Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, October 25, 2024

Mushy Ground Game

 Josh Marshall has been assiduously tracking stories about GOP GOTV efforts. He wrote about it yesterday and noted how shambolic and inefficient it seems to be. No sooner had he posted this, he finds a Times article credulously relaying Musk's GOTV operation. Basically, there does seem to be a metric ton of money being spent by Musk to elect Trump and other Republicans. What there does not seem to be is any real door-knocking or phone-banking. Or if it is, it's very much sub-rosa. 

I remember a few years back having a discussion with a student about Musk. I was incredulous that a guy who owns a company that makes such shit cars and has sunk so much money into odd projects like SpaceX that can't possibly be remunerative could be the richest man in the world. So much of Musk's fortune is venture capitalists seeing that he is the "future" and want to get on board with him early for when he becomes the next Ford or Edison.

A lot of his money does come from government contracts and now we have evidence that he's been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin. I'm so old, I can remember his quixotic quest to free those kids stranded in the cave in Thailand. We also have his absurd purchase of Twitter. In other words, we have a guy with a reputation for genius, who really isn't one. How can jeopardize your government contracts by being in contact with America's preeminent geopolitical foe? How many dipshit ideas like the Boring Company has he sunk his money into? He's absolutely trashed Twitter. 

Twitter might actually be the lens through which to see the GOTV operation. Musk came in and fired all the people who knew how to make Twitter work. He fired those who disagreed with him, surrounding himself with sycophants. Sycophancy is not a recipe for a robust operation in the long run. 

Could people be ripping him off with his GOTV operation? Could they be squandering money on weird "disruptive" ideas that won't work? (Early Teslas famously had no cup holders.)

Regardless, among the many reasons to hope for a Harris victory would be to sideline this fraud masquerading as the future

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