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One of the most colorful of all biblical tales concerns a Judean lad said to have been quite the skilled lyrist and, as it turned out, an excellent marksman with a sling. With that and one smooth stone, the youth felled the much-feared champion of the Philistine enemy -- a giant of a figure to be forever known as Goliath.
David is depicted as rising from a minder of sheep to the throne of the Judean kingdom and the progenitor of the great house named for him, which, according to one tradition, produced a messiah.
That the great man had moral difficulties -- to which the ghosts of Uriah the Hittite and his wife Bathsheba could well bear witness -- is not to be overlooked, but his figure in the legends of the Jewish and Christian traditions looms large.
The root of his eminence is almost always traced to that day in the Valley of Elah when, as the story goes, David, carrying only a sling and a bag of stones, strode out to do battle with the much-armored and equipped Goliath and won the day -- that whilst Saul's frightened army looked on, jaws agape.
That biblical legend came to mind as I read of the wildly enthusiastic reception given Sen. Bernie Sanders by nearly 400 people in the tiny Iowa hamlet of Kensett -- pop. 240. Known mostly for his socialist, independent streak, the Vermont solon was testing the waters for a run at the presidency.
When Sanders finally came to his "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" decision to try for the White House, you could almost hear the guffawing among the country club set of both major parties -- including, probably, some gusty har-hars in the Clinton camp. Fewer people are laughing today.
In some ways, Sanders is the David in these frighteningly early months of an election that is a year and a half away. Of the 188 Republicans now in the scrum, none of them is even a Goliath. Nor, perhaps, are all of them put together.
They seem to think, though, that the vast post-Citizens United money paid to their campaigns to gain influence are like Goliath's armor, his sword and his shield. Then comes the seriously underfunded Sanders the Socialist with his sling and pebble.
Just as the armies on both side of the Elah valley had a good laugh at David's expense, it remains to be seen if Sanders' campaign will be taken seriously by Democrats who are as lukewarm to a Clinton II as some Republicans are to a Bush III. It remains to be seen if Sanders himself is really serious or has entered the race to challenge Mrs. Clinton's much remarked upon inevitability or to prod his fellow senator Elizabeth Warren to jump in.
It is Sanders who is the David on this battlefield. Big money will not be bet on him, which in the present climate would hold him back, unless ...
... unless the press gets its collective head out of its rectal cavity, stops trying to fill the papers and the air with nervous news about trifles and begins to look not at the personalities, not at every real and imagined peccadillo of all 723 hopefuls, but asks the questions to which millions of Americans would like answers:
- What will you pledge now to do about the voluminous scientific evidence that Earth is warming, that sea levels are rising dangerously, that we are breathing and drinking toxins, that fossil fuels are global death warrants? What would you do about this after Jan. 20, 2017? And how soon?
- What will you pledge now to do about the vast and getting vaster distance between what the 99% have to live on compared to the 1%? Would you put the might and main of the highest office in this land behind a long-overdue reform of the tax code so that those with much will not have too much at the expense of those who have too little?
- What will you pledge now to make all income at any amount subject to Social Security deductions, thus strengthening the system to do what it was meant to do in the first place?
- What will you pledge now to do to counter the baleful effect of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against long ago?
- What will you pledge now to do about the continuing racial divide in America that would help Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of nation in which the character of a person, not the color of his or her skin, is what is valued?
- What will you pledge now to do about restoring truth to the promise etched into the Statue of Liberty about America's welcome to the immigrant?
- What will you pledge now to do about wringing the money out of political campaigns so that an individual's vote turns out to mean something?
- What will you pledge now to do about putting much-needed flesh upon the skeleton of America -- its infrastructure, its crumbling school buildings and its public transportation?
If I read Sanders correctly, his answers to those questions would be as blessedly clear and unequivocal as politics ever gets. It may be that the hall in little Kensett, Iowa, packed with a third more people than actually live there will become the significant moment in time at which American voters finally got the message about what and who is good for the country.
David had but a sling and a couple of stones. With one of the latter it is said that he took down the Big Guy and all he represented. Is it too much to hope that the likes of Bernie Sanders would be called to do that on behalf of his fellow Americans?
Bring on the sling and the stone.
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