Tom (?) Vilsack Fever Sweeps Nation
Vilsack vows to bring “bold change” if elected president
Just after 10 o’clcok [sic] Thursday morning, Vilsack and his family entered a Mount Pleasant gymnasium as the local high school band played a song titled “The Final Countdown,” by Europe.
Yes, 2008 is just around the corner, and you can feel it, can’t you? The whole nation is aflame with Tom Vilsack fever. Tom! Tom! Tom! Tom!
Uh…wait…just who in the Hell is Tom Vilsack?, you might ask. Well, he’s the Governor of Iowa, that state stuck between Missouri and Minnesota. Yeah, that one. I know what you’re thinking; hmm…Iowa…corn and cows as far as the eye can see, right? Yep, if you’ve been there, and I have many times, you know that Iowa is less a destination than a transit point- the world’s largest truck stop, if you will. Yeah, I spent an entire month in Des Moines one weekend….
In Vilsack’s case, running for President seems less a career move than a desperate attempt to escape the American equivalent of Siberia. At least he’s not going to have to go far to campaign for the Iowa caucuses, eh?
The problem is that no one outside of Iowa (and probably even a lot of people IN Iowa) knows who Vilsack is. To the politically uninitiated, this might seem to be a problem, and it could well be. Let me offer two names for your consideration, though- Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean. At this point in their respective campaigns- 1974 and 2002, to be exact- no one had a clue who these two were. If you’d told anyone in 1974 that Jimmy Carter would be elected President in 1976, they probably would have offered you another bong hit. In 2002, Howard Dean was just another quaint Governor from a quaint New England state. His campaign fell short (just how in the HELL do you lose to a wooden Indian and nonsequitur like John Kerry?), but he was parlay his success into a job as the head of the Democratic party. Not bad for a Governor of a state that most Americans think is a Canadian province.
Yes, a lot can happen between now and…well, who knows when? Besides, if Presidential-candidate-for-life Joe Biden can run, why not Tom Vilsack?
Stayed tuned. Remember, when the going gets wierd, the wierd turn pro…or run for President. Who knows, maybe I’ll run; it’s not as if I could do any worse than the smirking fool currently occupying the White House….
