THE CONDESCENSION IS OFF-PUTTING.

A Lily correspondent named Caroline Kitchener visits North Carolina.

[Winston-Salem resident Patricia] Murphy doesn’t regret voting for Trump: She was never going to support Clinton. She will always remember the “60 Minutes” appearance Clinton made when Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992. Responding to a question about her legal career, Clinton said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies.” To Murphy, that comment felt personal: If the two of them met at a party, Murphy says, she feels sure Clinton would not bother to talk to her, a marketing specialist who took years off to raise her kids, educated far from the Ivy League. Many of her friends feel the same way, she says.

“We’ll talk about how horrible Trump is, how embarrassing. We’re mortified. But then we’ll look at each other and be like, ‘Not having Hillary Clinton as president — worth it.’”

No surprise there, nobody ever coached Mrs Clinton (or a lot of other self-styled progressives) not to be stupid about being smart.  The problem, though, might be that the smart people aren't always as smart as they think they are.

Shari Dallas is stunned that Sanders is the Democratic front-runner. A registered independent, 59-year-old Dallas voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in the last presidential election. Especially at the university where she works as an administrator, people gave her a hard time, saying she wasted her vote on someone who couldn’t win. But Dallas didn’t care: She couldn’t bring herself to vote for Clinton or Trump. It’s been excruciating, she says, watching Trump run the country — and she’s been eagerly awaiting 2020, when she can use her vote to get him out of office. But now she’s worried she’ll end up voting for an independent candidate again — or maybe not voting at all.

By the logic of those university people, the Detroit Lions should have no fans at all. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)  Given that the Trump presidency has been, to use a word I saw somewhere, "shambolic" at best (a few policy pluses notwithstanding) and the Democrat field runs the gamut from a 77 year old guy to a 78 year old guy, perhaps Ms Dallas ought stand by her principles and convince her colleagues that the binary choice is only binary if voters let it be.