Have We Told Dean Phillips Lately To Get Fucked?
He won't rule out being the No Labels candidate. In case you thought he was anything but a spoiler.
If there was any possibility left that Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips might just be a misguided soul who means well — who’s just too bless his fucking heart stupid to understand that you don’t primary incumbents if you want your party to win — he’s officially eliminated it. (Trust us, after he suggested he might be cool with having Elon Musk in his cabinet, we already knew.)
Phillips said this weekend that if this summer it looks like the 2024 election will be between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — and it will — then he wouldn’t mind maybe running for president on the No Labels ticket. Remember, he’s doing this because he thinks Joe Biden is too old, and he, Dean Phillips, who you had never heard of before last year, must swoop in to save us all.
That’s right, if Dean Phillips doesn’t come from out of nowhere to beat Joe Biden in the Democratic primary, he might like to skullfuck Biden from outside the party. Compare that to the No Labels website, which is full of flowery euphemisms about a “unity ticket” because “Americans don’t want a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024” and “think we can do better,” LOL kiss my fucking ass.
Phillips told the New York Times on Saturday that he speaks regularly with the head of No Labels, Nancy Jacobson. (Who is married to Mark Penn, who swears he has nothing to do with his wife’s work.) Have some direct quotes:
“People are criticizing them because they believe whomever they offer on their ticket will hurt Joe Biden,” Mr. Phillips said after a town-hall event at a senior center in Nashua, N.H. “That’s false. If they put someone at the top of the ticket who could actually drive votes from Donald Trump, every Democrat in the United States of America should be celebrating it. They haven’t made that determination.”
As we said, this should foreclose the possibility that Dean Phillips is just too too bless his fucking heart stupid to understand that you don’t primary incumbents if you want your party to win. (It’s really gone well for the incumbent party every time it’s happened in recent history.) Unless he wants us to keep allowing for the possibility he’s that stupid. We could keep allowing for that possibility. It just seems cruel, though.
There is zero reason to be overconfident that some milquetoast conservative Democrat fucking nerd talking about common sense solutions would siphon votes from Donald Trump, and do no damage to Joe Biden. It’s an embarrassing misunderstanding of what the MAGA movement is and why they vote, and the idea that a miracle third party candidate could actually come in and win out of nowhere is shut the fuck up, Presidents Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.
No Labels is, of course, the piece of shit “movement” that’s poised to pop into the 2024 race and hand it to Donald Trump, unless somehow they are correct that what America is really just fucking dying for is a moderate third party that smells of Joe Lieberman. (It is a RICO conspiracy to make fun of No Labels, says No Labels. We really should stop.)
The Times explains that Phillips has known Jacobson for a long time. It says he doesn’t want to talk about being the Lieberman Ex Machina for No Labels “at this time.”
“It would have to be a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch that shows Joe Biden is almost certain to lose,” Mr. Phillips said. “That is the only condition in which I would even entertain a conversation with any alternative.”
Golly, when have polls ever misread the American electorate or failed to understand that we don’t vote for things anymore, we vote against people and parties, at least at this particular moment in American history? When have polls underestimated Democratic performance besides every special election last year and pretty much every special election since 2017 and also the red wave 2022 midterms and and and …
It’s a contest between who hates the other side more and has the numbers who want to show up for that reason. That’s the 2024 election. And while Joe Biden may have beat the living shit out of Trump in 2020 in the popular vote, his margins in Wisconsin, Georgia And Arizona were small enough that if a few votes had been siphoned away — perhaps by a middle-of-the-road common-senser! — it could have handed the Electoral College to two-time popular vote loser Donald Trump again. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that Biden’s margins in those three states were smaller than Trump’s cumulative margins in 2020 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin i.e. the three states that handed Russia the election.
So when Dean Phillips says shit like this:
“Everybody should keep their head and heart and mind open, because why would we shut off possibilities to defeat this horrific danger to democracy?”
… the only thing we can think of to say is get fucked, Dean Phillips.
Oh, we’ve said that before? SAYING IT AGAIN.
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
@evanjosephhurst on Threads!
I have profiles those other places but I think I forgot how to log on.
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Running for office, even when you have no chance in hell, must be very lucrative? And I'm not convinced that it is all because of Citizens United.
I don’t know much about No Labels, but if they are willing to risk Trump 2.0 by splitting the democratic ticket, they are very likely receiving dark money from far-right groups and aren’t a friend of democracy.