The Circuit: Campaign Diversity, Baby Bundles, and DILF Debates
Staff diversity reports, spilled drinks, a Family Bill of Rights, immigration plans, and 9,428-word profiles on Beto driving a van. This is the Hotline Bling & Pyramid Scheme edition.
I’m Chris Thomas. Welcome to Issue 5 of Rubber Chicken Circuit, the weekly election newsletter from Study Hall. Read more about us, subscribe here, and forward us to your friends!
Headliners
KAMALA HARRIS: Doing diversity right with her campaign staff.
It’s one thing to have the most historically diverse crop of candidates in history (pay no attention to the indistinguishable slices of Wonder Bread that tipped the race towards white men please). It’s another achievement to have the diversity extend to the people putting in the grunt work on the campaign trail. And no other candidate is bringing more diversity to their staff than the California Senator.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Harris leads the pack for diversity in race and ethnicity with a senior staff that’s 33.33% white, 33.33% Hispanic/Latino, 26.67% black, and 6.67% Asian/Pacific Islander. Sidenote, but according to this, Donald Trump employs fewer white people than Kirsten Gillibrand. Girl, what the hell is going on in your campaign? Along gender lines, Harris has the third most diverse staff with 66.67% women and 33.33% men — with Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro besting her for gender diversity, and Pete Buttigieg falling dead-last with a 65.22% male staff.
This isn’t Harris’ first staffing diversity rodeo. Back in 2017, as other Congressional Democrats came under fire for a lack of staff diversity, Harris pointed out to Politico that two-thirds of her staff positions were held by people of color, including a majority of the senior positions.
BERNIE SANDERS: A “Bernie is rich” takedown forgets how jobs work.
If you hadn’t heard by now, Bernie Sanders is a millionaire. Shocking, right? It like totally doesn’t vibe with his socialist message so he is definitely Not To Be Trusted. That’s the message that the media seems inclined to stick to and yesterday, the narrative reached a new low with a brain-melting op-ed from libertarian columnist Kristin B. Tate titled: “Millions of taxpayer dollars fueled Bernie Sanders to wealth success.”
His crime? Working in the government (how dare he!) “Sanders rakes in $174,000 every year from serving in the upper chamber Senate,” she says with flames coming out of the sides of her face. “He has earned $2,248,500 in his 12 years there and had earned $2,272,500 from his 16 years in the House, so federal taxpayers have financed his life to the tune of more than $4.5 million.” That is… how a job works.
Hit pieces like this and the Politico report last week charting his rise in net worth don’t really make sense when you consider Sanders has held the same policy positions for decades, including a sustained fight for tax increases on the income bracket he now belongs to. Let’s focus on what really matters when it comes to the Sanders campaign: expediting the ice cream scooping process.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Riding the Chapo Trap Train to the debates.
How did Oprah’s spiritual guru convince 65,000 donors to support her mission to guide America to a "moral and spiritual awakening?” With a little help from the political humor podcast Chapo Trap House and fans of Twitter user @ComfortablySmug. After the podcast spent about half an hour envisioning what a Marianne Williamson presidency would look like (“good vibes”) and implored their listeners to make donations, money rolled in to help, as @ComfortablySmug kindly explained, “put her crazy ass on stage.”
Now, she’s not only hit the 65K donor threshold but caught fire enough to hit the 1% polling threshold. Sure, getting a joke candidate on the debate stage undermines the system, but the system is already broken anyway. We might as well have fun dancing in the flames! Plus, we cannot wait to see the woman who referred to herself as “the bitch for God” in the ‘90s explain that the answer to the Israeli/Palestine conflict “must be on the level of the heart.”
ELIZABETH WARREN: Hotline blinging her way to the top.
“Call me on my cell phone. Late night when you need my vote.” isn’t part of Warren’s campaign messaging, but it should be. The I’ve Got a Plan for That candidate has been calling up random people to discuss her policies. Comedian Ashley Nicole Black received a call from the Senator after asking Warren on Twitter to fix her love life. She’s also made the hotline bling for her supporters, personally calling hundreds of them.
It also seems perfectly timed to what we’ll call the Warrenaissance (not to be confused with the Dernaissance). After slogging through eye-roll-inducing “why isn’t she likable” think pieces, the media has switched into There’s Something About Warren mode. Now, some are starting to realize that Warren might be the perfect person to clean up America — literally and figuratively.
Have feedback or want to slip us a tip? Reply to this or email chris@studyhall.xyz with your scoops and suggestions.
The Pack
JOE BIDEN: Sleepwalking to 2020.
The Amtrak Masseuse may be the Democratic Golden Grandma of the election thus far, but the narrative seems to finally be souring. Sure, his poll numbers remain high, but wherever these supporters are, they’re definitely not at his campaign events — when he decides to have one. While other candidates made cross-country dashes to shake hands and spread their message over the holiday weekend, Biden took a campaign nap and held zero events. If he’s supposed to be the frontrunner, shouldn’t he actually…be in front of people?
TULSI GABBARD: Mimosas with a side of conspiracy theory.
There are many ways to bounce back from a hit piece accusing you of being supported by Putin apologists. Having lunch with a conspiracy theorist who believes Bill Cosby was framed and the massacre in Las Vegas was connected to Harvey Weinstein? Not the best route to go, sis.
PETE BUTTIGIEG: Pink pyramid scheme.
Why compete for small fish donations against 3,452 other candidates when there’s room for a good, old-fashioned neoliberal pyramid scheme? Mayor Pete has a new bundling program to court his rich supporters that includes “mentorship and networking opportunities,” quarterly briefings, and “Speaker Series conversations.” All for the low price of pledging to raise between $25,000 and $250,000. If you’re rich, you too can learn how to be a gay mayor of a small city, with a boring fashion sense and unfortunately named husband.
BETO O’ROURKE: On the Road with nothing to say.
If you thought that we’d suffered through enough novel-length profiles on the Texan “born to be in it,” we have bad news. The New Yorker published a maddeningly overblown 9,428-word opus on 2020’s own Jack Kerouac, as he drove a van across the country, met people. and correctly identified raccoons in the dark. Fascinating.
AMY KLOBUCHAR: Meghan McCain’s new nemesis.
On the campaign trail, the Minnesota Senator told a story about John McCain reciting the names of dictators during Trump’s inauguration speech. Naturally, this sent his daughter into a rage because in her world, only she is allowed to use him as a talking point — and only on the political talk show she got a job with because she’s his daughter.
KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: You get a baby bundle! And you get a baby bundle!
As part of her Family Bill of Rights, the New York Senator would give all new parents a “baby bundle” full of diapers, blankets, onesies, and a mattress to turn the cardboard “baby bundle” box into a nursery bed. It may sound strange but it’s a copy of Finland’s baby boxes — a tradition that’s been around since 1938 and helped make the country’s infant mortality rates plummet.
CORY BOOKER: DILF-in-training?
This video of Cory “I Got a Boo” Booker telling dad jokes will either give you hot DILF vibes or have you calling the police (and your therapist).
The Leftovers
JULIÁN CASTRO: The man with the immigration plan. ANDREW YANG: Listens to The Greatest Showman: Reimagined album for fun. WAYNE MESSAM: “Wayne Messam does not have any financial problems and is a classic American Success Story,” says Wayne Messam. BILL WELD: Trump “would prefer an Aryan nation.” JOHN DELANEY: Wants to fight climate change with carbon-pulling pipelines. JAY INSLEE: Hit the debate's 65,000-donor threshold. JOHN HICKENLOOPER: Not a fan of socialism. MIKE GRAVEL: Still a bad teen performance art project. STEVE BULLOCK: White Guy #80 is apparently “Hollywood’s Dark Horse.” BILL DE BLASIO: A reporter tried to find a de Blasio 2020 supporter (it did not go well). MICHAEL BENNET, SETH MOULTON, TIM RYAN, and ERIC SWALWELL: Four slices of Wonder Bread.
The Trump Check
The Great Conservative Social Media Migration
In addition to causing a laundry list of mental health ailments that we’ll be discussing in therapy for the next decade, Trump’s presidency has also caused us to reassess everything we knew about traditional politics. There is no bigger example of that than on Twitter, where a single tweet from the president has the power to make stocks plummet and raise the threat of war. He uses the 280-character social media network like a diary of a spelling-impaired, emotionally fragile madman (because he is an emotionally fragile madman), but that could change in an instant: Trump’s disdain for Twitter has grown stronger every month as he accuses the platform and others like Facebook of anti-conservative bias.
So what if he left? Where would he go? The answer might actually be right in front of us — and French. An alt-social media app called Parler has gathered a loyal following of conservatives who’ve been kicked off mainstream social media platforms for being right-wing extremists. It’s a small app with about 100,000 users but, according to a new Politico piece, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale is considering setting up an account for the president on the site.
The possible migration to Parler isn’t surprising, especially given one of Trump’s more authoritarian ideas from last year: starting a state-run television network to “show the world the way we really are, GREAT.” That idea, of course, never materialized (it’s redundant, since we already have Fox News). But Parler could become the social media era version of the propaganda network, since its users already sway conservative. But aren’t right-wingers supposed to hate the French?
Still thinking about Cory Booker’s weird dad jokes video? Us too. We’ll see you next week for another serving of Rubber Chicken Circuit.
