This post was written because my family was leaving the New Bohemia in downtown Saint Paul when we passed a car with a “BETO 2020” bumper sticker on it. I pointed and laughed. My wife, who wisely does not follow politics and had no idea who “Beto” was, asked why I was laughing, and I explained that Beto stopped being cool the moment he lost to Ted Cruz. Anyone with a bumper sticker for him must either not care about coolness or be hilariously out-of-touch.

So, my wife asked, reasonably: what presidential candidates have bumper stickers that cool people put on their cars?

Remember: this isn’t a list of how cool each candidate is. This is a list of how cool each candidate’s supporters are, specifically in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Plenty of uncool candidates have cool supporters and vice versa.

1. Amy Klobuchar – she wins ONLY in Minnesota, but oh boy does she win Minnesota, Nearly everyone in Minnesota, of both sexes, including Republicans, has an irrational love of Amy, to the point where I suspect witchcraft. She’s a solid-left Democrat and workplace abuser who has somehow fooled half the state’s Republican voters into thinking she’s a nice young lady and reasonable advocate for their interests. (My mother blames Amy’s dad.) So it’s not edgy-cool to have an Amy bumper sticker in downtown St. Paul. But cool people are gonna be like, “Hey, I love Amy, that guy’s cool.”

2. Pete Buttigieg – hot stuff right now, which is bizarre for me, since I’ve followed his career since he was just some jerk, long before it occurred to me he could be President. Could stay that way because gay dudes are cool (and it turns out he’s gay? I never realized), but more likely Mayor Pete is the New Beto and will soon end up with Beto down at #25.

3. Bernie Sanders – no shock to see him way up here at the cool kids’ table after a remarkably strong 2016 run that earned accolades from the coolest people alive (dumb college students), but his stock is falling fast. He used to be the only progressive and, more importantly, the only alternative to Hillary. Now there’s tons of alternatives, and the great majority of them are progressives. When Sanders stands next to people who have actual charisma, he is much more obviously an old man ranting at a cloud.

4. Elizabeth Warren – her star is on the rise. She’s already the “cool kids’ Bernie Sanders,” and she will likely eclipse him in mere days, if she hasn’t already. I mean, hey, as I said to a friend the other day, “If we could have a president solely for antitrust law, I’d vote for her in a heartbeat.”

5. Marianne Williamson – before the debate, I had Marianne way down at #13, rounding out the “obvious protest candidate” tier of coolness. But her debate performance was… extraordinary. Why not give her a dollar to keep her in the race? Be warned, though: “donating to amusing debaters” is exactly what certain Democrats did in 2016… with Donald Trump. So be sure you’re okay with the idea of President Williamson before donating.

6. Justin Amash – though not very cool in himself, you get access to several different cachets of coolness points when you put his bumper sticker on your car: the “ex-Ron Paul supporter” coolness points, the “I’m voting third-party” coolness points, the “I’ve committed to a candidate who’s not even running yet” coolness points, the “partisans on both sides really hate this guy right now” coolness points, and the (admittedly almost completely unimportant) “this guy explains all his Congressional roll-call votes really carefully and rationally on Facebook and he is honest with his constituents and does good constituent services so he might be our first good president in decades” coolness points. All these different elements of coolness in a town that liked Ron Paul quite a bit adds up to a sixth place finish.

7. Tulsi Gabbard – Gabbard has an ineffably cool aura, but she is still somehow obscure enough that anyone who knows enough about her to endorse her for president gets coolness bonus points on top of that. However, warning: once she gets some mainstream scrutiny, that ineffability may fade and leave Rep. Gabbard in a Kamala Harris (#12) situation.

8. Mike Gravel – though a U.S. Senator, he cusses on Twitter [search “from:MikeGravel fuck”]. This, I am told, is very cool.

9. Joe Biden – it’s always somewhat cool to back the winning horse

10. Steven Bullock – Montana is cool. Simple, inarguable fact.

11. Andrew Yang – it’s weird how most businesspeople are coolness kryptonite, but a few of them are beloved cool dudes. Yang is… kinda in the middle.

12. Kamala Harris – should have more suction but the hardline progressives have a (kinda irrational, imho) beef with her, and progressives are the heart of bohemians and bohemians determine what’s cool, so… sorry, Kamala

13. Bill de Blasio – de Blasio is so aggressively and violently hated by literally everyone in both parties that it shows major cojones to put a bumper sticker for him on your car in St. Paul, MN.

14. Jay Inslee – Bill Nye, rapidly declining Science Guy and composer of “My Sex Junk,” did Inslee’s announcement speech. That is apparently as cool a celebrity as Inslee can snag. Enough said.

15. Michael Bennet – Colorado is not as cool as Montana.

16. Seth Moulton – yeah, the Marines are a little cool.

17. Wayne Messam – Wayne himself? Not that cool. But you gotta admire his supporters just for knowing so much about Wayne’s record of success in Miramar, Florida.

18. John Delaney – now well into “wow, man, never heard of him but you do you” territory here

19. Eric Swalwell – I can remember literally nothing about this person except that he is in Congress and that I have seen his name many times for vague reasons.

[EDIT: Swalwell dropped out before this piece went to press. I will now always remember him with the thought, “Swalwell that ends well,” since James Taranto apparently didn’t think he rated a bye-ku.]

20. Bill Weld – all a Bill Weld bumper sticker advertises is that you share the basic moral outlook of white liberals but are too much of a coward to stop voting for Republicans. It’s an apology, not an advertisement.

21. Tim Ryan – no other candidate’s headshot has EVER spontaneously made the phrase “blindingly white” pop into my head

22. John Hickenlooper – okay, Colorado, Bennet was fine but let’s not go crazy here

23. Cory Booker – like Beto, he was cool until he wasn’t. But his moment came and went years ago and Cory never noticed

24. Donald Trump – if more Republicans hated him, he could be like Bill de Blasio, his supporters becoming cool by standing by someone so unpopular. But instead he’s just polarizing, and this is St. Paul, so your oppositional defiance is not that cool here.

25. Beto O’Rourke – y’know, looking at his record again, I thought, “Beto really SHOULD be cooler, and it isn’t fair that he’s on the outs with the cool crowd right now.” But then I looked at his hair again and recanted.

26. Kirsten Gillibrand – a white New Yorker political chameleon, much like Hillary Clinton, but somehow less beloved. She has supporters, but they are all cold-eyed, flint-hearted pragmatists of anti-coolness. She is the least cool candidate to support.

There’s another voice in my head that believes everything everyone says about themselves, all the time.  This trusting voice is no less important in politics than the cynical, and should also be consulted from time to time… but, if you want to read “Flattering Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” go read their campaign websites.  Here are the unflattering ones.  Some are certainly accurate, others may not be, but consider them my worst fears for each candidate:

Mike Huckabee
Used to have the desire, skill, and ambition to be a leader, but, as the America he envisions recedes into the past, is content to vent his spleen and be warmly applauded for it by crowds that miss his America as much as he does.

Jeb Bush
A “compassionate conservative” who still kinda knows how to talk to Republicans, but is secretly seething that they have abandoned so much of what “his” party stood for. Sort of the Mike Huckabee of establishment Republicans.

Ben Carson
A once-rising star who let the plaudits go to his head and will now burn like Icarus.

Chris Christie
An intensely ambitious, furious man, with no particular principles beyond a vague affection for balanced budgets and low taxes, who’s willing to say anything to win… as long as it fits the elaborate superhero character he’s woven for himself, the Bombastic Budget-Cutter. Willing to play dirty in a state where dirty is part of the tradition.

Hillary Clinton
The opportunist’s opportunist. While an intense progressive at heart — a soulmate for Sanders — she has sold out so many times and so hard (even standing by a husband she secretly despises) it’s impossible not to see her as Claire from House of Cards every time she opens her mouth. The real tragedy of Hillary Clinton is that, unlike her husband, she’s no good at selling out.  Her many betrayals have bought her nothing but a truckload of distrust from all sides; her resume has lots of glitzy titles but none of the accomplishments she sacrificed her principles for.

Ted Cruz
The embodiment of conservatism’s worst instinct: the overwhelming desire to rend the flesh of insufficiently conservative conservatives, even at the cost of ceding power to progressives. Justifies this with an elaborate mythology wherein “energizing the base” matters more than persuading persuadables. The scariest thing is he might be right.

Carly Fiorina
An articulate, believing, even inspiring conservative who keeps looking at her resume and can’t understand why she never wins any elections or runs any successful businesses. Has not yet realized that a good chunk of it is not about belief, but managerial talent and luck, neither of which she has enough of.

Lindsey Graham
Half-Chafee, half-troll, Graham is running to ensure that an increasingly anti-establishment GOP stands for the same values he has stood for his entire career: corporate welfare and the military-industrial complex. Vain enough to think he might make a difference.

Bobby Jindal
Infinitely frustrated by the fact that his political career was torpedoed by bad timing, bad luck, and a single bad State of the Union rebuttal, Jindal refuses to give up, and is thrashing out, looking for the attention he desperately needs wherever he can get it.

John Kasich
Smuggy McSmugSmug.

George Pataki, Lincoln Chaffee, Martin O’Malley
Vain, highly insulated men with no sense of proportion. Just astonishingly vain.

Rand Paul
A man of principle who made a conscious decision to compromise a little of what he believed in for the sake of attaining power, but, when that didn’t seem to be enough, kept going, and got lost somewhere along the way.

Rick Perry
I can’t bring myself anymore to care about Rick Perry enough to write something mean about him. (Never mind, I just did.)

Marco Rubio
Drastically inexperienced (no more experienced than Sen. Obama was!) young’un who is so scared of making missteps that he makes missteps by trying to avoid making missteps.

Rick Santorum
A principled, intelligent, and consistent conservative, who has genuinely synthesized the social, economic, and foreign policy legs of late-20th-century conservatism into a single, cohesive, plausible platform… which is precisely what makes him so scary to so many. The Bernie Sanders of the Right.

Bernie Sanders
A principled, intelligent, and consistent progressive, who has genuinely synthesized the social, economic, and foreign policy legs of late-20th-century progressivism into a single, cohesive, plausible platform… which is precisely what makes him so scary to so many. The Rick Santorum of the Left.

Donald Trump
If you need me to explain the problems with Donald Trump, you are one of the problems.

Scott Walker
An intensely ambitious man with an attachment to conservatism that runs deep only because he has lived with it for so long that its convenience has become conviction, not because he has any particularly clear basis for it, intellectual or otherwise. Fortunately for him, he has learned expertly the art of following The Conservative Script and only answering questions when it serves his purposes, so it’s easy not to notice.

Jim Webb
The Lindsey Graham of the Democrats, with perhaps a little bit of the Jeb Bush “why can’t my party believe in all the things it believed in the ’90s?” to go along with it… with the important difference that establishment Democrats (unlike establishment Republicans) do not actually miss the days when economic conservatism and social moderation reigned supreme in Washington, leaving Webb without an audience.

Well, that was grim.  I think I’m going to go back to deciding who to vote for based on who has the best 404 page.