I love the Presidential election season. Any election is like a satirist’s birthday, gifts and cakes, funny hats and pin the tail on the Jack Ass. A Presidential election, for the satirist, is like your birthday falling ON Christmas, celebrated at Disney World with Willie Nelson providing the entertainment and the party favors.
Let’s take a moment and see how a presidential election plays out. First, you have to become the candidate don’t you? Becoming the candidate means you have to win the primaries. Primaries are when each state decides who they want to vote for at the convention. Are you following all this? Good, me neither.
Anyway you just simply must win the primaries which will cost you most of your money and any integrity you happen to have lying around. What you have to do is referred to as ENERGIZING YOUR BASE. For public consumption what they mean by that is exciting all the committed people who get out there and work hard for the candidates.
What they actually mean by that is somewhat different. Picture the American political tree. The early nuts are out on the little limbs so the Demo squirrel runs for the ones on the left and the Repu squirrel runs for the ones on the right. When the two parties say they want to energize their base what they mean is to run to the left or the right and gather up the really succulent NUTS.
Why yes I am saying that the political base of both parties are a bunch of nuts; some are walnuts, some are chestnuts but most are your simple wing-nuts. One issue extremist with agendas harder than a salesman’s heart, delusions more complex than Chinese Arithmetic and fantasies more vivid than a fifteen year old with a Playboy. If I offend any of my readers then maybe you need to sit down, take off your tin foil hat and think about it.
You guys, the party base, are the ones they already got. You are the POWs of the political war. They got you; they are going to keep you so they don’t have to do one real thing for you. Just pat you on the butt once every four years and tell you how important you are and you work your little buns off for them and then you vote for them.
President Obama, being a sitting president, is not as tied to this process as the Republican Candidates were. President Obama already has his nomination sewed up but still he must at least nod towards those people that make up the core coalition of his liberal base. Gay marriage is an example. Obama more or less said, “I didn’t believe in it last time but I thought about it and it is the thing to do.”
Please note he sent Vice President Biden to try that stance out first. Everybody knows Jokin’ Joe is a bit of a wing nut himself and had it not been received well Barrack could have just laughed it off, “That Joe, he is such a character.”
Let me tell you something my Homosexual friends and fellow citizens, when and if Obama is re-elected your issues will slip to the bottom of his pile. Not because he does not believe what he says or because he does. It will fall between the WIDE Washington cracks because he no longer NEEDS you.
Now I bet a lot of your conservative Republican friends of mine are laughing at this. Enjoy it, you are next. Romney has probably eaten more hamburgers, BBQ, fried fish and coleslaw in the last six months than he has in his previous life. He is for guns, against gays, for God, against abortion and etc. If there is an issue important to three people in the Republican base he is with them on it. If there are contradictions among those issues he is with BOTH SIDES. Honest, he means it.
His commitment to all of your core issues is unshakeable, rock solid and not to be doubted. Until, that is, you nominate him. You see your base gets you nominated but it is the other ninety-eight percentile of us that get you elected. Guess what happens next?
At that point picture the tree of American Politics just full of nuts. You base on the right and left are no longer important because you already have all those nuts. It’s all those nuts in the middle that are going to get you the chance to sit behind the Resolute Desk and get called POTUS. So now our two little political squirrels run back to the middle of the tree.
Now comes the time to “clarify your position”. Which means spin some other fantasy to cover up the fantasy you spun for those other guys. The mutually agreed on way to do this is to turn the debate to the bigger issues. Neither candidate wants to talk about all those other issues they already lied about.
So the talk will turn to Foreign Policy, terrorism, immigration reform and stuff like that. Of course it will never turn to the fact that since 1983 prices have increased and middle class income has stayed exactly the same. Oh, and it will never get near the fact that, under the stewardship of the Republicans and the Democrats, this nation is teetering on the brink of become a footnote in world history. If we discuss that some folks might realize that both parties are to blame and kick the whole sorry lot to the curb.
Now we can’t have that can we?
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