And after having already lost a primary to some guy no one had ever heard of, too. You'd think she would have learned something from that.
And speaking of "some guy no one had ever heard of", it really is amazing how rarely a presidential candidate is someone everyone is already familiar with, isn't it? Former vice presidents running for office, like H.W. and Gore and Biden, are about as famous as they get, and even then people aren't entirely sure what they spent the last four to eight years of their lives actually doing. Generally, I don't consider that a bad thing. The race for president should not be a name-recognition contest. Sure, there have been movies about a celebrity with no political experience running for office, and almost always winning, but that's just movies, right?
I'd argue the only reason it had never happened before in real life is that no one had ever been crazy enough to try. Let's face it, if you're successful enough to win an election on fame alone, you're probably at a point where being President is a step down more than anything; even Trump gave the impression that he had only run for the attention and was disappointed to have to spend the next four years of his life being a politician. But he had spent the last few years of his life as a quasi-political figure, lashing out at Obama and spreading rumors that he wasn't a native-born American and all that. He wasn't just the most A-list famous person to ever run for President; he was also the closest thing to a popular political pundit running for President. Remember when people tried to get Stephen Colbert to run for office? Remember when Al Franken did run for the Senate, won, and held office for multiple terms before finally getting outed as a sex pest and tossed out?
Trump was running against like a dozen people in the primary, but the only one with any sort of name recognition was Jeb Bush, and well... as Bloom County's rundown of the primary put it, "Try saying 'President Fiorina' five times fast. Try saying 'President Bush' at any speed."
It wasn't a fair fight at all.
Last edited:
