Tonight CNN airs a very special infomercial for two exciting, long-in-development products: Hillary Clinton™ and Bernie Sanders™. Both toys come with lifelike rhetoric sounds, include cutting-edge revenue-generation technology, and feature real chopping action.
But wait, there’s more: tonight they’ll be showing off their accessories! Their accessories are named Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee, and Martin O’Malley, and you can collect all three. But why would you want to?
Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of these folks — their national presence has never exactly been dazzling. Here’s how to tell them apart: Lincoln Chafee is the outgoing governor of Rhode Island and kind of looks like someone tried to draw Alan Alda on a lightbulb. Jim Webb is a former Virginia Senator and resembles the old-age makeup in Back to the Future. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is the hot one, but politics-hot, so calm down.
Aside from that, you don’t really need to know too much more about them, since none will be in the race for much longer. They just need to grin their way through a debate or two, then it’s back to their oddly specific private-sector lives: horse racing (Lincoln Chafee), teaching literature (Jim Webb), and playing in a rock band (Martin O’Malley).
How can I be so confident that they don’t have a shot? Well, because all three candidates are outstripped in the polls by a formidable opponent: Other. These three guys are polling around 1%, while Other gets 2.5%.
They’re also not particularly excited about running for president, maybe because they’re doing it as a favor to someone. Chafee, for example, has had no public appearances for about a week. Jim Webb notoriously avoids reporters at every opportunity.
And yet they could still have a beneficial impact on the election, if in no other way than by presenting the Democratic Party as vastly more organized than the clown-car Republicans. On most issues, the five Democrats running for office have a unified ideology: they agree on abortion, on marriage equality, on environmental issues, and on eliminating obstacles to voter registration.
But there are a few differences between them: Jim Webb is the only one who’s intensely pro-gun, so that issue may come up at the debate. If it does, the other candidates will likely use it as an opportunity to show off their stance on gun control, so in that respect Jim Webb will serve as a helpful scapegoat.
Another difference: Martin O’Malley is the only one who believes — wrongly — that pot is a gateway drug. It will be interesting to see if the candidates want to talk about this issue, since the elderly audience for political debates may be more sympathetic to O’Malley’s position than to legalization. But they may be less inclined to care for O’Malley in general, since he’s so young: just 52 years old, a decade younger than his closest competitor, Lincoln Chafee.
But whatever, who cares. Tonight has nothing to do with expressing a position, discussing issues, and furthering political discourse — it’s about proving to investors that the Democratic party’s flagship properties have market appeal. It’s basically an Apple keynote, except that the products are obsolete before they even launch.
