California wants a louder voice in presidential races
Moving the primary up to March is good way for state to be heard
California voters had virtually no voice in who was nominated for president last year. That’s plain wrong. And hopefully it can be made right for 2020.
Yes, that’s an eon away, although for millions of voters in this deep-blue state, the next presidential election probably can’t come soon enough.
Regardless, the system needs to be fixed long before the next White House wannabes surface and inevitably politicize what should be a rational decision about California’s role in the nominating process.
Just ask yourself: Were you really happy about the nominations of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? Millions were not, I suspect.
But Trump and Clinton had the Republican and Democratic nominations practically sewed up — thanks to some pampered pipsqueak states — before Californians were heard from in the June primary.
They probably would have been nominated anyway. Trump and Clinton won in California’s June primary and may well have been the victors even if we’d voted in March.
But that’s not the point. The point is that our views didn’t matter. By the time we got to the party, no one cared. Everyone was leaving for the conventions.
It’s a sorry system of democracy that disregards the opinions of nearly 11% of the nation’s electorate.
It’s our own fault, however, for scheduling such a late primary when the political
David Letterman’s mother, Dorothy Mengering, a Midwestern homemaker who became an unlikely celebrity in her 70s as she baked mystery pies and covered the Olympics for her son’s late-night show, has died. She was 95.
Letterman’s publicist Tom Keaney confirmed Mengering’s death Tuesday.
Letterman had been on the air for years, and had made ironic celebrities out of dozens of nobodies, before he thought to bring on his mom.
But the moment he did, she became a hit, with a cheerful “Hi, David!” in her Indiana accent starting every appearance.
The two had great on-air chemistry, her homespun sincerity proving the perfect foil for her son’s urban acerbity.
Her first appearances came via satellite from her Carmel, Ind., kitchen for a segment called “Guess Mom’s Pies,” which became a Thanksgiving tradition. Letterman would make a huge production of the bit before finally declaring, usually correctly, “chocolate chiffon!” or “rhubarb!” When he was wrong, she would take on a comforting tone like he was a boy who had lost a Little League game. She soon started making annual Mother’s Day appearances too.
But she really became a star when the show took her out of the kitchen.
Mengering was a correspondent for Letterman’s CBS show at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, a role she reprised for the next two Winter Games, wearing bulky snow gear that made her tiny body almost invisible, and oozing pure sincerity even in the absurd bits Letterman’s writers had her perform.
“After Lillehammer, I couldn’t believe how it all took off,” Mengering told the New York Times in 1996. “I think it’s about the idea of Mom and of a family.”
Mengering lived all her life in Indiana. She married Letterman’s father, florist Harry Letterman, in 1942. He died in 1973, and she married structural engineer Hans P. Mengering, who died in 2013.
After she became famous, she put out a cookbook, 1996’s “Home Cookin’ With Dave’s Mom,” that included recipes such as “Dave’s Fried Baloney Sandwich” and the secrets behind many of the pies she had baked for the show.