Beltway Erections

Everyone watch out! Cillizza is getting hot and bothered with a new fantasy!

If you wanted to run for president in 2020, you’d be doing exactly what Joe Scarborough is doing right now.

Marrying Mika Brzezinski? Oh, no, it’s being a Third Way wanker:

Let’s game this out a bit. Say you are a high-profile TV personality with an interest and an ambition to run for president. Positioning yourself as a solutions-minded centrist who has abandoned the party of your youth because it left you with its extreme agenda is a good place to be in an electorate that loathes both political parties and is desperate for other options.
Now what if that same person was also seen — or working to be seen — as someone who was once a friend of President Donald Trump but who has turned into one of his most vocal critics. A person who knows Trump well — so well that he has decided the president is not only out of his depth but in a dangerous state of mind.

“Him getting elected has just amplified all of his insecurities,” Scarborough told Nuzzi of Trump in a bit of armchair pop psychology.

The point here is that Scarborough is not only not denying he is interested in running for president but also positioning himself in such a way to appeal to people disgruntled with Trump and with politics more broadly. Which is interesting — and smart.

Before you write off Scarborough as a candidate, consider this: Donald Trump is the President.
Given that, can anyone really be ruled out? The answer is, of course, no.

The biggest hurdle to Scarborough becoming a serious candidate is not that he is a TV personality but rather that it looks like his path would be as a third-party nominee. That’s a tough row to hoe given the costs of qualifying for the ballot in all 50 states and then getting enough polling momentum to boost yourself into the general election debates.

How’s that post-coital cigarette Chris?