Seven candidates who could save the Democrats in 2020

Is there no one else?

primary
Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton
Share
Text
Text Size
Small
Medium
Large
Line Spacing
Small
Normal
Large

Has there ever been a more cack-handed, sloppy bunch of goons than these Democratic candidates?

Ancient Joe Biden looks like he’s just been defrosted after a few thousand years in a cryochamber, tremulously stirring to a world full of new social norms that baffle him.

Elizabeth Warren pretends she’s a Native American and poor Bernie Sanders’s rusty old ticker could blow any minute now.

Beto O’Rourke’s chilling rhetoric on everything from guns to religion makes Vladimir Lenin look like Isaiah Berlin. Cory Booker is a 50-year old adult man who proudly attends comic book conventions.

Tulsi Gabbard might be…

Has there ever been a more cack-handed, sloppy bunch of goons than these Democratic candidates?

Ancient Joe Biden looks like he’s just been defrosted after a few thousand years in a cryochamber, tremulously stirring to a world full of new social norms that baffle him.

Elizabeth Warren pretends she’s a Native American and poor Bernie Sanders’s rusty old ticker could blow any minute now.

Beto O’Rourke’s chilling rhetoric on everything from guns to religion makes Vladimir Lenin look like Isaiah Berlin. Cory Booker is a 50-year old adult man who proudly attends comic book conventions.

Tulsi Gabbard might be a Russian sleeper bot; Julián Castro’s ideas are so thin you could poke a hair through them; Mayor Pete Buttigieg is only popular with Rhodes Scholars, and most of them live in England.

According to The New York Times, Democratic donors who survey this bleak vista are beginning to panic. The doomsday clock ticks towards four more years of Donald. Where is the candidate to comprehensively dynamite Trumpism once and for all? Where is the man or the woman or the Clinton riding in on a white horse to save the party?

Well, in a spirit of truly generous bipartisanship, here are a few potential candidates for our restless donor class to consider.

Michelle Obama

michelle obama 2020
Michelle Obama

How the liberal heart aches for the Obama years. How they yearn to return to that glittering era when a failed novelist ran the Empire and Citigroup picked the cabinet. How they swoon when they recall two terms of Vanity Fair puff piece glamour; all that soaringly ineffective rhetoric that sent half the country and much of the world to sleep. Yes, the Obamas barely put a foot wrong. No wonder Michelle Obama would become the overnight favorite for the nomination if she sashayed into the race. The Obamas make liberals feel good about themselves, even good about America. How the prim, corporate Michelle with her slender sense of humor would fare if she rode her high horse out of the paddock towards the rougher, swampier terrain that Trump dwells in is another question.

Mark Zuckerberg

mark zuckerberg 2020
Mark Zuckerberg

Those lidless eyes drained of life like an empty swimming pool. That Augustinian haircut. The milky skin that never horripilates. Candidate Mark Zuckerberg would represent less of a pitch for the big job than a window into a near-future machine age. A time when a powerful AI in its uncanny human wetsuit will lovingly prune the affairs of men, asking that all we feed it in return is our data…President Zuck is still somehow less creepy than Beto though.

Harvey Weinstein

harvey weinstein 2020
Harvey Weinstein

Think of the merchandise for a Harvey 2020 campaign! Weinstein 2020 bathrobes! Weinstein 2020 massage oil! Imagine the fear that a President Weinstein would put into America’s enemies. A jittery Taliban delegation is summoned to Camp David, worriedly fingering the edges of their clerically black robes, nervously eyeing up each potted plant, each doorway, in terror of President Weinstein scuttling into the conference room in flagrante delicto, begging for a back rub. Weinstein arguably has more impeccable liberal credentials and connections than most of the actual candidates. Plus: has he really done much worse than Bill Clinton? <

Jon Stewart

jon stewart 2020
Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is funny, smart and not even that much of an arsehole for a celebrity, qualities that probably disqualify him as a presidential candidate. Stewart, blade-sharp even without a writer’s room stuffed with pot-vaping Ivy League grads behind him, would tear through this primary field. His relentless support for the 9/11 responders fund showcases his ability to connect with people and his canny political skills, perfectly geared towards a media landscape overgrown with viral video takedowns. Celebrity works, and Stewart could be the blue Trump.

Hillary (again)

hillary clinton 2020
Hillary Clinton

Say every continent on Earth were permanently maimed after an all-out nuclear conflagration between the great powers. Every city is ruthlessly wiped away. The seas have boiled away to slime. Triple-faced mutants gambol across blasted wastelands. Birds fall from the sky, choked with radioactive dust. In this hellish, warped tundra you could expect three things to remain: there would be cockroaches; somehow there would be an open, fully-functioning Irish pub; Hillary Clinton would be running for president, again.

Lincoln Chafee

lincoln chafee
Lincoln Chafee

Could 2020 finally be the year that America feels the Chafee? With his flagship policies of returning the nation to the metric system and an end to endlessly strafing the Middle-East with bombs, Chafee would be a beacon of reason in this field. Plus, he’s younger than Biden, Sanders, Warren and Trump, at a sprightly 66 years of age.

Literally any Kennedy

joe kennedy 2020
Sure, here’s one

Is America ready for another Kennedy in the White House? Probably not, but that’s never stopped them trying in the past. Thanks to the clan’s remarkable fecundity there is almost always a Kennedy on the bench somewhere, ready to serve, ready to heave that heavy family jaw into the waiting cameras. And wouldn’t it make sense — wouldn’t it somehow be fitting — if our own era of Sixties style tumult and fanaticism were crowned by another doomed Kennedy boy marching into the crosshairs of national and familial destiny?