Everything I needed to know about politics I learned on the kindergarten playground.

Many years ago in elementary school, there was this thing called cooties. You could catch them – by kissing a girl, touching the wrong person, wearing the wrong clothes, even exchanging a friendly word or two with another kid. Heck, you didn’t even have to have contact with the pestilential kid to catch them. “Ew, Alice germs! You have Alice germs!” one kid would say, touching another to “infest” them.