He spoke to Chris Matthews on Hardball this evening or today…it always is hard to tell with backdrops these days. I would also like to add that Chris Mathews is something of a stalled writer and a hibernating Machiavellian, both evident in his book, Hardball, which currently has a rating of #259,664.
That means he gets a few sales a week, not a lot to live on, but better than some of my books. You can also check out his book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, though I think you might get more laughs from this movie, and save yourself some time:
I just like to point those things out, because I don’t feel the Chris Matthews show does that enough. But then I haven’t really watched it much since around 2000, and does it really matter?
I guess it does if you’re surfing the net on a Monday and thinking about politics and decrying the fact that we have such lackluster reporting and such narrow editorial viewpoints.
And that’s why we need to go to the video.
A lot of people in Montana don’t like Keystone. I think it’s pretty unavoidable, but I also think about that train wreck around East Missoula last week, and what would happen if a lot of oil was there and it all blew up.
After that Matthews went off on a rant for about a minute and then we got to a question (3:10) he asks what the Democratic message for the people is.
This is a problem, because Tester himself has admitted he’s not much of a message man. Tester made it a point to say we’re always in crisis management form, meaning we’re always reacting against the shit the GOP is throwing at us, or at least all these disparate issues that pop up.
Ebola, ISIS…how the hell do you combat the negativity in the press that comes up when those issues rear their ugly head? It sure is tough to talk about the good issues, but Tester made it a point that we should have.
We’re learning, and I think we really need to get more direction from Obama. But what good is that? We’re really just waiting on that Great White Hope, whichever candidate will stand up first and get the whole shit house on the road.
Jon Tester has to manage that 2016 election circus on the Senate end. I don’t know who leads it for the House, but various campaign managers will be leading it nationally until the early months of 2016 when the candidates begin bowing out, around February and into March.
You’ll have these dipshit campaign managers – invariably men, with narrow, regional viewpoints and accents and dialects and every answer in the book for what ails the country (let’s just call them snake oil salesmen) – and eventually the convention will narrow it down to one.
He’ll set the 2016 Democratic agenda, because you know the candidate often can’t do it, and they sure the hell can’t do it alone.
So that’s what we’re waiting on, when you hear that fancy phrase “2016 Democratic Message.” It means some crackpot scheme cooked up by one of our regional good old boys.
Continuing with the Matthews interview, at one point (4:10) the host asked how the terrible trend is turned around, and Tester laid out a few points:
- We have good candidates;
- We have good people around them;
- We have a unique approach for each race.
Sounds like a pretty good strategy. So how does it work? I guess the state party organizations begin vetting candidates and maybe even busing some in. Who knows. I figure I’ve got my hands full with Montana right now and the 2015 Legislature that’s about to kick-off.