind where we build things instead of serving things, and our educational system, and yes, maybe a little bit about immigration, less still about terrorism and war.

But instead of searching the schedules to see who was going to be in his area, he said he was searching for a candidate that matters, and he added,

What a circus. The world must be in hysterics watching this.

We talked a little about the UK debating on whether they should ban Trump (they chose not to), and he went on to tell me that he gets frustrated just watching the snippets of their speeches and appearances on television, that he'd definitely not be able to sit through the real thing. He lamented the lack of real plans on the part of most of the candidates, the lack of logic, and the abundance of rhetoric and hate.

While I don't think many of the candidates are talking to me, I thought they'd be talking to my brother. But it seems he's waiting for one of them to make sense to an ordinary American without any particular agenda of hate.

I wonder, how long will he have to wait?