no yin without Yang

The rumors are that Andrew Yang is on the verge of suspending his campaign. I have several reactions to this.

1. Why can't the other Democrats who have been polling far worse than Yang get a clue and drop out of the race? How stupid are they?

2. Yang mystifies me. On the one hand, he was one of the few candidates to acknowledge that Trump-obsession was a bootless pursuit. On the other hand, he himself has disparaged Trump, which makes him no different from anyone else.

3. Yang is probably right to focus on automation as a threat to low-skilled workers' jobs, but his redistributionist notion of UBI (universal basic income) is utterly insane. How can one man run the gamut from rational to irrational like that? (Maybe, like Walt Whitman, he is large and contains multitudes.)

4. For a supposedly successful entrepreneur (he's actually pretty minor-league), Yang ran a piss-poor, shoddily organized campaign that betrayed a lack of understanding of self-promotion and artful persuasion. I've found him to be affable and even funny in his speeches and interviews, and I think he might even have been a decent debater against Trump, had he been a front-runner, but Yang has a tin ear when it comes to trying to connect to the US population at large. He has his nerdy acolytes, the so-called Yang Gang, but that doesn't make him much different from his better-polling rivals, who also have their own all-or-nothing groupies (cf. the Bernie-or-bust crowd).

5. Dave Chappelle only recently came out as a Yang supporter. How sad must he be?