Elect Me If You Can

October 27, 2017 12:22 PM

A husband and wife are running for Senate. Against each other.
They also might not be married? Or who they say they are? And nobody in their small town seems to know them? But they have a plan for a “whole new financial system.”
Meet the Deans.
posted by Grandysaur (17 comments total)

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
posted by OrangeDisk at 12:41 PM on October 27, 2017 [12 favorites]

I'm getting tired of politics as reality show. It shouldn't be this difficult to evaluate potential candidates for office. There should be no dramedy hook for election campaigns. No twists. No AKAs or pseudonyms or weird relationships between candidates running against each other. Backstory bios should not read like Scarlett O'Hara's schemes to get money from Rhett Butler. ("During the financial crisis in 2008, she used the remaining curtains in her house along with the scrap fabric to start a fashion business.") I reject all of this. I hope Montanans (Montananites?) and the DSCC do, too.
posted by xyzzy at 12:45 PM on October 27, 2017 [22 favorites]

Campaign as performance art didn’t work out so well in 2016. Just sayin’.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 12:51 PM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

This is certainly the best way to cover con artists if you want them to win. Just repeat their patter wholesale! Repeat their claims about an entirely new financial system without ever once questioning it! Let’s take a look at the new cute power couple ready to con middle America! We’ll balance out their puff statements with elected officials equally unsourced put downs! It’s establishment versus the new kids!


My next local election is Nov 7th. When it (at this point seemingly inevitably) goes south I really don’t know how I’m going to maintain any hope for American democracy or the poisonous, self-righteous scum bags who cover it for the “news”. Why would any candidate bother putting out a platform beyond platitudes at this point? Just promise that you alone can fix it and the news media will helpfully reprint your promise again and again alongside pointed attacks from lobbyists of your opposing candidate’s actual campaign platform.
posted by cyphill at 12:53 PM on October 27, 2017 [10 favorites]

A) Grifters.
B) Lunatics
C) Anti-Government militia/sovcits/theocrats
D) Russian/Russian-backed agents
E) All of the above.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:54 PM on October 27, 2017 [16 favorites]

Yeah, they are clearly A, possibly B, why not C and D. Oh, fuckit, just go with E.

I mean, could you be any more shady?
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:22 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

I mean, could you be any more shady?
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:22 PM

Eponyronic.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 1:25 PM on October 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

I mean I think they are low key enough to not have any ties to Russia or the Koch brothers, so yeah, they could be more shady.
posted by Grandysaur at 1:25 PM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yeah, they're probably just a couple of local fruit loops, but they're obviously running as spoiler candidates, so who knows who's funding their campaigns?
posted by octobersurprise at 1:36 PM on October 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

I was amused enough that I almost shared this. But then I decided not to signal boost for them. Enough with the novelty candidates. Enough.
posted by elizilla at 1:49 PM on October 27, 2017 [11 favorites]

They're not necessarily spoiler candidates - it might just be a direct money grab. They may have looked at the president's campaign tactics and said, "oh hey we could do that! Only, in both directions!"

It looks like she's got a long history of "send me money and I will send you happy thoughts" and he's got a history of, "I can't explain what I do, but it's very important - give me money."

If they can produce some documents that indicate they're actually married, they may be able to pull this one off. (Not get elected; I have no opinion on whether they could do that. But get party backing, milk the donation sources for personal cash, and so on.) If they're not married, I think that's going to block them. It looks like their history is public enough for someone to show that anything other than a confidential marriage (CA has them; I'm sure other states do as well) isn't possible, and that'd bring up a lot of sharp questions.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:57 PM on October 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

I have a little pet theory about journalism and the increased amount of creduility in journalists nowadays. The incredulous ones - the skeptics and the complete thinkers and such - wash out before journalism school because they read up and think deeply about the decline of journalism as a career and the marginal existences of most journalists. So the unskeptical and gullible remain, but just as a selection effect, crowding out the passionate and skeptical. It's not very complimentary about journalism in America but the open-eyed journalism professors I've talked to are not too sanguine about that sort of thing either.
posted by hleehowon at 3:49 PM on October 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

Montanans just love people coming from other states and telling them how to do things better. It's a local favorite.

I really like Tester I hope he can keep his seat.
posted by Duffington at 3:56 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

What we need to be doing now is trying to articulate to future generations as clearly as possible how it was that the American Empire fell. I mean, living through it I kinda get it, but trying to explain it to an outsider — oh gawd. “See, there were these people called Baby Boomers who believed everything anyone told them...and then there was this Internet that made anything any crazy person said make sense and spread...and some people figured out how to exploit...but they didn’t understand or care about the abuse of power they’d discovered...and everyone who understood what was going on tried to say something...but by then the Baby Boomers knew they were being fooled by the internet and ....”

Honestly, the only thing to be gained at this point is to try and have it over on everyone else. Beyond that, we should all be trying to figure out how to live sustainably off grid and maybe save a few Shakespeare plays in the process.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:15 PM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't know - I thought the tone of this article was pretty clearly unflattering. "Several of the answers offered by the Deans are like coins in the deep end of a swimming pool, vaguely recognizable but not reachable."
posted by queensissy at 8:23 PM on October 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

What we need to be doing now is trying to articulate to future generations as clearly as possible how it was that the American Empire fell.

There are life-cycles to empires, and it looks like we're hitting the catabolic collapse stage, after a society seeks to deal with shortages by expanding until it runs into a hard resource limit (like the end of land to take over), and has to cope with both maintenance needs and the problems of not growing anymore.

So, like running up credit cards to pay debts - eventually, you run out of credit, AND the debts are still due, AND your lifestyle was built in having a lot of available money that's not around anymore. Or, like tech debt for a company: building new stuff instead of fixing the original code works until it doesn't, and then you have both a swarm of bad code to fix and no easy routes for income while you're getting caught up.

American society didn't collapse (or, isn't on the verge of collapsing) because of the Boomers; that part's the symptom, the specific manifestation of the problems. It's collapsing because we have the Myth of Progress built into both government and economic structures, and we are running into hard limits.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:49 PM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Welp, that was an amazing amount of crazeballs. Multiple names, child labor camp, a "famous" dad she won't name and nobody's tracked down yet, shady businesses, HIPPIE businesses (in Montana, will that fly?)....

Yeah, everything is a shitty reality show these days. I wish certain idiots would just stick to making a TV show.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:36 AM on October 28, 2017