The Paid-Off Political Endorsement Game Drowning in Swamp Muck

Establishment dinosaurs continue to deny openly the reality that stares them in the face as they go about making their lofty personal endorsements. That their strained posings mean absolutely nothing to anybody besides themselves does not seem to register at all. The careerists insist on pretending it is still 1987. But it is post-Trump 2016, and the American people have had it with the entrenched Swamp way of doing business.

As Liberty Nation's Tim Donner explains, a great many folks have a vested interest in turning the clock back to one day before Donald Trump stunned Hillary Clinton and forever shook up industrial life along the Potomac. Endorsement Theater is one way of trying to keep riding a horse that everyone else can see has died.

Games People Play

In January, The New York Times endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) for the Democratic nomination for president, not even bothering to narrow their choice to the one allowed by law to voters. Outside of the mockery the paper was promptly deluged with for the bizarre double-dip, the archaic gesture had no real influence as Iowa voters cast the first ballots of the Dem primary season. No serious political observer thought it would.

Former Vice President Joe Biden entered the race in 2019 expecting his decades-long career in Washington to be all he needed to immediately walk away with the nomination. Anyone paying attention for the last four years knew this would not be so. Yet even as he and his campaign leak oil everywhere after underperforming badly in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden still accrues endorsements from the inner workings of a Dem party machinery that has manifestly proven unable to thrust him to the top of the pack. "Biden wins endorsement of key Nevada lawmaker," read the headline in The Hill on Feb. 14. "The endorsement comes at a crucial time for Biden," the article explained, as a lazy establishment media struck up the old, outdated tune. The story is filed, the charade is performed, yet everybody knows Joe Biden is finished.

After laughably posing as a staunch neutral during his TV correspondent career, former ABC News warhorse Sam Donaldson, 85, has given a "shocking" endorsement of former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg for president. Nobody under the age of 60 gives one whit.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, is apparently using his huge fortune to purchase the endorsements of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus one by one. Political hacks come in all colors. He is still in deep trouble attracting black voters because of his controversial comments on stop-and-frisk policing in the Big Apple during his time as mayor. Will accumulating a bevy of elected officials to declare otherwise significantly change that in today's tumultuous political environment? Things simply are not that neat for politicians anymore. Appropriate insider strategy in 1994 doesn't fly in 2020.

Business Norms and Standards

This kabuki dance of endorsements is the last act of an aristocratic Swamp averting its gaze from the guillotines being sharpened for them. Is it mere naiveté, or are the rulers of an outmoded system whistling past the graveyard, intentionally not facing up to the fact that their old world is over? It seems these long-spoiled pols fail to see that they have been stripped of many of the manipulative powers that used to come with long incumbency. They can't just "deliver" their constituencies to the candidate who best greases their wheels, much like medieval nobles once served up their personal fiefdoms to claimants to the throne. They know it yet deliberately refuse to acknowledge it.

For to do so might mean a whole new job description, and that would be the worst calamity of all. To accept the new anti-Swamp political climate would mean elected officials would have to put the stated interests of the people who voted them into office over the desires of the corporate donors and entrenched special interest groups that lavishly fund them. This explains why the thoroughly intertwined political media play along as well. An entire factory-town industry is at stake here. And so we likely will see more posturing nobodies declaring in the gravest of manners their "after much serious thought" decisions to back Candidate X on the road to the Democrat nomination. The game must be played. Disdainful of reality, the Swamp marches on.

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