A writer for The New Republic has "endorsed" a Republican candidate for the presidency. Of course, to receive such an endorsement, such a candidate much have sufficiently liberal credentials to pass muster as well as have absolutely no chance of winning. Such a candidate is one Mark Everson who you probably never heard of since he is pretty much indistinguishable from a department store mannequin.
Oh, if you had paid attention ten years ago you might have noticed that Everson was the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and after that he slid back into almost complete obscurity...until now when Claire Groden at The New Republic is hyping him almost because he has absolutely no chance of being nominated. If the impossible did happen and Everson was nominated, you can be sure Groden as a loyal liberal would definitely vote for his Democrat opponent in the general election. Here is Groden's completely unserious "endorsement" of Mark Everson but at least it allows her to take cheap shots at Ted Cruz:
On Monday, after Ted Cruz declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, a man named Mark Everson fired off a statement calling the Texas senator the “standard bearer of government dysfunction” with a “silver tongue and a short senate career devoid of achievement.”
...And yet, on paper, Everson is far more broadly appealing than Cruz.
Everson, 60, currently the vice chairman of specialty tax service company Alliantgroup, was the Internal Revenue Service commissioner under President George W. Bush. He wants to reform the tax code based off Columbia law professor Michael Graetz’s Competitive Tax Plan, which imposes a value-added tax and removes the income tax for families making under $100,000. Cruz’s crusade to abolish the IRS is “just happy talk,” Everson told me. “You can’t abolish the IRS. You can make it smaller. I presume that Mr. Cruz wants to maintain social security and defense, so where’s he going to get the money?”
The rest of his platform is distinctly centrist. A former CEO of the American Red Cross, Everson proposes not to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but to broadly modify it. He opposes the death penalty, and on gay marriage he writes that “love overcomes some pretty high hurdles.” Perhaps most radically, he calls for undocumented immigrants to be granted amnesty—“to call it anything else is disingenuous,” he told me—and a path to citizenship. Everson describes himself as center-right, telling me that “center-left folks are willing to entertain solutions that are center-right if they feel they are well thought out and put forth for reasons that aren’t political or partisan.”
Everson does cater to the conservative crowd. Undocumented immigrants must be given rights and integrated into American society, he argues, “lest we follow Europe into incoherence, chaos and grave division over how best to contain the dangers of radical Islamist ideology.”
Got it? A "reasonable" Republican. Not a Ted Cruz. Of course such a candidate would still not satisfy Groden's inner leftist so just to make sure he couldn't win, he comes with personal baggage:
Everson awkwardly mixes in his personal experiences. “Like many Americans, my youngest child’s mother and I were not married when he was born,” he writes. That’s because his youngest child was the result of an extramarital affair with a Red Cross employee, he blithely explains. He lost his job and marriage, but “learned a great deal through [his] own passage.”
Yeah, that "endorsement" was about as serious as a presidential endorsement made by the DUmmie FUnnies in 2006: former Iowa governor (currently Secretary of Agriculture) Tom Vilsack. Not only was Vilsack sufficiently bland and nondescript to earn the endorsement but he also carried even heavier personal baggage than Everson, namely being caught on camera wearing a Winnie the Pooh Bear on his head in public pictured below. I assure you it is not photoshopped.
Exit question: If Hillary falters should Tom Vilsack hit the campaign trail and WEAR THE BEAR?
