Ready for the Fall campaign
Are you a Gaelic football fan who is interested in American politics, but doesn’t want to listen to a 90-minute New Yorker podcast in order to sound hip at the watercooler? Here’s a breakdown of the contenders as Super 8 teams (and Galway)...
The Incumbent
Wait — this is in no way likening Dublin’s dominance with the current president’s war on all things democratic and decent.
The only room for comparison is the flagrant want of the fair-minded public for change at the top. Just as Trump’s almost daily nefarious outbursts have started to bore more than shock, so too Dublin’s rather routine demolitions of every team they meet. The danger with both is, if the opposition doesn’t somehow get their shit miraculously together, we all could be looking at four more years.
The Challengers
A no-brainer. Biden’s people hail from Knockmore, the most Mayo of parish clubs where the pitch is church.
Viewed by many as the best one-off challenger, despite miles on the clock and a proclivity for personal space violations (see Lee Keegan versus everybody), Biden is recently showing his age. For the past eight years, Biden and Mayo have been the people’s champion; the blue-collar everyman who represented the underdog. That shtick has worn a little thin the last few months with people tiring of the force-fed “look how sound I am!” rhetoric when policy and performance are all that matters.
Biden has Hunter, a loose cannon of a son, that may derail his campaign. He is the equivalent of the talented, troublesome ‘’brother at home who’s better”, the most Mayo affliction ever.
Warren is a career politician, and crucially a great debater, which means, like Kerry, she will win new fans and friends for her attacking style. She’s not short on policy either, which suggests for the first time in a while, there’s a plan for not just getting into office, but for what she’ll do when there.
Warren has possibly overplayed a tenuous link to a possible Cherokee heritage. It’s has been her “yerra, we’ll tog out and see what happens” bullshit moment.
Harris has grafted her way into the reckoning when many saw her too much an outsider.
Her platform is much more aligned with the passion of grassroots, and anybody who’s spent a day in the company of a Donegal GAA person would attest it differs from almost everywhere else in the country in that regard. She is born to Jamaican and Tamil Indian parents. Like Donegal, nothing about her is typical, and it is that which is most admirable.
The very things that make her different (conscientious, empathetic, a woman, a person of colour) may be the very thing that makes her unelectable. Oh, and she has no Ryan McHugh on her campaign team.
Bernie, like Micky Harte, has achieved phenomenal things in his four decades in politics. His championing of the less well-off and his refusal to take the soup have seen him become a far less desirable candidate for Big Business as they realise a victory for him would lead to uncomfortable times for them.
Like Tyrone, he was viewed as one of the games great innovators, but time has made him weary, and if he just plays it the same way, it will end in similar inglorious fashion.
Too extreme for some.
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Nobody quite knew what Mayor Pete was bringing to the party when he announced his candidacy, and much like Cork, he has performed well enough to suggest this is just a dress rehearsal for a future run at the throne. Not everybody is convinced, he has polled negligible amongst African Americans, which means like Cork, it’ll be over quite soon.
Lots of it. Can stick with the big boys for 60 minutes, liable to leak scores like a sieve thereafter.
Booker is running a campaign along the lines of love, unity, and a revival of civic grace. Which is pretty much how Roscommon played against Dublin. Like the Rossies, Booker looks and sounds good, and could be a force to reckon with in the future.
More like the Rossies, he’s done well to get this far, and may be better suited to a couple of decent years in an open draw-type scenario.
No doubt. His race is run.
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I know what you’re thinking; who the hell is Julian Castro. Well, Julian is Meath. He is young and a little light on his feet — politically speaking — which is a nice parallel for the Royals, who, since their hammering at the hands of the Dubs have acquitted themselves with a degree of respectability that should elicit hope for the future.
Seriously? Imagine a guy named Castro president of today’s version of the USA?
Where do we start? There was the cool name. The Kennedy hair. There was the Vanity Fair profile of the reluctant man who would be king. The lost years roaming the streets of Manhattan, in search of his true self, playing in bands and sleeping on girlfriends’ couches. There was his messiah moment when he pushed Ted Cruz close in the Texas senate race (see Galway’s 2018 league final loss to Dublin). Beto was the collars up, high soloing, new white hope. Now? See below.
The only doubt is whether he will be out of the presidential running in time for lady’s day at Ballybrit.
Yes, Beto is bet-oh.
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