No to Gephardt

A reader emailed me this missive this morning:

Please, continue to crusade against Gephardt. Whenever I see him, I immediately feel tired and old. He is sort of a black hole of energy – it vanishes in his presence. I don’t live in MO, BTW.

So I guess I’ll share the email I sent to Kerry’s blog last Friday(*):

Hi,

I think it might be worth passing up your chain of command that liberal and centrist bloggers and their readers are somewhere between 92% and 99% against Gephardt for VP. Seriously, I haven’t seen a single enthusiastic endorsement of DG; at most, just posts saying the VP choice doesn’t matter much, so DG wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.

Bloggers, and their readers, are a miniscule fraction of the electorate; but I think they are active water cooler/happy hour politcal conversationalists, both in terms of spouting their opinions as well as (and maybe more importantly in the current context) absorbing what friends and co-workers are saying. So there’s a decent chance that the sentiment among bloggers presages the likely reaction voters would have to a Gephardt selection. Seems like something the Kerry’s VP committee might want to consider.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen anyone write that they would not support Kerry just because he picks Gephardt. But that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

AB

I did get a nice email back saying that the message had been passed on to the political desk (the sender noted that “According to a Pew/Roper report, the percentage of people online who are “influentials” in their communities is much higher than the general population.”) So hopefully they’ll pick someone else, which at this point apparently means John Edwards. If they do, I’ll take full credit.

Speaking of Kerry, don’t forget to make your final contributions. After the conventions, you won’t be able to give to Kerry anymore, so act now! So far, this blog has raised $5,342, keeping me ahead of my goal of raising at least 1/50th of what Atrios raises. Goal number 2, raising $10,000, looks elusive.

AB

(*) I would have posted this sooner, but I was searching in vain for a screenshot of Abe “Grampa” Simpson typing one of his angry letters (common in the early years of The Simpsons) to accompany this post.

UPDATE: Here we go. This is how I think my readers picture me, emailing unsolicited advice to the Kerry campaign (thanks to Xan for the link):