TKO Creations

I apologize ahead of time for the incoming rant.  It’s not meant to be some sort of manifesto or statement, but the venting of a very tired and frustrated man.

Hopefully, this will torch any dreams of getting me to run for political office.

It happens roughly every 2-4 years, but someone (sometimes from both major parties) gets the idea to ask me about running for political office.  The difference in this particular election cycle… I genuinely entertained it.

But as I sit here in a Zoom meeting listening to experts and consultants trying to give their advice to all the prospects entertaining running, it becomes increasingly clear to me that politics and political office could never be my domain without significant changes, changes that are not likely to ever happen in my lifetime.

To begin, I am not a salesman.  Anyone who has seen me trying to sell my books knows that.  Unfortunately, a massive part of the current political environment is about selling yourself to donors and to specific people.  Then it involves being a general annoyance calling people or visiting them at their homes unsolicited.

I simply can’t do it, and unfortunately, it’s a necessary and essential part of getting into office.  You need to be a door-to-door salesperson before you can be a politician.

How many out there actually like door-to-door salespeople?  But perhaps it is necessary because of the second problem, and one that is definitely a “me” problem.

See, any political campaign I were to be a part of would have to reckon with my publicly stated contempt for the “Average American Voter.”  I think the “Average American Voter” is, to be entirely blunt, an amoral, dithering idiot, and I am not willing to handwave it away by blaming our media or influencers or social media or whatever.

I’m going to dial back the clock to a memory of my early life, as I was waiting for a parent/teacher conference with my mother and father (one of the few times my father actually went to one of those meetings).  Anyway, my parents strike up a fascinating discussion with another family waiting, one that involved them angrily talking about that “uppity [insert racial slur that starts with an ‘n’ and ends with a hard ‘r’ here] taking all their money and giving it to the other [repeat racial slur here].”

Now, you may think, “Well, of course!  Fox News poisoned the well for Obama in 2008, and those anxious voters were merely repeating those talking points!”

Which might be true… if I wasn’t talking about Rev. Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984, which predates Rush Limbaugh’s prominence and Fox News by about a decade.

See, I know better.  Fox News didn’t make us this way.  Leftist cranks on YouTube didn’t make us this way.  Twitter or TikTok influencers didn’t make us this way.  We have always been this way; the only thing our media did was realize that the money wasn’t in telling us what we needed to hear.  The money was in telling us what we wanted to hear.

At least, for the politically invested.  The rest of us never wanted to know how anything works, don’t want to know how anything works, and frankly never will want to know how anything works.  Even better, we will get righteously angry at anyone who tries to tell that it’s kinda important to at least have a rudimentary understanding of how things work.

That is the “Average American Voter;” an incurious dolt that either by inability or unwillingness, has barely any clue what they are voting for except for the “vibes” they get, which often have no attachment to reality.  Damn near every single one of us in that “average” class has constructed an absolutely nonsense world where shadowy secret cabals are warping society to self-serving ends… while the people actually warping society work in broad daylight to the cheers of the masses that would rather blame Jews, or Muslims, or trans people, or centrists, or communists, or lizard people, or [insert whatever conspiracy you wish here].

I… simply can’t play to that.  I don’t have the temperament or the patience.

So how would I want to run a campaign?  You mean… the way that will never work?  Simply put, it would be a completely low-pressure campaign.  I wouldn’t robo-call, I wouldn’t go door to door.  I’d have weekly “town halls” if you will in whatever place would want to host me.  It would all start years in advance, not months, building the trust in the citizens so that I wouldn’t need to robo-call or knock on doors, interrupting people’s family time or dinner or whatever.  It wouldn’t be tied to any party, at least not initially. 

The goal wouldn’t be appealing to any partisanship initially, it would be finding out what was important to the people, learning and teaching how to go about changing it, and then once I knew what the people wanted, had their trust as a good faith actor, then I’d appeal to a party that best fit those desires meshed with what I’d be willing to pursue.

It would never work because that’s not what people want.  We want this mess of a reality show that we’ve had since the turn of the century, and I’m tired of listening to the griping of people pretending they don’t.

This entry was posted on February 28, 2026 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Grumblings with tags mental health, news, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.