Phony Betomania Has Bitten the Dust

Remember Beto O'Rourke?  Of course you don't.  

The Texas wunderkind who almost defeated Ted Cruz for a Senate seat started with a bang in his run for the Presidency and has already ended with a whimper.  He's not out of the race yet, but he might as well be. O'Rourke has been working hard trying to listen to what people want and need but he still hasn't formulated any concrete answers or responses to the feedback he's been getting. With the novelty of a winner of a Bobby Kennedy lookalike contest having worn off, he's now in sixth place in the polls, behind Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as well as Pete Buttigieg.  And I don't think any of those candidates can win.  So how does that make O'Rourke look?

It gets worse.  O'Rourke has already had a staff shakeup in his campaign, indicating that he has no sense of direction (as if his wandering around the Southwest hadn't already made that clear), and his tax returns showed that he underpaid two years in a row because he apparently isn't good at math.  And if that weren't bad enough, O'Rourke, who recently got the endorsement of Dave Brock - not the conservative who shifted to Democratic centrism and endorsed Hillary Clinton for President in 2016, the leader of the British progressive rock band Hawkwind - undistinguished himself at the She the People convention of female minority voters when asked why such voters should consider a pale male like himself.  There are probably several reasons for women of color to vote for O'Rourke, just as I'm sure there are reasons why a sista who grew up listening to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Let's Get It On would like Yes' Fragile or Close To the Edge (or anything from Hawkwind, for that matter), but O'Rourke couldn't think of one.

It's a good thing no one asked him about Yes.

I know that it probably would have been a bad idea for Martin O'Malley to run for President in 2020, when he likely would have had fewer supporters than Democratic primary opponents, but endorsing O'Rourke has proven to be a bigger mistake by O'Malley than a second presidential run would have been.  I reluctantly joined an O'Rourke Facebook group, but I have since quit for obvious reasons, and I also quit a Pete Buttigieg group when I decided that he isn't going anywhere either.  (And I unsubscribed from e-mails from Cory Booker's campaign, which I don't even recall signing up for.)  The truth is, as I iterated before, that since I am an independent living in a closed-primary state that votes too late in the primary process to matter and since I do not see among any of the 2,020 Democratic presidential candidates (no typo, I think that's the actual number of candidates!) that would make me want to register as a Democrat again, I am not supporting anyone for the Democratic presidential nomination.  However, I will vote for the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2020 general election - even if (ha ha ha) it's O'Rourke.  (But not if it's Marianne Williamson.)  In the meantime, I still plan to dissect and skewer the declared candidates on this blog.  I've picked apart ten Democratic candidates so far (plus Howard Schultz), and I'm not about to stop now. 

"But, Steve,"  you say, "you have to vote for one of these people next November.  You shouldn't pick them apart!"  No, Democratic primary voters shouldn't pick them apart, though they still do, and seeing as I am both a cynic and a political independent, that's my job.  But, having said that, I do concede that any of these candidates, pathetic though they may be, are preferable to Trump.

Anyone know where those Hawkwind records went?