{"id":28703,"date":"2018-01-09T18:23:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T00:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/?p=28703"},"modified":"2018-01-09T18:24:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T00:24:00","slug":"next-democratic-president-will-celebrity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/09\/next-democratic-president-will-celebrity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Next Democratic President will be a Celebrity"},"content":{"rendered":"

And, more to the point, the Democrats will not be electing a president until they elect a celebrity. <\/p>\n

I seriously doubt Donald Trump will be re-elected president in 2020, but not because he will lose to a Democrat. Rather, he’ll be replaced on the ticket before that (he may not know it but he doesn’t automatically get to run as a Republican) or he’ll be removed from office by force of law, by illness or death, or some other means before then.<\/p>\n

The person who will be elected in 2020 will be a Republican. Why? Because the Democrats are going to hand the presidency to the Republicans in 2020, and every election year after that, until a generation of Democrats has grown old and died off.<\/p>\n

And no, I’m not talking about millennials. Well, some of them I assume, but I’m really talking about Democrats of all ages and stripes, and not all of them, but a percentage of them. About half on a bad day but no less than about 20% of them.<\/p>\n

I’ve done this experiment a number of times and it never fails. Name a possible candidate and float the idea. At first that candidate may get some support, nice things may be said, but it won’t take long before naysayers jump into the conversation and start whinging and whining about the candidate, and promulgate the idea that this candidate is unacceptable, and if this candidate runs they’ll vote for the Republican or move to Lithuania or whatever.<\/p>\n

Not just “I prefer someone else” or “this or that thing is problematic” but rather, this candidate did or said something once that makes them so bad that we might as well not even have an election if they are running.<\/p>\n

Almost all the time the reason for the hate, if you trace it to its origin, is not based on logic, reason, or good information. Sometimes there is a grain of truth, or even a real difference on an issue. But the complainer never seems to realize that it is a simple truth that not one of us has a clone, a doppelganger, a perfect duplicate of wonderful, wise, and perfect selves out there anywhere, let alone one that is running for office. And, most of the time, the issue difference is one or the other of these things: 1) not important or 2) imagined.<\/p>\n

Among these naysayers I believe there are two types. One is the growing number of the seriously engrumpled, often older Democrats who have gone over some kind of edge of senility, or sometimes the are younger and ignorant, but in all cases they are very selfish individuals who have put the affectation of hate before party, politics, people, and civilization. The other type is the Russian operative, or someone who is so enthralled by such an operative, or perhaps paid off, that we get the same result.<\/p>\n

An example of the former: I approach a small gaggle of old timey Democrats at a fund raiser. I know these folks, and I know they are loyal party members, who will be happy to argue hard about issues and candidates, but who will always support the final outcome of the party process and fight to the end to get the candidate elected. The issue of Hillary vs. Bernie comes up and it turns out that they supported Bernie in the earlier stages of the primary, but that part of the primary is over, and he isn’t going to be the candidate. Instead of shifting to get behind the party goals, they tell me that they are going to throw the party under the bus and who knows who they are going to support (the conventions have not happened yet but it feels like they are planning to vote for Trump.) Understand, now that over the previous ten years, these are the same people that were at every party event, organizing, selling bratwurst, running a silent auction, helping to set up meetings and events, all of it. Not the level of operative that convenes a meeting or acts as a chair, but not occasional volunteers either. Perennial fixtures. Perennial fixtures gone, suddenly and alarmingly, bad. Ever since then, they have been regular and habitual naysayers of this or that or some other thing to the extent that one might prefer they just take off and become Republicans because they can do their psychological damage over there, to them, and not over here, to us.<\/p>\n

An example of the latter: A widely respected leader in a particular political area, highly influential and generally liked by his followers, is suddenly advising people to come out against a Democrat running for a key office, one of those races that Democrats needed to win to show the world that we are going to stand up to Trump. He privately notes that his organization is going to come out with material attacking the Democrat in the race. Soon after, that in fact happens, and literature that was apparently created by left leaning organizations that no one ever heard of before is being distributed everywhere, in a widespread effort to disgruntle Democrats and make them stay home in that race. I am as certain as I can be without being absolutely certain that this was paid for by the Russians, though perhaps indirectly, in part because it is exactly the same scenerio that happened in cases where we now know the Russians were involved, and partly because of the nature of the thing. I could be wrong, of course. And, the effort failed partly because it was too late, and partly because the braggart let the cat out of the bag too early and the appropriate parties were warned in advance that it was coming.<\/p>\n

Those two groups of people are going to reduce the heft of each and every Democratic candidate that comes from the usual sources, including existing elected officials everywhere. Between long standing and still in place voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the fact that nearly half of Americans are right wing yahoos anyway, this absolutely guarantees a loss in a presidential race against any Republican candidate. Even a clown like Trump. Like actually happened. Remember?<\/p>\n

This is why it is interesting to see everyone jump on the Oprah bandwagon when she gives one good speech and has not indicated she is running for anyone. We are so desperate for bigness we’ll take any large scale celebrity. This is illustrated in the diagram below. Take any candidate and subtract the damage caused by this senseless and ubiquitous hate. What you get is a candidate diminished sufficiently to guarantee a loss to a Republican candidate. Alternatively, take any large celebrety, who is much larger than any politician because that is simply the way it is with celebrities. Subtract the same hate, and what to you get? A winner.<\/p>\n

So, here is my statement to anyone who nay-says Oprah or any other celebrity. You may be right to say not to this person, but is it also the case that you have participated in prior acts of senseless and stupid cannibalism of more typical candidates? Because if the answer to that is yes, then time for you to shut up and live with the situation you created.<\/p>\n

Let’s just hope we get a good celebrity.<\/p>\n

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And, more to the point, the Democrats will not be electing a president until they elect a celebrity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5026],"tags":[3529,5106,33,5107,964],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/22-freeman-deepimpact.jpg?fit=550%2C399&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-7sX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28707,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28703\/revisions\/28707"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}