The Republican Dish

Just imagine this. You're a chef and are asked to prepare a special dish called a Republican Primary. No, not a juicy prime rib, a Primary! You are proud of your skills, have practiced your recipe on countless occasions and each time, have had pretty decent success, sometime winning an award, sometime missing it closely, but you know your stuff.

Now you go to market to pick your ingredients. Disappointment. There's nothing you really like and almost because of it, you double up on the quantity thinking that perhaps, one will be less lackluster than the others and stand out to save the day, the dish and your reputation. You then get to work on each and every ingredient. The more you work on them the more you see they're really bad, in fact they're dreadful. So one day you see one as the best of the bunch (read “least worse”) another day it's another one, and so on, but unfortunately nothing sticks.

You pour more money into your efforts, but it make the meal look even more terrible, revealing sides you'd rather hide. In fact as you cook these disparate ingredients they seem to fight each others, making horrible noises and creating a terrible stench. You would like to throw them all away and start anew, but it's too late now, dinner is about to be served, you desperately know that your reputation will be tainted and you won't win any award. As a chef, you should have known; delectable cuisine always starts with the finest ingredients!