How Dean Can Win Wisconsin
To wrap up Jack History Month, I’d like to offer a few pointers to presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who will need to win my home state of Wisconsin on February 17 in order to stay competitive in the primary race.
Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty busy lately talking about all the girls I felt up in high school, and I’m just getting around to addressing this important issue. Since in the meantime Dean failed to win Wisconsin, and in fact dropped out of the race the next day, we can tell my advice would have been helpful to him. In this light, however, I will present a revised notion of what Dean needs to do to win Wisconsin twelve days ago.
By the end of the second term of the administration of President Judith Steinberg, the executive task force investigating time travel will make breakthroughs not in time travel itself, but a new branch of temporal electronics that will make it possible to send electrons back in time. This in turn will allow scientists to realize digital communication with the past. The President’s husband, retired monster truck rally announcer and one-time politician Howard Dean, will get on the timephone with his 2003 self one warm Burlington night.
“Howard,” he will say, “it’s Howard! I’m calling you from the future! We’re going to lose! You had better listen to me! We’re going to lose, do you hear me? We’re going to lose our front-runner status and rack up loss after loss, until we go from being known as the candidate who raised the most money in the history of electoral politics to being the candidate who spent the most money to win the fewest votes! Instead of continuing to report on our awe-inspiring ability to rally support across the country, the press will begin to focus on a seemingly endless list of our mistakes!
“But we can prevent this, Howard! All we have to do is be a little more self-critical, believe less in the inevitability of our success, and watch our steps more carefully. The last thing we want to do is to appear arrogant, or cocky, or out of step with the mainstream. There are certain things in our past that we need to nip in the bud, but more importantly we have to be careful not to cause new concern over our ability to be a forceful, reasonable candidate by making outlandish claims or — stay with me on this one — screaming in a high-pitched wail when we get too excited. No one has galvanized disaffected American voters like we have, Howard, and it’s too important to let it slip away just because we’re too stubborn to adapt to changing events.”
“Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?” 2003-Howard will have said, and he’ll slam the phone down.
Vice President Hilary Duff Onassis, the nominal head of the time travel task force, will receive a final report suggesting that time travel is indeed impossible, although not for reasons previously thought. You cannot alter the past, not because of the laws of physics, but because people are assholes and won’t listen.
by Jack, February 29, 2004 2:54 AM | More from Election 2004 | More from Jack History Month | More from The Damned Human Race
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Great scott! This is heavy!
Rumour has it Jack is being sought by the high and mighty of the print world. . . must be all the politicizing. Or maybe just the description of cheerleaders.
Why did women march on Washington, DC for abortion rights when they already have them?