Deck the halls with more political intrigue

Gail Collins says now that the midterm elections are finally over, a horde of Democrats is already eyeing the White House.

We are now totally into the holiday season. The whole world is talking about Melania Trump’s White House Christmas decorations, which feature a bunch of trees of a sort of terrifying crimson color. Do you think it’s some kind of metaphor for the Wall? Her mood?

Everybody is making travel plans. Donald Trump is going to Argentina for a big international confab. In an exciting preview earlier this week, Trump said that whenever he meets with foreign leaders, “they walk in and they say, ‘Mr. President, it’s incredible what’s happened with your country in such a short period of time. America is respected again.’”

Which countries’ foreign leaders do you think he was quoting? Saudi Arabia? Papua New Guinea? Or maybe he mistook the desk clerk at a European hotel for a prime minister?

The midterm elections are finally over. Cindy Hyde-Smith won that last Senate race, and she’s become the first woman ever elected to Congress from the state of Mississippi. How does that make you feel, people? A) Good.

B) Bad.

C) There are more than 900,000 other women Mississippians could have chosen.

Well, if you’re going to start quoting statistics on me ...

Hyde-Smith was certainly a memorable contender. She reluctantly agreed to a single debate, standing behind a pile of notes so formidable it looked as if she was defending a Ph.D. dissertation. She kept checking them rather desperately, but still managed to get a bunch of things wrong. I kind of loved the fact that she referred to the notes before announcing that the audience had heard “two clearly different opposite differences” between the candidates, especially given that Hyde-Smith had refused to allow any actual audience in the room.

Everybody presumed that HydeSmith was going to beat the Democrat, African-American former Congressman Mike Espy. It’s usually a bad sign whenever the commentary on someone’s campaign begins with “not since 1870.” Hyde-Smith succeeds the ailing Thad Cochran, a veteran who was famous for his ability to Get Stuff for his state. As a result, Mississippi moved into the 21st century receiving $3 in federal aid for every dollar it sent to Washington, including funding for about a quarter of the public schools’ budgets.

This is all fine, given that Mississippi is a needy state. It would be nice, however, if its politicians refrained from saying thank-you by demanding that the federal government “stay out of Mississippi when it comes to policies,” as Hyde-Smith did during her one and only debate. Really, Mississippians. It can get kind of ... annoying.

Now that the elections are over, we’ll have time to talk about, you guessed it, the elections! Sure, it’s more than a year until the first presidential primaries, but don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about them.

The Democratic hopefuls are popping up everywhere. Sen. Kamala Harris of California has a memoir coming out, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has a new children’s book on the history of suffrage. As candidate publications go, I can really recommend Gillibrand’s, which is only 18 pages, with big pictures. On the other side of the coin, Bernie Sanders is publicizing a 288-page chronicle of his visits to 32 states over the last two years.

And he’s not resting! This week Sanders gave a speech in which he demanded that the nation start examining the problems of “income and wealth inequality et cetera et cetera.” It was a message to the nation: America is now on the cusp of the et cetera season.

Just this week, Beto O’Rourke announced he was not ruling out running for president. But there are actually at least several thousand other politicians who have not ruled out running, either. Face it, almost every Democrat who has ever been elected to anything is mulling the possibility. Your state representative may be dreaming about it this very day. The chairwoman of the Zoning Board of Appeals is working out a strategy while she hangs Christmas lights.

Actually, O’Rourke is a bit different in that he had publicly ruled out a presidential race, something I’ll bet your state representative never did. At the time, he was trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate and swearing that if he won, no siren call from the White House could lure him away from his job. Nobody really takes those promises seriously. During his re-election campaign, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he’d stick around for his entire four-year term unless “God strikes me dead.”

This is an advantage to Cuomo: interesting quotes. Plus, of course, that vision of a lightning bolt striking the campaign headquarters.

Feel free to discuss whether Cuomo would be a better presidential nominee than O’Rourke. Also, you can throw in Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Jerry Brown, Sherrod Brown, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and former HUD Secretary Julián Castro. That gets us pretty much through C.

This can be an excellent mental exercise for the long winter months. When I have trouble falling asleep, I frequently try to see how many former vice presidents I can name. I can usually get to 45, which I realize is truly pathetic. Please, don’t mention it to anybody.

But candidates are au courant. And I’ll bet you would nod off long before you made it to Elizabeth Warren. Collins is a New York Times columnist.