A guy named Joe is running for the Democratic nomination for president, filling the vital role of “Most Ridiculous Candidate to Ever Run For President.”
Democrats have plenty of other characters running, each with their own special gifts. What they are, we’ll let you know when we see them. But consider the extraordinary characters who have already announced:
- A senator from Vermont who extolled the greatness of communism when he took his new wife on a honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
- A senator from Massachusetts who went through most of her adult life pretending to be a minority in order to game the affirmative action system.
- A former folk singer, former congressman, and a failed Senate candidate in Texas. Yes, but women think he’s cute.
- The man whose name alone disqualifies him for high office. (President Hickenlooper?)
- The current mayor of New York City who appears to believe it’s his primary function to annoy people.
- A California senator who has accomplished little but who checks all the boxes for an acceptable Democratic candidate: female, multi-racial, ultra-liberal.
- Various and sundry congressmen and a gaggle of ex-politicians who somehow believe they’ve been anointed as the person who will lead America down the path of socialism.
- A twice-failed presidential candidate who won the “warm bucket of spit” prize when Obama named him to the ticket.
All of this leads us to believe that the Democratic presidential field is actually an Onion post.
Now, Joe Sestak, former Navy admiral and three-term congressman from Pennsylvania, announced in a video posted on his website that he was running for president because he thinks Americans want “someone who is accountable to them, above self, above party, above any special interest.”
Maybe he and Biden can form the “civility ticket.”
Sestak is actually an impressive man.
Sestak spent roughly three decades serving in the Navy. He was the director of defense policy on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s.
He won election to the U.S. House in a Republican-dominated district in 2006. As a three-star admiral, Sestak was the highest ranking military official elected to Congress at the time.
He served two terms in the House, holding positions on the Armed Services and Education and Labor committees, as well as serving as the vice chairman of the Small Business Committee.
Sestak won the 2010 Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania but lost in the general election to Republican Pat Toomey. He launched another bid for the seat in 2016 but lost his party’s primary.
HuffPost had this unintentionally hilarious “correction” to the original story:
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of candidates in the Democratic race.
They aren’t alone in the media. Depending on whom you’re reading, the number of “serious” Democratic candidates is 22, 24, or 26. God save us all if one of them wins.
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