• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

We still have time to mess this up!

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Not all heroes wear capes.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Mobile Menu

  • Winnable House Races
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • Balloon Juice 2023 Pet Calendar (coming soon)
  • COVID-19 Coronavirus
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • War in Ukraine
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • 2021-22 Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Politicans / Marco Polo Rubio 2016

Marco Polo Rubio 2016

Throwback Wednesday: Rubio, Rue-Bye-Oh…

by Anne Laurie|  March 23, 20166:28 pm| 149 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity

welp @nycsouthpaw pic.twitter.com/oyUkYi2hQV

— darth!™ (@darth) March 17, 2016

Because it’s never too late for dissecting the opposition. Michael Grunwald, who wrote that cover story (but not, he stresses, the original REPUBLICAN SAVIOR tag line), defends himself in Politico:

In February 2013, Senator Marco Rubio let me sit in on the politics course he taught part time at Florida International University. He knew I was writing a cover story about him for Time magazine, but he still gave his students a master class in self-promotion in my presence, explaining the machinations he had used to persuade his colleagues to elect him speaker of the Florida House of Representatives: “You raise money for them. You befriend them. You make sure your kids are friends with their kids. And then you cut the best deal you can.” He also candidly described how partisan redistricting had driven him and his caucus toward ideological extremes: “If you know the only way to lose your seat is to get out-conservatived in a primary, you’ll never let anyone get to your right.”…

… I thought Rubio made so much sense for the GOP in 2016; he was the quintessential modern Republican. He stood for almost everything Mitt Romney stood for—massive tax cuts, muscular foreign policy, social conservatism—but while Romney, a former Massachusetts moderate, spoke Republican as a second language, Rubio was fluent. The one issue where he strayed from orthodoxy was immigration, but the Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” after Romney’s defeat had urged the party to moderate its views on immigration to attract more Hispanics to the party. And what better messenger than a telegenic young Cuban-American with a beautiful family and an inspiring personal story, the son of a bartender and a maid with an amazing rap about the American Dream?…

Ultimately, though, Republican voters didn’t want a conservative version of Obama, another fresh-faced minority first-term senator who gave a great speech. They wanted an anti-Obama, a bombastic billionaire who wasn’t a politician, wasn’t no-drama, wasn’t interested in public policy, wasn’t going to improve Republican outreach to minorities, and definitely wasn’t a law professor or a community organizer. They didn’t want a new rock star with broad appeal. They wanted a rock thrower who reflected their anger…

I will miss Marco Rubio most of all for saying the smartest thing in this campaign: "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing."

— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 16, 2016

Jeb Lund, in Rolling Stone, on the “Death of a Mannequin”:

…Better things were supposed to be in store for Marco Rubio. The people paid to tell you that couldn’t stop telling you.

He was young and good-looking and told inspiring stories that made the hairs stand on the backs of the necks of people who can be inspired by American conservatism. He stood a generation apart from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and he could deliver a new way forward, for the American people. He was the one candidate that the Beltway chattering classes knew the Democratic establishment most feared, and some Democrats agreed with them. He could make his voice warble when saying “America” emphatically…

The fatal streak running through the Rubio narrative was the same one that runs through so many conservative candidates. For someone bound by blood to the cult of the self-made entrepreneur as the only non-cop/soldier of any value as a citizen, Rubio merely spent two awkward belches in the private sector amid a career built on taxpayer dollars, donor largesse and patronage. He was a career politician and glad-hander calling out government cronyism with a sense of self-awareness so broken that he couldn’t weather the barest standards of his own ideology…

show full post on front page

What the Rubio campaign needed everyone to forget was that — to anyone who doesn’t live off political news, to anyone not inured to the blocked toilet that is Florida politics — Marco Rubio sounded like either a moron or a crook.

All that might have been enough to overlook if there had been any ideas behind Rubiomentum. But Rubio was a Reagan Republican in the same way that all other Republicans are Reagan Republicans: 95 percent of what he believes hasn’t been updated since 1981. As to the remaining five percent, any time something new came out of his mouth, half the journalists covering him wanted to run around to the side of the stage to catch a glimpse of the puppeteer from the Heritage Foundation with an arm shoulder-deep up his ass…

His announcement that his campaign was over could not have been more fitting for what his campaign represented: A passionate delivery of an old idea everyone had already memorized, delivered instead as news. A few people listening had red eyes, as some internal mechanism in Rubio yanked down a lever to the Emotionally Uplifting Twaddle setting.

“I ask the American people: Do not give in to the fear. Do not give in to the frustration,” he said. “We can disagree about public policy, we can disagree about it vibrantly, passionately. But we are a hopeful people, and we have every right to be hopeful.”…

It was a masterpiece of bullshit, combining the Rubio experience’s two true and constant outcomes: a text any follower could have reasonably assembled from the greatest hits, and one whose philosophical aspirations were invalidated by the person voicing them. Rubio’s rhetoric never tried to soar higher than when it was being undermined by everything else he campaigned on…

I love campaigns that are so disloyal that the Post Mortem is fully written an hour after the concession https://t.co/4tZZXHFA9Q

— Wyeth Ruthven (@wyethwire) March 16, 2016

From the Politico article:

… Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended.

That’s exactly what happened in 2016; it just turned out Rubio wasn’t the one transcending…

…[W]hile other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn’t need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn’t need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner. All they needed was Marco.

Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first…

The campaign spared no expense in setting up events to be television-friendly. There were invariably press risers, tidy backdrops and television lighting to portray Rubio, quite literally, in the best imaginable light.

But one of the things Sullivan seemed least interested in was field offices. The campaign would force volunteers and supporters to pay for their own yard signs, posters and bumper stickers…

It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.

“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”

“Marco is convinced, and perhaps rightly so, that he has the skills to convince anyone,” said Dan Gelber, who served for eight years in the Florida Legislature with Rubio, including two as the Democratic counterpart when Rubio was GOP speaker. “He really believes that if you give him an audience, he can turn them to his way of thinking.”…

Marco Rubio has until May 6th to change his mind about running for Senate reelection. In this environment would anyone be shocked if he did?

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) March 17, 2016

Jonathan Chait, in NYMag — “The End of Marco Rubio’s Campaign Is a Dodged Bullet for America”:

… Rubio could only go so far because only Trump has found a way to break all the norms of American politics at no political cost to himself. Rubio ran a different strategy not for moral reasons but because he thought it would work. His plan was to fashion himself as the frontman for the Republican donor class. Rubio’s proposition to party insiders was that he could spare them from any serious reconsideration of party dogma — except, perhaps, on immigration reform, the one issue where Republican moneymen were happy to move to the center anyway. In place of substantive moderation, Rubio would use his modest upbringing and winning personality (and Rubio truly is likable) to sell old Republican wine in a new bottle. Rubio’s insider strategy conveyed many benefits on his campaign. He raised plenty of money, and overwhelmingly outspent Trump in Florida and elsewhere. Republican insiders showered him with understanding, supplying friendly spin to the media that allowed Rubio to portray a long series of defeats as proto-victories.

It was not only calculation, though, that shaped Rubio’s candidacy. His life has been defined by a fascination with wealth, bordering on worship. Rubio once told a roomful of rich businessmen that the inspiration for his politics came from driving around as a young boy and gawking at the homes of the rich. As a young politician he read Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s paean to the superiority of the rich, twice. He attached himself to wealthy patrons and moved between politics and lobbying throughout his career, seamlessly blending public service with moneymaking.

His willingness to eloquently champion the interests of the donor class enabled Rubio’s rapid ascent and defined his governing philosophy. In Florida, he proposed cutting property taxes, which fall on landowners, and replacing the revenue with higher sales taxes, which fall most heavily on the poor. His domestic agenda was defined by a tax cut twice the size of the one George W. Bush enacted. Like Bush, Rubio’s tax cut tacked on some small-change tax credits for low-income families, but the bulk of the money went to the top, with 40 percent of the cost of his plan accruing to the richest one percent. He wanted to deregulate the financial industry and eliminate Obamacare — which he repeatedly voted to eliminate without the necessity of a replacement. He refused to accept the legitimacy of climate science, even as his home city is literally disappearing slowly beneath his feet. One of the very few areas where Rubio claimed to stake out untraditional ground was in higher education — but even here, his policy turned out to be deregulating for-profit colleges, one of the shadiest of which had generously funded him…

Rubio’s conservative admirers bitterly observed that liberals mocked him because they deemed him a potent nominee. This was not wrong. Despite his inability to out-Trump Trump, who has captured his party’s id, Rubio has maintained high levels of favorability with moderate voters, especially Latinos. His substantive extremism would have proven a liability in a general-election campaign, but it was entirely plausible to believe that Rubio could have smuggled his right-wing policies past the electorate by running on cheerful slogans and a winning smile. The potential to do so is why Rubio may well find himself atop his party’s ticket in a future election. In the meantime, his failure is a bullet dodged.

rubio used cars morin

(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
.

Throwback Wednesday: Rubio, Rue-Bye-Oh…Post + Comments (149)

Monday Evening Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  March 7, 20165:15 pm| 239 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!, Assholes, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

CITIZEN: (at front door, peering at sackful of rats) Why did you bring me…this? pic.twitter.com/SwYGVfoGDM

— Big Sexy Jeb! Lund (@Mobute) March 7, 2016

my guy you can't even take it to people who *do* vote Republican pic.twitter.com/bMtOA12kBm

— brendan (@deep_beige) March 7, 2016

I laughed, because I am inadequately sensitive to the very real struggles of the rat-friendly community. Also:

That Republican insiders thought they could mold Marco Rubio into "our Obama" only proves how much they never stopped underestimating Obama.

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) March 7, 2016

Apart from base japes, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Monday Evening Open ThreadPost + Comments (239)

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Delicious!

by Anne Laurie|  March 2, 20165:58 am| 270 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Hail to the Hairpiece, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!, Assholes

GOP operatives considering urging Ben Carson to quit the prez race and run for Marco Rubio's Senate seat, per CNN's Dana Bash.

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) March 2, 2016

Finally something Democrats and Republicans can agree on https://t.co/NPwAPN5Mng

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 2, 2016

I swear, this election is turning into a Donald Westlake novel. Dancing Aztecs, perhaps, with the Oval Office instead of a solid-gold statuette as the macguffin…

gop trump blame circle toles

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
.

***********
Apart from schadenfreude hangovers, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Delicious!Post + Comments (270)

Open Thread: Repubs Revert to Their Time-Honored Traditions…

by Anne Laurie|  February 22, 20167:00 pm| 156 Comments

This post is in: Cruz-ifiction, Election 2016, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Assholes

Cruz may not win the presidency, but he'll surely win the dirtiest campaign in modern history award. pic.twitter.com/dJnuqGifWJ

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) February 22, 2016

… Low-rent ratfvcking and Talibangelical Bible-humping. I first saw the story in the Washington Post last night:

… The 21-second video offered an exchange unthinkable for a candidate trying to court evangelical voters as he seeks to consolidate support among the Republican establishment: Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) dismissing the Bible.

In the video, Rubio confidently strolls into a hotel lobby past Rafael Cruz — the father of rival Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — and a man identified as a Cruz staffer reading a book. But not just any book: the Good one…

But it was soon revealed that the video was incorrectly subtitled. The actual exchange:

Rubio: “Got a good book there,” Rubio said to the staffer.

Staffer: “Yes, sir.”

Rubio: “All the answers are in there. Especially in that one.”…

"Even if it was true, we are not going to question the faith of another candidate," Cruz told reporters re: the Rubio story.

— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) February 22, 2016

Full details at the link, including video and the original source for same — a pro-Cruz college newspaper. (So at least the original ‘reporters’ have the excuse of being too young to know any better.)

If we’re going to talk about the Media Village Idiots’ all-important “Narratives”, the one coalescing around #Failgunner Ted is, shall we say, unflattering to the aura of a Christian Conservative…

Just in — @marcorubio campaign responds to @tedcruz asking for Rick Tyler's resignation: pic.twitter.com/GVGidNBSmE

— Patrick Svitek (@PatrickSvitek) February 22, 2016

Good news for You-Know-Who, of course…

The reason that Ted Cruz lost the Evangelicals in S.C. is because he is a world class LIAR, and Evangelicals do not like liars!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2016

And popcorn futures! Munch, munch…

have we tried turning this election off and on again

— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) February 22, 2016

Open Thread: Repubs Revert to Their Time-Honored Traditions…Post + Comments (156)

Little Marco, Sharing His Elders’ Behind-Closed-Doors Ugliness

by Anne Laurie|  February 8, 20168:57 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Fables Of The Reconstruction, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

rubio is gop trainable ohman

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
.

Marco Rubio is a young (-enough-for-Repub-purposes) man in a hurry. His youth was supposed to be his big selling point — a shiny new face, not like that old Hillary harridan! Only problem with fresh-faced youngsters, even the quick studies, is that sometimes they repeat nasty stuff the Wise Old Heads would’ve preferred to keep a little more private. His much-mocked talking point was not just the result of a callow lad missing his mark after cramming for the Big Test — it was a code phrase for the Far Right fringes. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, reporting for Esquire:

… Now, it is a sad truth that, while traveling with a campaign, you will hear a candidate say the same thing three or four times a day in three or four different cornfields. But I have been to the rodeo more than once and I can tell you that I never have seen a candidate say the same thing three times within five minutes. The transcript doesn’t really do it justice, but it should be preserved for posterity nonetheless. The next time they put him up on the stage, Rubio’s handlers are going to have to nail his shoes to the floor lest he waft up into the rafters.

The general hilarity has tended to obscure what Rubio actually was saying. (And saying, and saying, and saying…) He was accusing the president of monumental and deliberate acts of subversion in office. This is a stunning charge, especially from a one-term pipsqueak whose memory banks jam whenever he steps an inch beyond his actual depth. There already was some evidence mounting here that Rubio’s momentum coming out of his glorious third-place finish in Iowa had dissipated somewhat. His numbers rose at first, but now they seem to have stalled out. And the way to regain that momentum is certainly not to embody perfectly the caricature that your rivals have created out of you. This should be his defining moment. If it isn’t, then the entire political world owes apologies to both Howard Dean and Edmund Muskie…

I suspect donor class has been reluctant to get behind Rubio for fear he's too callow. Tonight will confirm their fears.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 7, 2016

Today, Paul Waldman at the Washington Post:

… [T]o understand what Rubio was trying to communicate, you have to see it on two levels. On the surface, Rubio’s claim about Obama is a defense of his own youth and limited résumé. Some Republicans have said of Rubio that he’s too inexperienced to be president, just like Barack Obama was. So Rubio can counter that argument by saying that despite his short time in prior office Obama has actually been a brutally effective president, skillfully carrying out his nefarious schemes, and therefore experience isn’t all that important. But the real message goes deeper, into the dark heart of the conspiracy theories and twisted loathing of Obama that has persisted on the right for the last seven years…

Just to be clear, when a Republican talks about “the rest of the world,” he doesn’t mean it in a good way. So when Rubio says Obama “wants America to become more like the rest of the world,” he’s saying that Obama is trying to harm America, to bring it down, to weaken it, to punish it, to make it less than it has been and should be.

show full post on front page

Let’s pause before we proceed to acknowledge how positively insane this idea is. The fact that it has been espoused by untold numbers of supposedly mainstream conservatives in recent years makes it no less so. It’s one thing to say that your political opponents are wrong, that their plans will fail, that they are unconcerned about problems that you believe demand immediate action, or even that their values are misguided. But it’s quite another to think that they are intentionally seeking the destruction of the country. Yet that is just what Rubio argues….

Dave Weigel, at the Washington Post:

…[T]he idea of Obama as a saboteur, who “knows exactly” how to undermine American greatness, is deeply ingrained on the right… This should be familiar to anyone in the tea party movement, and especially familiar to anyone who’s read the Obama-era work of Dinesh D’Souza. Starting with a 2009 cover story in Forbes, D’Souza posited that the president was “the last anticolonial,” a man inculcated with anti-Western values, whose decisions were best understood if one asked how they weakened America.

“Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America,” D’Souza wrote. “In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.”

Over the next few years, D’Souza adapted that thesis into a book and movie. He found common cause with Glenn Beck, who in his Fox News heyday portrayed every Obama decision as part of a long-term left-wing strategy to destroy wealth and empower the Third World. Beck obsessed over a stock phrase from Obama’s 2008 stump speech — that he would help “fundamentally transform America” — and insisted that he had given the game away…

Ed Kilgore at NYMag, expanding on that thesis:

… This is precisely the 2008 stump speech that a host of Twitter critics confronted me with Saturday night when I suggested Rubio was blowing a dog whistle to conspiracy theorists.

If Weigel and I (and the folks at Media Matters, and probably other commentators) are onto something, then why would Rubio choose to get in touch with his inner Glenn Beck in “moderate” New Hampshire? Well, for one thing, there is a vein of tea-party sentiment in the Granite State, even if Christian-right types are a bit thin on the ground. And for another thing, Rubio is undoubtedly looking ahead to a long string of contests in much more conservative states that begin on February 20 in Nevada and South Carolina. And finally, the whole essence of a “dog whistle” is to say something that the initiated understand at a lizard-brain level as a profound message without other people being offended — a particularly useful device to a candidate like Rubio who is trying to straddle ideological lines in the GOP. To “moderates” and to media observers innocent of the Beck/D’Souza meme (which Dr. Ben Carson has also alluded to), the question of whether Obama is incompetent or just wrong may seem like a less-filling/tastes-great distinction. So there’s nothing to lose by waving a secret freak flag to the citizens of Wingnuttia — unless you wave it one time too many and Chris Christie points and laughs.

Easy enough to laugh, like Jon Chait, that “Marco Rubio’s Debate Spinners [Are] Doing the World’s Hardest Job.” Just the fact that so many of the Wingnut Wurlitzer’s best-paid shills are singing Rubio’s praises should make a sane Democrat suspicious!

It’s something of a consolation to know that Jeb Bush and his superpac(s), if they can’t get Bush III elected, intend to at least destroy Young Marco’s hopes of doing so… this time around. But Rubio’s more than young enough to run again, and by 2020/24/28, he may be experienced enough to blow his dog whistles a little less clumsily.

Little Marco, Sharing His Elders’ Behind-Closed-Doors UglinessPost + Comments (70)

Some More Marco Robotio Fun…

by Tom Levenson|  February 8, 20166:44 pm| 225 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads

…noting that the last/next laugh may be his tomorrow.

Hugh Atkins forwarded news of his latest video styling — and I think you’ll enjoy it:

 

 

There really just isn’t any there, there, beyond an acknowledged gift for delivering memorized lines with some appearance of carbon-based sentience.

 

I’d say this was yet more thread…

Some More Marco Robotio Fun…Post + Comments (225)

Open Thread: Bread for the Clown Circuses

by Anne Laurie|  February 7, 20162:06 pm| 169 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2016, Marco Polo Rubio 2016, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?

Rubio on Obama: he divides us against each other on purpose. When he became president he decided to put 51% against 49% to win re-election

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) February 7, 2016

It's like a veil has been lifted and suddenly everybody realizes Rubio's been reciting dumb talking points all along https://t.co/1JEQlHQKfi

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) February 7, 2016

And just when all the money people were set for a nice evening of entertainment, per the Washington Post:

CHARLESTON, S.C. — About 1 a.m., long after the GOP presidential contenders had finally filed off the stage of the North Charleston Coliseum, the Republican National Committee’s post-debate party was still going strong.

Top party donors jammed into the ballroom of an upscale hotel in the city’s historic downtown, milling around a long buffet table piled with pulled-pork sandwiches, baby shrimp, macaroni and cheese, and ice cream sundaes. They buzzed about the sharp jousting between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, caught up on campaign gossip, and made plans to see one another at one of the upcoming forums in Iowa, New Hampshire or Florida.

The outsize spectacle of this primary season’s Republican debates has made the events hot-ticket items for wealthy donors, who are flocking to them as if they were political bowl games…

Major fundraisers and top contributors fly in on private jets and gather in hotel suites before start time, marveling over the latest twists in the race. Once inside the venue, they snap selfies in front of the stage. They anxiously root for their favored candidates, swapping text messages with friends as the jabs fly back and forth.

“It’s the same thing as going to a football game,” said Foster Friess, the Wyoming-based financial investor who was among the heavy hitters in the audience for Thursday night’s debate in Charleston. “If you’re in the crowd, you can hear the cheers, unfiltered by microphones. The chemistry is so much more exciting.”…

For New York venture capitalist Ken Abramowitz, who has made contributions to multiple candidates, the appeal is less the main event and more the private gatherings afterward, where he tries to offer some feedback to the White House hopefuls.

“I like to give them a word of advice if they said something during the debate I thought was wrong,” said Abramowitz, who said he managed to buttonhole former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee at receptions after the first debate in August in Cleveland. “I will point that out to them — not in a critical manner, but a friendly manner, to help them.”…

Just in case you thought the candidates weren’t suffering, imagine you much fun it must be to take advice from these party animals…

Apart from munching on popcorn, what’s on the agenda for the afternoon?

Open Thread: Bread for the Clown CircusesPost + Comments (169)

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Comments

  • Subsole on The Funniest Thing About All of This (Mar 30, 2023 @ 11:01pm)
  • Geminid on War for Ukraine Day 400: Russia Takes a Hostage (Mar 30, 2023 @ 11:01pm)
  • Chetan Murthy on War for Ukraine Day 400: Russia Takes a Hostage (Mar 30, 2023 @ 11:00pm)
  • Trivia Man on The Funniest Thing About All of This (Mar 30, 2023 @ 11:00pm)
  • Subsole on The Funniest Thing About All of This (Mar 30, 2023 @ 10:59pm)

Balloon Juice Meetups!

All Meetups
Seattle Meetup coming up on April 4!

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Fundraising 2023-24

Wis*Dems Supreme Court + SD-8

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
We All Need A Little Kindness
Classified Documents: A Primer
State & Local Elections Discussion

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Mailing List Signup
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)

Twitter / Spoutible

Balloon Juice (Spoutible)
WaterGirl (Spoutible)
TaMara (Spoutible)
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
TaMara
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
ActualCitizensUnited

Join the Fight!

Join the Fight Signup Form
All Join the Fight Posts

Balloon Juice Events

5/14  The Apocalypse
5/20  Home Away from Home
5/29  We’re Back, Baby
7/21  Merging!

Balloon Juice for Ukraine

Donate

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2023 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc