Rep. Dean Phillips To Win Democratic Nomination On Platform Of He's A Brain, An Athlete, A Basket Case, A Princess And A Criminal
Rep. Dean Phillips To Win Democratic Nomination On Platform Of He's A Brain, An Athlete, A Basket Case, A Princess And A Criminal
It's apparently Gen X's moment to shine, in his brain.
What with all the bourbon we’ve been pouring into our egg nog, we had completely forgotten about Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and his quixotic attempt to challenge Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.
Now that we remember that Phillips exists, we would like to offer hearty congratulations to whatever social media consultant is grifting what we hope is a yuuuuge chunk of his $124-million fortune to produce such gems as this tweet (yes, fuck you, Elon, it’s still a tweet):
Oh yeah, break out the War Tour t-shirts!
Boy, this could work for so much early-’80s Gen X nostalgia if Phillips feels like tapping into it. Imagine waking up with a president who remembers that Van Halen had another lead singer before Sammy Hagar! Imagine waking up with a president who saw Big Trouble in Little China in a theater! Imagine waking up with a president who spent high school getting stoned and yelling “Where’s the beef” at girls in the hallway!
Who the hell is running the Phillips campaign, anyway? Oh, it was Steve Schmidt? And now it’s Jeff Weaver and Andrew Yang’s former campaign manager because Schmidt left to lead a super PAC focused on raising money to advertise for Phillips in some of the early primary states?
Well, it’s a living and as the old Zen koan says, there’s one born every minute.
Personally, yr Wonkette doesn’t give two shits if the next president listened to early U2 or lived through the generational trauma of ridding the world of black-and-white TVs. We Gen Xers recall when Bill Clinton rode to the presidency on a wave of Boomer nostalgia, and you know what? That wasn’t so great, what with the cringy sax-playing appearances on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and the “Finally a presidential candidate who fucks” vibe we got from all the media swooning.
And we certainly didn’t care about all the goddamn times everyone got to get together and sing Fleetwood Mac’s worst songs, though if it helps Dean Phillips, we promise we’ll get together with our friends and sing “Tainted Love” to celebrate if he wins the nomination.
Maybe someone told Phillips he needed the youth vote and he forgot that the minimum voting age is younger than 40.
We are reminded of the famous Kurt Vonnegut quote that “true terror is to wake up one morning and realize that your high school class is running the country.” (More specifically, Doktor Zoom was reminded of it.) Then we remembered that Marjorie Taylor Greene graduated high school the same year we did so maybe our class is already running the country, and we said “Pfffft, whatever.”
Seriously, we’ve been staring at the above tweet for like an hour asking, “Who does the Dean Phillips campaign imagine this is for?” People who vaguely remember when their family got its first VCR? The all-important Fans of Molly Ringwald demographic?
Phillips’ major reason for running, as he has said more than once, is that Joe Biden is old. So how is reminding Gen X that it too is aging to the point where watching early MTV on a color television feels like the height of rose-colored nostalgia going to help? Hey look, you’re all still youthful and vigorous and you remember all the lyrics to “Call Me!”
Dean Phillips must be a huge dork, but if you’re Steve Schmidt, the checks aren’t likely to bounce, so go for it, we guess. Somehow we’re really not concerned about any of the “Carter-Kennedy in 1980” comparisons.
[Twitter]
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I assume you were not hoping that your grandmother would fall. I do not feel the same way about this clown.
Do you suppose this guy has any faint notion that young people do not think that he is young?