When he ran for president in 2000, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah was entranced by the power of the Internet. Every two seconds he implored his television audience to visit OrrinHatch2000.com. It got to the point that for years I would only refer to him as OrrinHatch2000.com or just OrrinHatch.com. I’m not sure if he won even a single delegate to the convention, but he was at the forefront of online organizing. I was on the other side, trying to get Bill Bradley nominated by the Democrats. Bradley used the internet even more effectively, and actually raised more money than Al Gore. But having money couldn’t get CNN to treat him with any respect. Orrin Hatch had the same problem. Come to think of it, Howard Dean took the internet a hundred miles further than his predecessors, and he got no more respect for it, either.
We’ve come a long way, but there are still some pretty powerful gatekeepers on our airwaves who largely determine who is a serious candidate for president and who is not.
But don’t feel badly for OrrinHatch.com. With each passing year, he’s become a bigger asshole. Call it a survival mechanism in the modern GOP. He doesn’t want to go out like his colleague Robert Bennett did in 2010.
These days, it’s impossible to distinguish OrrinHatch.com from a simple troll.
Hatch also drew laughs from the crowd when he made fun of the left for using the term “progressive.”
“I get a big kick out of them using the word ‘progressive,'” he said. “My gosh, they’re just straight old dumbass liberals anyway.”
He’s says that the Republicans will win back the White House in 2016 and then they’ll serve us up with a great big dose of our own medicine.
I am not a scientist, but I am going to try to figure out how to prevent that from happening.