Editor’s note: Read a Sanders-supporting millennial’s response to this piece.

1. Scalia 

While I was writing what comes below, a New York Times web notice came in about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Presidents do important things during their four years in office, but perhaps the most important thing they do is nominate new justices to the Supreme Court. Long after those presidents are gone, those justices are there, on the bench, deciding what kind of lives we are permitted to have.

In the next year, the Republicans will do anything they can to keep an Obama nominee from getting a seat on the Court. They will block hearings; if there are hearings, they will keep them from going anywhere. Their majority leader, only a few hours after Scalia’s death, said so.

Presidents matter.

 2. Bernie I 

At first, I really liked Bernie Sanders. I liked his passion, his opposition to the way Big Money dominates so much of American life and politics, his opposition to villainy in the financial industry.

I sent him money. It wasn’t that much, but I soon started getting emails—sometimes three of them a day—beginning, “As a major donor to Bernie’s campaign…” The emails soon began to feel like spam, but I let it go because, if the little I gave made me a “major donor,” then his claim that his campaign was funded by small donations from ordinary people seemed true. That, I thought, was nice. It was before I found out he was drawing from at least one Super PAC.

 3. Bernie II 

Then, after listening to him a lot, I realized I was hearing things again and again, but I wasn’t hearing anything more, anything new, anything deep, anything practical. It was all slogans.

Everything comes back to villainy and grand goals. I keep waiting for specifics: How are we going to pay for this? How are we going to make those changes, given that the Republicans will surely continue to control the House and may in all likelihood continue to control the Senate? How are we going to make any of this happen?

Sanders’s response is, “Trust me. It will.”

Specifics never come. The hand-waving and finger-pointing and shouting continue. The unmodulated, angry voice continues. The list of monolithic villains—“Wall Street” in particular—continue. It is all, “My intentions are good. Trust me.”

For a while, I was mesmerized by Sanders’s passion and his singular vision.

But now I think his singular vision is as narrow as any of the Republican front-runners. They hate foreigners; he hates Wall Street. They have no foreign policy; Bernie has no foreign policy. They are pissed off; he is pissed off. They have no ideas about how to run a country; Bernie has no ideas about how to run a country.

Pissed off is not a desideratum for electing a president.

Bernie is easy to identify with. He’s pissed. We’re all pissed. But he offers us nothing.

Hillary is complex. Some people want to dump her because her husband got a blowjob in the Oval Office from an intern. That is blaming the wife for the husband’s frailty. Some people want to dump her because of the Whitewater scandal; that scandal was entirely a Republican construct.

Others want to blame her because of her ostensible connection to Wall Street: She has gotten contributions from individuals in the finance industry (a significant amount) and financial organizations (not very much). Find a president in the past century that didn’t have a connection to Wall Street. Find a current Republican candidate. She was a US Senator from New York. Wall Street is one of New York’s major industries. What is your connection to Wall Street? I’ll come back to that canard.

And some people want to dump her because she has more experience, has achieved more domestically and internationally than any other candidate. If she’s done all that, she’s part of the Establishment, right?

No: wrong. That is lunatic. Go to Snopes.com and you will find pages of Hillary Clinton canards, and how none of them plays out. You or I might disagree with some of her votes, but there is no evidence—none—that she has been bought or sold.

They are canards, lies, but they show up again and again in the so-called “social media” as if they were facts.

 4. Eternal Life 

I have a close friend who is currently connected with a group dedicated to eternal life. Not eternal life of the soul or spirit, or eternal life in memory of those left behind, but eternal life, as in right here, right now: the bodies we inhabit.

It’s a grand idea. (Though if I had eternal life I’d move the eternal starting point back several decades.) I’m glad it gives my friend comfort. But the simple fact is, in not very long, my friend and I will be dead. I’m almost 80; he’s not much younger. Some things are not reversible. Some things are not achievable. We do what we can; hopefully we do what we should; we cannot do what cannot be done. Some parts of the world do not exist in words; they are real.

And I have a young friend—we write one another about this campaign—who focuses on what ought to be. That’s a good thing: Young people should focus on what ought to be because they have time to work on making what ought to be happen.

But older people—Bernie, like me, is one of them—have to work in the world of the real, not the world of ought. You’re in that world, too.

Congress is not going to change a year from now. Bernie offers anger at things we should be mad at, but no specific ways we might fix any of those things. You cannot run a government fueled by rage and shouting and fields of dreams.

Hillary has an astonishing record of getting things done. The recent Iran nuclear agreement is one of them. Bernie never talks about things like that. He has, so far as I can tell, little or no interest in things like that.

I used to think it was issues that drove Bernie; now I think it is his rage.

 5. Homogenizing Wall Street 

Start with his primary beast: Wall Street.

Every time I’ve heard him speak, Bernie goes after Wall Street. Sometimes he names specific organizations, but mostly it’s “Wall Street,” something monolithically evil. It’s like the gray roadway the huge truck lumbers down in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. That is a bad roadway.

As a teacher and as a writer, I find that depiction of our financial environment cheap and facile. Things are not that simple. Would that they were.

A cop kills somebody because the somebody is black: Does that make all cops bad or racist? Nonsense. Most of them are good people doing hard jobs you and I need done. Sometimes they make mistakes; sometimes they fuck up big; sometimes they’re bad to the core. But not all of them; not most of them; not nearly all of them.

And there are certainly villains on Wall Street (as there are in Congress, the film industry, education, families, the food industry. and organized baseball), but most people who work on Wall Street are not villains and most of them do not go home with those huge boxes of money.

More important, Bernie elides the simple fact that nearly all working Americans are seriously involved with Wall Street.

If you have a pension plan—unless you’re a government employee with a government-defined pension, as Sanders is—Wall Street is where you go to have it make money for you so you can live your final years out of poverty. If you go to college or have a child in college, and if that college has an endowment, it is Wall Street that makes that endowment useful. College is expensive; some colleges are hugely expensive. They would be even more expensive and would be able to provide far fewer benefits to their students and faculty without the income from those endowments. The same applies for any public agency with an endowment: an art gallery, a hospital, a foundation that does good works in the community year after year.

Wall Street needs reform and villains need the handling villainy earns, but to smear the entire enterprise is to engage in the same kind of demagoguery as Donald Trump, only with different (but equally abstract) villains. It’s easy, it gets people cranked up, but it just isn’t true. It is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 6. Tarring Dr. Robert Califf 

A Reuters report posted on Huffington Post (January 26) said, “U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said on Tuesday he has placed a hold on President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, claiming he is too close to the pharmaceutical industry to be an impartial regulator. The nominee, Dr. Robert Califf, is a cardiologist and researcher who joined the FDA a year ago as a deputy commissioner. He previously held senior positions at Duke University, where he founded a large academic research center that received more than half its funding from the drug industry. A Sanders statement said, ‘Dr, Cardiff’s extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry give me no reason to believe that he would make the FDA work for ordinary Americans, rather than just the CEO’s of pharmaceutical companies.’”

That is, as anyone who took a college-level course in logic or evidence knows, or as anyone who thinks about it can figure out, demanding that Califf prove a negative hypothetical: Prove to me that your lengthy experience will not influence your judgments to come. We’d all fail that test. That proof cannot be made.

Sanders also said, “We need someone who will work to substantially lower drug prices, implement rules to safely import brand-name drugs from Canada and hold companies accountable who defraud our government.”

Yes. These are all laudable goals, but none of them is within the mandate of the FDA. Why should Califf’s appointment be held hostage to things he could not possibly intersect?

Of course pharmaceutical companies fund drug trials. Who else is going to fund them? The reason they channel those trials through universities rather than do them in-house is to be able to offer some evidence of arm’s-length objectivity. Some drug trials are rigged, corrupt to the core. But I’ve found no allegation that any study involving Dr. Califf has been tainted in any way. The New England Journal of Medicine has urged the Senate to confirm him. I don’t know anyone who has ever suggested that NEJM is in anyone’s pocket.

The only thing anyone has brought up against Dr. Califf is Bernie Sanders in his guilt-by-association riff. This is Joe McCarthy redux.

If knowing nothing about and having nothing to do with the key issues at hand is Sanders’s requirement for appointment to key positions, how might this play out elsewhere in a Sanders administration? What kinds of unengaged and ignorant folks would pass his purity test?

 7. Hillary 

There is a lot of talk about Hillary Clinton receiving Wall Street money. (She has also received a lot of money from other sources.) I’ve found only one Hillary vote her opponents say was influenced by that Wall Street money. After all the scrutiny: just one.

She’s offered an explanation/justification. I think it makes sense. It’s just one vote. All those years in the Senate, all those issues to throw at her, and not one of them holds up. (There is a solid article online about this sliming of Hillary, “The Case for Hillary,” on Huffington Post.)

Does that offset Bernie’s five votes against the Brady Bill? His refusal as Veterans Committee chair to heed the calls for a Senate look into problems at the VA when people died because they couldn’t get help? Or his almost total failure to engage gender issues, environmental issues, education issues, race issues?

We can argue some of Hillary’s votes along the way. And we might disagree with them. But we must also honor what she’s done along the way. She fought a bruising battle for universal healthcare early in Bill Clinton’s first administration; she worked in civil rights; she worked for gender rights; she helped achieve our first major treaty with Iran since the overthrow of the Shah.

This is not past history. It is our present.

 8. Perfection 

In a perfect world, we’d have perfect candidates. Psalm 130 has a line, “If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?” None of us, surely.

We do not inhabit a perfect world, nor do we inhabit a dreamworld. We live in the real, a place where things matter.

There is a Yiddish word—luftmensch—dreamer. My parents used it. Dreaming is wonderful to do.

But then morning comes, and we get up, and we deal with the day. A US president, he or she has to deal with the day, every day.

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Bruce Jackson, The Public’s national affairs editor, grew up in Brooklyn, not far from Bernie Sanders.