Advocacy Consultant
The Rams are moving back to Los Angeles. The Chargers and Raiders want to move to L.A., too. Ron burgundy’s hometown could lose its football team, but might coax the ruffians from Oakland down to the southern end of the state. As the teams play musical chairs, local governments are trying to figure out what they’ll have to pony up for new stadiums.
Got all that? Me neither. Luckily, my old pal Vince Vasquez helps me figure it all out on this week’s Crummy Little Podcast.
Beverly Hallberg was super-nice enough to record this week’s Crummy Little Podcast right after the last GOP debate, and you can see some of her predictions are coming true already. She said people would start dropping off, and there goes Scott Walker.
Walker’s abrupt exit still leaves the Republican field crowded, and the big crowd includes a few well-funded candidates. Past primaries have served as surmountable obstacles for early favorites, providing just enough resistance to make the smart-money candidate break a sweat. This time, there isn’t a favorite, and a good chunk of the party finds the supposed front-runner less than ideal.
That’s a recipe for a brokered convention. If any four of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and John Kasich come into the Republican convention with a hefty amount of delegates. Trump has a plurality, but there’s no majority. How does that play out?
The easiest answer is the non-Trumps dropping out and throwing their support behind a consensus candidate. And if you want to be that consensus candidate, now is the time to drop out.
None of the candidates have lost any votes, yet – their greatest crimes have been poor poll performance. They could credibly blame lackluster fundraising for their exits (“money in politics” is an effective bogeyman). They can hope that their failures of 2015 are forgotten by the summer of 2016. The two who have dropped out so far – Walker and Rick Perry – boasted very successful gubernatorial records.
Could the busy, noisy, crowded field that drowns out the voices of accomplished candidates be the factor that re-opens the door next year?
Well… no. It’s probably more likely to be a House of Cards story arc than a real-life convention drama. But if there was a cycle where something this bizarre could happen, 2016 might be it.
Since it’s the 30th anniversary of the premiere of The Golden Girls, this week’s Crummy Little Podcast is devoted to the sitcom. The guest is Dave Swindle, West Coast Editor for Liberty Island.
Canada is having an election. It takes our neighbors to the north just 78 days for their election cycle, and they are just now ramping up halfway through it. Luckily, Robin Speer joined the podcast this week to help me figure out what’s going on.
Seventy-eight days! Seriously. American media will spend the next 78 days talking about Trump, and even then we’ll be months away from any meaningful votes.
In college, I had a friend named Asif. Everyone knew him. So many people knew him that “Hey, do you know Asif?” became a conversation starter. In fact, five years after I got to D.C., playing softball with the local UMass Alumni group, I still ran into people who knew Asif.
Patti Simpson, this week’s guest on the Crummy Little Podcast, is the Asif of the conservative and Republican-leaning circles.
(Asif was and is a big Democrat, so if he sees this he’ll probably be upset. Whatever, he lives in Texas. If he comes after me… well, it will be good to see him, it’s been a while.)
This week’s guest on the Crummy Little Podcast is Chris Younce, who knows both grassroots campaigns and baseball better than most.
Having spent much of 2012 making sure the insurgent Ron Paul was on Republican primary ballots nationwide, Chris shared his insight into how difficult it would be for someone to jump into the Democratic primary at this stage.
George got some attention for that video, as you might expect, but what’s been missed was his coverage of the confederate flag rally from which that video came. He also spent a week covering a shady soccer stadium deal in DeKalb County, outside of Atlanta. It’s a long podcast, but it was a great conversation about news reporting, media, where it’s at and where it’s going. It probably could have been two shows, but I liked the flow of it.
This was an especially fun episode for me because George and I go back a ways. Long before I had a crummy little podcast, I had a crummy little radio show back at UMass on campus station WMUA. George was the news director at that station for a time, and even guest-hosted my show at least once (and did a better job than me, if I remember right). Needless to say, he’s done our alma mater proud since.
What a crazy first Republican debate. Luckily, Beverly Hallberg returned to the Crummy Little Podcast to help make sense of it all. Find out who won, who lost, and who kept their heads down and stayed the course – which, when Donald Trump is attracting viewers, might have been a win unto itself.
There aren’t many people who can keep up with the ever-evolving intersection between technology and politics. Todd Van Etten, Chief Digital Strategist for The Herald Group, is one of them, and he does it well. He’s this week’s guest on the Crummy Little Podcast, chatting about online politics and advocacy.
You can download/listen here or through iTunes.
District Media Group Founder and President Beverly Hallberg is one of the savviest media professionals in Washington, D.C., and she did a great job previewing the upcoming Republican debate on this week’s Crummy Little Podcast. She also talks about why Hillary Clinton isn’t connecting with voters (and why Bernie Sanders is). There’s even some baseball talk at the end.
Jim Eltringham 