There must be something magic about running for public office. You’re like a rockstar, except you can’t sing or play for shit. There’s clearly a bit of juice/electricity to looking at the sea of little signs bearing your name and hearing people respond to your well-organized thoughts with out-of-their-seat applause.
You have power. Sway.
Most of us never experience that kind of fealty. Our noses are too busy at the grindstone to look up and say, ” You know what? I have something super important to say that tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people need to hear. Follow me.”
Perhaps that is the element most missing from the coverage of the 1,489 Democrats currently running for the biggest brass ring on the planet. To wit: that this shit is addictive, and that, as those of you who have had an addiction know, can countermand the fuck out of reason.
A lot of people are making hay about the number of contestants entering the primaries. The numbers are unhealthy politically speaking, because there’s only so much oxygen in the room at the show. And as Joe Biden recently learned, some of the contestants in the rapidly filling water chamber that is the primary season hide a knife to cut your supply off and it’s see you at the bottom, chump. But even the existing amount of oxygen is not enough. You better be able to say something meaningful and make it fucking quick because someone else will come along, steal your breath and say it before you. And you need to be fresh and new when you’re saying it, as Bernie Sanders has recently learned.
The first of the Democratic candidates to concede that they haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance will reveal themselves soon. It is my sincere hope that others who know damn well they aren’t going anywhere will do the same. But as they say, wish in one hand, shit in another. In fact, we’re about to have a net gain of candidates. Joe Ses… oh, who the hell cares declared a few weeks ago. But brace yourselves…
a fucking billionaire wants to be the people’s candidate.
Why? Because he can. Obviously this is some sort of wild head trip, because no one I know needed Tom Steyer to get on the stump, pipe up and say that Donald Trump should be impeached. He is late as fuck to the party on that count. But apparently no one has been doing it right in Tom Steyer’s mind, I guess. He’s probably going to buy his way onto the next debate stage- out of your email and onto your TV.
To which I say, thrillsville and what the fuck ever. You’re already gutshot and you don’t even know it, tuna. This primary doesn’t need another fucking patrician to tell us what’s up. Strike one: you’re a guy. That’s a major liability right now. Strike two: you are a white guy. You are the root cause of every suck-ass thing in the world. Strike three: you are an old, rich white guy. That’s a subset of people who are even more precisely the root cause of every suck-ass thing in the world. Only Joe Biden, for arcane reasons I cannot divine, is exempt. For now.
To fail to be able to put his finger in the wind and figure out which way the wind is blowing doesn’t say much about his decision-making skills. With any luck, he’ll be as annoying, charmless and feckless as the last billionaire ego tripper to think he could win the presidency, Howard Schultz-and he can fuck off just as quickly before he starts eating up valuable oxygen for viable candidates. By dint of his extreme wealth and his somewhat longstanding belief that Trump needs to be removed, he’s grabbed that live wire of exposure. And he likes the feeling even if we need to do more than dump Trump.
What was wrong with funding groups to save the planet, and providing funds to whomever can legitimately stomp a mudhole in Trump and the GOP?
Was that getting boring, Narcissus?