Tag: jeb!

Open post

Bloomberg Surpasses Jeb! as America’s Biggest Presidential Flop

Today’s Campaign Update (Because the Campaign Never Ends)

Ok, so, who’s the biggest flop of all time in presidential politics? – In 1980, all of the nation’s punditry made huge fun of Texan John Connally for spending the then-princely sum of $6 million in the early GOP primary races before dropping out without having won a single delegate. He was widely considered at that time to be the biggest loser in modern presidential political history.

Boy, Connally sure doesn’t hold that dubious title anymore.

That trophy got taken in 2016, when Jeb! Bush and his supporting super PAC frittered away a grand total of around $300 million. For that phenomenal investment, Jeb! and his backers won exactly 0 delegates to the GOP convention. The former Florida Governor had entered the race as the odds-on favorite to become the eventual nominee, but, after taking a pounding from Donald Trump in the party’s 2015 debate season, the low energy candidate dropped out after a horrific showing in the New Hampshire primary.

But luckily for Jeb!, all of that $300 million was other people’s money, and he was able to slink back to Florida to resume his life of immense privilege. Like Connally in 1980, his political career was well and truly over but his personal fortune was intact.

There have been other big presidential primary flops in modern times – Howard Dean in 2004 and Rudy Giuliani and his infamous “Florida strategy” in 2008 come immediately to mind – but in terms of throwing good money after bad candidacies, no one could compare to Connally and Jeb!.

Until now.

Interestingly, the motto for the Jeb! Bush campaign in 2016 was “Jeb can fix it!”, which is eerily reminiscent to the “Mike will get it done!” motto for the campaign of America’s new all-time biggest flop in presidential primary politics, Michael “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg.

As only he can do, President Donald Trump summed up Mr. Excitement’s Super Tuesday showing in a 280 character tweet:

Yeah, that’s pretty much it, all right.

But hey, Mini-Mike did manage to win a caucus – in American Samoa, where a grand total of less than 400 people participated in the process. His campaign hasn’t told us how many millions he dropped on TV ads in that tiny island territory that most Americans don’t even know exists.

Otherwise, despite an investment of more than $500 million, with another reported $200 million of his personal fortune already committed in ad buys, Mini-Mike came up bupkis in terms of actually winning. Oh, he’ll rack up several dozen delegates once all the votes are finally counted in several states in which his third-place finishes got him above the 15% viability threshold, but that will be small consolation for this very small, hubris-driven man.

Rumors are circulating this morning that some of his teeming masses of senior advisors – none of whom apparently have a clue about what they’re doing to judge by the candidate’s performance – urged him on Monday to drop out of the race in order to avoid the humiliation he – and, let’s be honest, they – suffered last night.

It was good advice, as things turned out. They could see what was coming, even if the candidate could not.

Rumors are also circulating that Bloomberg was under “immense pressure” from party leaders Tuesday night to announce the end of his campaign following his latest disastrous showing. Assuming that is really happening, it is also good advice, because Mini-Mike is dead in the water. He could burn through his entire $60 billion fortune between now and the July convention and probably not win a single state primary.

The reason why is simple: Because the product being advertised does not match the reality of the product, and everyone knows it now. Mike Bloomberg is the Ford Edsel of American politics, and no amount of paid advertising can sell an Edsel.

Joe Biden has had to run his campaign on a shoe-string for the last several months. He spent pretty much no money at all on paid advertising in the majority of states he won on Tuesday, yet he was the big winner of the day. Similarly, in 2016, the Pantsuit Princess spent 3 times as much money on paid advertising as Donald Trump, and still lost because she, like Bloomberg, was a horribly unappealing candidate.

As I noted a few days ago, in fact, Bloomberg’s campaign is a perfect illustration of the very limited returns on investment in paid advertising. Those returns are becoming increasingly limited over time, since younger people under the age of 40 pretty much do not watch any paid advertising at all. What Mini-Mike bought with his half-billion dollar investment was a certain level of name recognition and pretty much nothing beyond that.

The temptation for Bloomberg and his enormous ego will be to keep soldiering on at least through March 17, when Florida – where he has been leading in the polls – is up, along with Illinois and Ohio, where he has also spent gobs of bucks. Hell, he’s already in for $700 million – why not make it an even billion and try to save some face here?

The problem with that reasoning, though, is that all of those Florida polls were taken before Biden’s win in South Carolina, and the huge boost that provided to his campaign. The next round of polls are very likely to show that “Joe-mentum” has carried Biden into the lead in all of those upcoming states.

When that happens, the pressure on Mini-Mike to drop his pretense of a campaign and line up behind Quid Pro Joe, as distasteful as that may seem to him, will become overwhelming.

But regardless of what Mr. Excitement does going forward, he has earned the title of the single biggest flop in modern presidential electoral history, and nobody, at least in this election cycle, can take that away from him.

That is all.

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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Joe Biden and Other Democrats Who Will Not be the 2020 Nominee

Today’s Campaign Update
(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Some of these Democrats just missed their moments. Others never had a moment, and never will. – I’ve already talked about my belief  that Irish Bob O’Rourke missed his moment by dithering around for four months before announcing his candidacy, but let’s talk about two other Democrats who missed their moments by not running in 2016 against the Pantsuit Princess:  Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.

Had she run in the 2016 Democrat primaries, Senator Little Mouth Always Running might have been able to leverage herself in between The Commie and the Fainting Felon as the compromise candidate for the party’s voters. True, it would have been extremely hard overcoming the pernicious influence of the Clinton Machine, which conspired with the DNC to rig the nominating process, but having a third “legitimate” candidate in the race might have made that rigging harder to achieve.

Warren’s false claims of Native American heritage – which she undeniably used to secure a plum spot on the faculty at Harvard – had been revealed long before 2016 and would have become an issue in the nominating process, no question. But by sitting out that race, Warren has given President Donald Trump another two solid years to pound her fraudulent reality as a human being into the public consciousness.

Two years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Warren would immediately become the odd-on favorite to win the 2020 nomination as soon as she announced she was running.  Instead, she has foundered along in single-digits in the preference polls, and most likely will never move any higher because even Democrat voters now consider her to be a walking, always talking ethnic joke.

We’ve seen a similar thing happen to Senator Spartacus from New Jersey. He has long aspired to be seen as the next Barack Obama, and had he done the bold thing that Obama did in 2008 and jumped into the 2016 nominating process despite an incredibly thin record of public service, he might well have been able to legitimately pick up that mantle and seriously challenge the Coughing Crook for the nomination.

Maybe he would have caught fire then like Obama did or maybe he wouldn’t have, but by sitting that one out and waiting another four years, he, like Fauxcahontas, ended up just giving himself another four years to become a walking joke with a self-inflicted nickname. Booker’s problem isn’t that people just don’t know who he really is, like one idiot talking head said the other day, it’s the fact that people hear his name and snicker. He’s done, and might as well go home.

Joe Biden never had a moment and never will. Yes, he’s leading the Democrat polls right now, but let’s all remember that at this point in 2015, Jeb! was strongly leading the GOP polls, and he ended up throwing more than $150 million down a rat hole without winning a single primary or caucus before unceremoniously ending his campaign. The same thing is going to happen to Biden.

This is Biden’s third run at the nomination, and he has three major problems: He’s simply an unattractive candidate, he is a pasty-white man, and he is too damn old to hold the office. I’m sorry – I have nothing against elderly Americans and aspire to become one myself fairly soon – but the office of the presidency is incredibly demanding and Joe Biden is an elderly man. These realities will become more and more apparent to the increasingly-leftist, social-justice-warrior-oriented Democrat voter base in the coming months.

Then there’s New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand – what in the hell is she even doing in this race? That’s the key question she must answer, and she simply has no means of answering it. In a race that already includes liberal senators like Kamala Harris, Spartacus, Fauxcahontas and Amy Klobuchar, why should Democrat voters pick Gillibrand out of that lineup? Gillibrand is currently polling at either 0% or 1%, depending on which poll you look at, and she most likely will never rise more than a point or two above that before getting out of the race.

Meanwhile, she’s humiliating herself with tweets like this one:

My goodness. The scent of desperation literally wafts up from the computer screen.

I’ll have a second post later today detailing the real rising dark horses in this campaign, and their names will definitely surprise you.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

Open post

Trump’s Kill Shot on Beto is Already Yielding Results

Today’s Campaign Update
(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

The shallowest man on the planet. – Over the weekend, Irish Bob O’Rourke compared bureaucrats at the EPA who write climate-related regulations to the thousands of incredibly brave American soldiers who landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. I knew a couple of those men in my younger days, and I’m frankly glad they are no longer around to witness such abject nonsense emerging from the mouth of a candidate for the U.S. presidency.

Absolutely disgraceful.

Irish Bob also had to issue his first apology to the social media outrage mob on Sunday, not something we’d have expected to see from the guy who last fall was the idol of the college campus set. The intrepid Irishman’s sin was … wait for it… oh, you have to wait for this one… GIVING HIS WIFE MOST OF THE CREDIT FOR RAISING THEIR CHILDREN!

I kid you not, the outrage mob decided Irish Bob had to genuflect before them in supplication after he credited his wife Amy with raising their children “sometimes with my help.” This simple expression of gratitude to his wife for taking up the slack during the many times he’s been away from home due to his political career created such a high level of outrage on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that the fidgety ex-congressman felt the need to say the following:

“Not only will I not say that again, but I’ll be more thoughtful going forward in the way that I talk about our marriage,” and “My ham-handed attempt to try to highlight the fact that Amy has the lion’s share of the burden in our family — that she actually works but is the primary parent in our family, especially when I served in Congress, especially when I was on the campaign trail — should have also been a moment for me to acknowledge that that is far too often the case, not just in politics, but just in life in general. I hope as I have been in some instances part of the problem, I can also be part of the solution.”

Breathtaking. You seriously cannot make this stuff up.

But here’s the funniest part of the whole incident:  He said all of that with his normally-flailing arms held rigidly at his sides. Watch this clip:

Once again, a Donald Trump kill shot has had a major impact on one of his opponents. In case you missed it, after Irish Bob had formally announced his campaign in a frenetic, hyperactive speech during which his arms were flailing all over the damn place, President Trump gave the speech this hilarious review during a White House press availability:

“Well, I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never seen so much hand movement. I said, ‘Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?'” Trump said at the White House. “I watched him a little while this morning, during I assume it was some kind of a news conference, and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it.”

Just three days later, Irish Bob’s arms appear to be welded to his sides.

Coincidence? Not hardly. This is classic Trump, doing to O’Rourke what he did to Jeb! “Low Energy” Bush, Little Marco Rubio and “Pocahontas” Warren. Once the President issues one of these kill shots and they get repeated endlessly in social media and the fake news media, it becomes impossible for voters to see these people without having that image in the back of their minds.

Even worse for Trump’s opponents, being the subject of such a kill shot makes them so self-conscious and focused on proving him wrong that they end up doing incredibly stupid things, like Rubio going on a series of ballistic tirades during a debate and “Pocahontas” killing her career with that idiotic DNA test. And now he’s got Irish Bob so focused on keeping his arms and hands still that he appears to be doing an impersonation of a Civil War statue.

This just creates another huge problem for Irish Bob. All of his arm-waving and running around the stage and bobbing and weaving and jumping and skate-boarding and just general flailing about is a big, big part of his appeal where the college set is concerned. These are children who grew up with their eyes constantly welded to their I-Pad or I-Phone in a never-ending quest for an image or short video clip that will give them that next shot of dopamine. They have the attention span of the average squirrel and require constant visual stimulation in order to hold their focus.

To this point, O’Rourke has served as their own political version of YouTube. If he becomes just another rigid talking head and stops giving them their shots of dopamine, all these kids are just going to go back to streaming videos.

One thing’s for sure: Trump has already gotten into Irish Bob’s head, and it is showing.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

Open post

How March 15, 2019 Turned Out to be the Ides of Beto

Today’s Campaign Update
(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Just don’t call it Jeb!II, ‘cuz that looks funny. – Just days after his 2016 campaign’s Super PAC was hit with a huge fine for taking more than $1.3 million in illegal contributions from Chinese interests, Jeb! Bush was on CNN (because of course he was on CNN) saying that someone (hint, hint) ought to challenge President Donald Trump for the GOP nomination in 2020.

Gosh, who would that be, Jeb!? Why, what Republican out there would have the ability to raise something like, oh, I don’t know, $150 million or so from U.S. and Chinese interests to fritter away in a hopeless effort to challenge a hugely-successful sitting President from his own party?

What prominent Republican is so filled with hubris and lacking in anything substantive to do with the rest of his life that he would be willing to take on the mantle of the rapidly-dying #NeverTrump nitwit faction of the GOP in such a Quixotic quest? Even better, what prominent Republican has a last name that every American voter immediately recognizes thanks to a family legacy of ex-Presidents and his having tossed away $150 million in American and Chinese currency during the 2016 nominating battle?

Hey, I know who that guy is – he’s Jeb! And the great thing is, Jeb! could even promise to name Paul Ryan as his running mate, since Ryan’s got nothing better to do right now, either. That worked out so well for Mitt Romney in 2012, after all. Maybe even call him Paul!, because that worked out so well for Jeb!, didn’t it?

“Jeb!Paul!2020!” The bumper stickers practically name themselves!

Ok, that’s too many exclamation points – time to move on.

Dear Irish Bob: Your window of opportunity was January 1. You missed it. – Back in November, I told you all that I fully expected Robert Francis O’Rourke to be the Democrats’ 2020 nominee for the presidency.  Then, in early February, I warned you that the lanky, fidgety Texan had better fish or cut bait pretty quick, because his window of opportunity was closing.

Here’s an excerpt from that piece:

A month ago I’d have made Irish Bob the odds-on favorite to be the 2020 Democrat nominee because he is the absolutely perfect Democrat candidate:  Completely unqualified; no accomplishments in the private sector of our economy of any note; no real accomplishments in government, either, for that matter; willing to say literally anything to attract votes from depraved and demented Democrat base voters; and he looks good on television. Hell, he even has his fake nickname that leads at least half of all Democrat voters to still think he is Hispanic or something, allowing him to tick off that “Minority” box even though he isn’t one, just like Fauxcahontas has made a habit of doing throughout her adult life in order to get ahead.

Today, I’m telling you that my February piece was overly-optimistic, and our hero’s window of opportunity most likely closed way back in January, maybe even December, before any of the other candidates got into the race.

There was plenty of reason in late November to believe O’Rourke could become the Democrat nominee. Yeah, he’d just lost his senate race to Ted Cruz, but he had made it pretty close thanks to a 3-to-1 spending advantage, and today’s Democrats are all about the moral victory, just fascinated with political losers. He was clearly the favorite of all the young girls in the news media and many of the young men as well, all of whom longed to get the plum assignment of covering his campaign.

He truly had everything going for him, all the political momentum in the world, and then…he decided to take a few months off. He said he had to go “find myself”, and spent weeks wandering around who knows where, live-streaming dental visits, doing interviews with an ever-willing Oprah and “60 Minutes” crew and apparently raising a clinically depressed black Labrador retriever.

December came and went. January came and went. February came and went and then half of March, until there were 11 Democrat candidates in the race, but still no precious Beto for all the local TV news anchors to swoon over. Simply put, by the time Irish Bob finally got around to formally announcing he was going to run, a huge portion of his potential support base that was firmly behind him in late 2018 had already moved on.

Even more devastating for the de facto favored candidate of the news media, many of his potential suitors had grown tired of being stood up for the date, and had even grown bitter. Even worse than that, some of them had even figured out the essence of his schtick, as evidenced by the headline of the piece published yesterday by the very liberal New Republic: “The Profound Emptiness of Beto O’Rourke.”  Ouch.

The leftwing media pushback wasn’t limited to the New Republic – far from it. The lunatics who run Slate beat them to the punch by two full days with an anti-Beto diatribe headlined “Beto 2020 Has No Reason to Exist.” Yikes.

By Friday, the growing awareness in the fake news media of Irish Bob’s essential emptiness as a human being and similarly-growing awareness by the Social Justice Warriors among the Democrat voter base that this guy with the Hispanic-sounding nickname is really just another pasty-faced white guy had the hacks at Politico using the dreaded “B” word:  “Not One Woman Got That Kind of Coverage: Beto Backlash Begins.” Hooboy.

Indeed, the backlash momentum had become so severe by week’s end that not even the news-fakers at CNN could resist getting in on the act:

 

Other leftist media organizations had become so bitter by Irish Bob’s months of dithering that they even assigned reporters to do some actual, real reporting on his dark personal background. That led to this report from Reuters making its way into publication on Friday:

Backstory: How Reuters uncovered Beto O’Rourke’s teenage hacking days – Reuters reporter Joseph Menn exclusively revealed on Friday that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke belonged to one of the best-known groups of computer hackers as a teenager.

Oh, my.

This was not how it was all supposed to go for our precious Beto, not how it was supposed to go at all.

The fact that Friday was March 15, aka the Ides of March, had many speculating that Gestapo Chief, er, “Special Counsel” Robert Mueller would use the Caesarian symbolism of that date to issue his final report. Well, the long knives of the American Left were certainly out on Friday, but they weren’t coming for President Trump, they were coming for Irish Bob.

March 15, 2019 should forever be remembered as the Ides of Beto, the day it became obvious that the guy who couldn’t win Texas despite an enormous money edge and the entire national news media serving as his campaign’s propaganda operation won’t be able to compete on a national stage, either.

It turns out that window closed way back in January.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

 

Open post

Here’s Why the Democrats and their Media Propaganda Complex Are Panicked

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Democrats in Action!  – It is now no longer enough for Democrats and their spokespeople pretending to be journalists at our nation’s news outlets to simply fake the news on this fabricated border issue, now they must cry or otherwise become irrational while doing so.

Thus, on Tuesday we had the spectacle of Rep. Elijah Cummings pretending to breakdown crying as he screamed through his irrelevant opening statement at the House Judiciary Committee’s FBI corruption hearing, MSNBC fake host Rachel Maddow pretending to cry (without visible tears, of course) as she read a story about how HHS employees are placing the youngest children in separate centers designed to provide special care (because obviously, liberals oppose young children receiving special attention and care), and some bald-headed freak literally screaming through his entire 5 minute segment on Fox News’s “The Story” With Martha MaCallum. [Note:  I switched over to a baseball game after that, but I’m told Geraldo Rivera also went into a similar meltdown on the Sean Hannity program, along with panelists all over CNN and MSNBC.]

To top that off, you had the spectacle of some Democrat congressional staffer shouting “F*ck you!” at President Donald Trump as he walked through the halls of the U.S. capitol building, and a group of leftist agitators violently forcing Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen to leave a restaurant where she was dining last night.

Obviously, the Democrat/media complex has some polling or focus grouping information that indicates that screaming and crying helps gin up public outrage on this subject.  Never mind the damage their idiotic histrionics do to our society, utterly destroying what little is left of civil discourse, they couldn’t care less.  These are truly desperate times for these people, and that desperation is playing out on all of our television screens each day and night.

The most scary part of all of this is that they will only become more desperate as November 6 approaches.  And make no mistake:  If these people obtain polling data or focus group results that indicate outright violence and rioting might knock the President’s public approval ratings down a couple of points, they will get a bunch of money from George Soros and pay a bunch of professional agitators to stage violent demonstrations and riots.  If you think I’m wrong about that, you just haven’t been paying enough attention lately.

So, why are the Democrats, their media benefactors and their radical social action support groups so desperate, you ask?  Well, isn’t it obvious?  Let’s go through a bullet list:

  • They spent 8 long years utterly corrupting every institution of our society, often engaging in criminal activity in the process.  They got away with it because 98% of the national news media helped them cover it up;
  • They assumed – were absolutely certain – that all of that would be swept under the rug and they would be able to continue corrupting our institutions and destroying our Republic for another 8 years when Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2016;
  • And win Hillary would, because most every senior official in the Obama Administration – including Obama his own self – and a hardworking, dedicated cabal of loyal leftist FBI and DOJ officials were going to fix the damn election.  Yay, them!;
  • But, well, Hillary lost.  When that eventual outcome began to become crystal clear at about 9:00 ET on Election Night, they could see their whole world come crashing down around them;
  • It would have been one thing had the Pantsuit Princess lost to some establishment apparatchick like Jeb! Bush or John “Didja know my father was a postman?” Kasich – they would have been fine in that event because another Bush or a Kasich would have just gone about being kinder and gentler and helping them sweep all their crimes under that gigantic swamp rug and nobody out here in Flyover Country would have been any the wiser;
  • But no, the Fainting Felon didn’t lose to just anyone – she lost to Donald Freakin’ Trump, the one Republican out of 17 initial candidates who would actually come into the office and go about exposing their crimes, firing the perps, and ultimately prosecuting them;
  • So, utter, complete and total panic set in, and the American left lost what little collective mind it had left.  Violent demonstrations organized by groups funded by Soros and a handful of leftwing foundations began popping up all over the country, featuring a bunch of black-robed mask-wearing thugs that called themselves “Antifa”;
  • Members of the Clinton Campaign – including the Coughing Crook herself – immediately began promoting their “Russia Collusion” fantasy as the reason for their utter failure, and a well-coordinated fake news media campaign cranked up in support;
  • Meanwhile, the FBI/DOJ cabal and senior Obama officials transitioned their failed effort to fix the election into an effort frame Trump officials like General Mike Flynn for crimes they did not commit, and to entrap the incoming POTUS himself into committing some act that a special counsel might be able to dummy up into an obstruction of justice charge;
  • The Democrat/fake media complex also embarked on a withering, never-ending campaign to impugn the President’s character in a desperate effort to drive his public approval ratings down into the 20s in the hopes he would resign or, barring that, be impeached as he lost the support of congressional Republicans;
  • But the President did not resign, and his average poll ratings never fell below 40.  Instead, he went about reversing almost the entire Obama 8 years of policy, creating a massive renaissance of the U.S. economy, destroyed ISIS in about 5 minutes – infuriating all Obama loyalists and John McCain – and initiating a de-nuclearization process with North Korea that may well win him a Nobel Peace Prize that he couldn’t care less about;
  • Still, the Democrat/fake media complex carried on.  As recently as 7 months ago, the Democrats and their propaganda team were walking around in a state of glee as congressional preference polls showed their team with a big lead, leading to the narrative that the 2018 mid-term elections would bring about a great “Blue Wave” that would sweep Democrat majorities into both houses of congress, giving them control of the congressional committees that have been revealing so much of their wrongdoing.  It wasn’t too late to sweep everything under the rug – who would be able to stop them?;
  • But now the polls have turned sour for them.  President Trump is now at his all-time high standing in even several of the fake leftwing polls, and their edge in the congressional preference polling has all but disappeared;
  • They had to create a new issue, and the best they could land on is to portray President Trump and anyone who supports him as “Nazis” for basically enforcing immigration laws that have been on the books for decades.

This issue won’t work for them either, because the average American isn’t quite as stupid as Democrats and fake journalists always assume they are.  In the meantime, the last two days of testimony by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and the ongoing revelations surrounding it show them that the IG’s report on the FBI’s fake investigation into the Clinton email scandal wasn’t an end game, but the start of a process that will ultimately expose the entirety of their Obama-era scheming.

These people now realize they are aboard the political version of the HMS Titanic, and the first Horowitz report was just the tip of a vast iceberg that is floating inexorably in their direction.

Of course they’re panicked.  You would be too.

Just another day in it’s all going to come out in the end America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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