Rick Perry got to pick up the birther mantle after Donald Trump had some fun with it earlier in the campaign. Trump got Obama-haters excited when he claimed he had people in Hawaii who "could not believe what they were finding."* This was such an outrageous claim that even Bill O'Reilly thought Trump was doing the birther thing for attention. And when Obama released his long-form certificate, Trump played it like that was exactly what he set out to do, which is classic griefing behaviour. Dance puppets, dance.
Many never believed that Trump was actually going to run -- even Bill Cosby recognized that Trump was "full of it" well before he left the race and I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby has been senile since the early '90s -- but Trump still got a lot of people to stand behind him before he jumped out of the way. Trump quit the race because, as he explained, who wants to be president when you have a "hit" TV show? And he is right; yelling at people on The Apprentice and flying to your golf courses (plural) on your helicopters (plural) has to be way more fun than being leader of the free world. Trump hasn't ruled out coming back into the race either, so expect another fun gag later on.
After getting a few pointers from Trump at at pizza place in NYC back in May, Sarah Palin was able to recreate the Trump experience. She trolled the media hard (and griefed her own supporters along the way) with a bus tour of early primary caucas states. At the end of the tour she essentially yelled, "Psych y'all!" and disappeared from the campaign. She also released a hype film about herself in July that was targeted at Tea Party districts and ended with her looking into the camera and saying, "Mr. President, Game on!" Three months later, it was game off.** You would think Republican candidates would at least have the decency to troll Democratic voters and not their own party.
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| "Ya see Sarah, first you get their hopes up and get their campaign donations, then, when they're invested emotionally and financially, you drop out the race!" "HA! That'll teach 'em to take the presidency seriously!" |
Another hilarious way to mess with the public and the media is to take a fake thing from a video game and convince people that it is a real thing that is going to happen, like Herman Cain did with his SimCity tax plan. The Cain 9/9/9 plan caused poor people (that is, non-millionaires) to freak out once they realized how much more it would cost them in taxes.
I think this sort of thing is bound to happen when only millionaires like Cain and Trump (and, to a lesser degree, Mitt Romney) can afford to launch a campaign without significant financial aid. Everyone who cannot pay their own way has to do so many stupid things (think of all the pictures of GOP candidates eating corn dogs) to solicit campaign contributions and support, that the millionaires running around having a wank with the whole process are hard to distinguish from the rest of the pile. As if anybody who is already rich and powerful would want to be stuck with a job as demanding as President of the United States.
And then, there is this:
I doubt Mike Gravel was throwing rocks in ponds for the lulz back in 2008, but I do think he felt pressured to act like a weirdo to compete for eyeballs. The trend of politicans-qua-griefers wouldn't even be so bad if there weren't real candidates with good ideas being overlooked because someone else is doing silly things. And that forces the real candidates to act like idiots to get money and media attention, which is messed up. It's gotten to the point that I wouldn't be surprised to find out Rick Santorum secretly funded google-bombing of the contemporary definition of "santorum" just to be relevant again in a GOP presidential race that had (correctly) decided he was beside the point.
*: Trump's investigators were probably smart not to believe what they were finding since whatever was making Trump excited must have been bogus.
**: In Palin's defence, the film only grossed $117,000, so maybe the support wasn't there for a presidential run.
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