Campaign 2024: Officially Chaos

 

MATT TAIBBI:

 Campaign 2024: Officially Chaos.

At this stage of the cycle three elections ago, on August 1, 2011, President Barack Obama signed a controversial debt deal and headed back on the trail, starting with a pair of birthday fundraisers in Chicago. Meanwhile, Michelle Bachmann left the stump in Iowa to return to Washington and vote against Obama’s deal, saying it “spends too much and doesn’t cut enough.” This was considered campaign excitement once. Boring is too mild a word for those mechanized non-dramas of yore.

A dozen years later, the campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven’t experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded. Forget the national debt; there are now not-improbable scenarios in which the main issues in next year’s debates, which could easily involve both nominees in ankle monitors, are nuclear fallout and alien visitation. Our leaders, who once had the election process reduced to scripts more predictable than Everybody Loves Raymond, now seem to have no clue what will happen beyond the next few minutes.

If not for the fact that the disintegration of American society might be imminent as a result, I’d be laughing harder. It might be funny anyway. Consider: the establishment plan for the Republican Party this cycle was clearly Ron DeSantis, but a New York Times/Siena poll published yesterday shows he’s plunging like a stone, falling to 17%, a.k.a. 37 points behind Donald Trump. . . .

The cognoscenti never figured out or accepted that the support for protest candidates like Trump or Bernie Sanders even is rooted in wide generalized rage directed their way. To this day they don’t accept it. They keep thinking they can wish it away, describe it away (see Bump’s description of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as “not at this point serious competition”), indict it away. If you drop 76 charges on a candidate and he goes up in polls, you might want to consider that you might be part of the problem. But they can’t take even that heavy a hint.

They’re emotionally incapable of accepting the truth that they’re awful.

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