NEW: Dean Phillips told The Daily Beast that he doesn't remember receiving a max campaign donation from conservative financier Harlan Crow, but allowed that it was possible he solicited it personally. Me w/@JakeLahut https://t.co/7TTweHRhPR
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) October 27, 2023
It used to be, I would enjoy (for my obviously not-healthy form of enjoyment) posting about CPAC, which is a thing that for me, culminated with this post here about how AFPAC and CPAC were like twinsies, and calcified with the realization that CPAC had gotten freaky as fuck all on its own. This little rightwing shindig is no longer what it was. And that's why instead of blogging about it at all, I'm blogging about Dean Phillips, because his candidacy is weirder, and therefore, more interesting to me.
CPAC just has open Nazis running about, now. Matt Schlapp is a multiply-accused homosexual sex pest. People associated with CPAC just flat out say democracy is dead. It is now what they always played at--fascism for Chiclet heads.
The candidacy of Dean Phillips is also weird, but in a different way: I don't know that Dean Phillips was always an op, but the robocall thing in New Hampshire is serious op energy.
An advisor to the Phillips campaign that formerly worked with the Kanye campaign paid a guy to do an AI Biden ad discouraging voting. No part of that sentence makes sense in any time period but 2024. What would induce any campaign employee to do any such thing? Are they just unaware that Douglass Mackey and Jacob Wohls and Jack Burkman before this all caught cases for voter suppression robocalls, which is indeed illegal?
An advisor who worked with the Ye campaign--the gold standard of not fucked in the head political advice, going by the glowing example of Trevian Kutti? Was able to do this thing, and the Phillips very sweaty and thirsty campaign isn't supposed to know about it?
(I know! "How thirsty are they?" So thirsty, Dean proposed a "unity ticket" with Nikki Haley, who will pass because way to lose all of the GOP base, poser, while he just insults a bunch of Democrats in awesome standing. She understands at least that he is not the popular guy in the reality show contest he thinks he's in.)
I get that the far-right has captured the CPAC folks. GOP candidates are getting worse and are more like culture war mascots all the time. What the fuck is going on with the useless "nobody-asked-for-this" campaign of Dean Phillips, though? I can't think that it doesn't exist for some reason. Maybe it's a knock-off No Labels because No Labels is now a (negative) brand?
Anyway, Phillips's campaign has coordinated with their superPAC and maybe did fraud about petition signatures, and barely brushed back Biden's primary dominance.
Where did this level of high motherfuckery begin? Because that kind of thing is also very damaging to democracy--he's a fake. And while we can tell that today--maybe in the future, various funders can make better fake campaigns that actually do make a dent in our politics,
This is a thing I worry about. When we don't have clear choices between known quantities, but have fake issues like "Biden is old" and fake candidates like, "I stand for whatever gets me national attention."
There are people with money enough to front whole campaigns like it was pocket change. That's another affront to democracy. One less obvious than the fashies of CPAC. But also potentially very damaging.
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