Nobody Does It Better

When I returned to U4Prez this week, after a nearly three-month hiatus (six weeks of which included exile from this blog), one of the first to greet me back was Faustus. Faustus is probably the most professional candidate at U4Prez, himself running for the office of Governor in Idaho for 2010. He is a polished speaker, having clearly defined positions on all issues, and has no problem speaking his mind. Unlike most of us, though, he is smart enough to keep out of the fracas when the partisan bullshit starts to fan out. He never has a harsh word for anyone, and I don’t think anyone has a harsh word for him.

Faustus, quite expectedly, breezed through 2007, winning three of the monthly primary positions for the Democratic Party. With Elected_Al resigning his position, Think08 taking a long and unexpected leave in the summer, and Bluproject willing to present himself as Kempite’s whipping boy, it became even easier for Faustus to push through to the convention and win the nomination. Do not perceive this, however, as a case of the Democrats imploding this year. Quite the contrary. Most Democrats have come to respect Faustus deeply, and it is very easy to support someone who is as polite, thoughtful, intelligent, and professional as Faustus. When he left U4Prez, Elected_Al made it a point to endorse Faustus on his own profile, perhaps to consolidate the Democratic base, but most likely to show support for a candidate who genuinely deserves the highest of praises.

Why, then, am I endorsing MejicoJohn?



Those of you who have been following the Olivia soap opera since March, you should already know why.

I can’t remember the conversation I was having, who I was having it with, but I remember saying about three weeks into my campaign, I would not be surprised at all if MejicoJohn won the whole thing. MejicoJohn gets it. When many of us were running ourselves ragged, taking U4Prez way too seriously, MejicoJohn would chime in with a new video, or say something that made us all crack up.

Even as a newbie, I realized John was campaigning differently. He wasn’t putting together polished, fanciful videos, he wasn’t putting the finishing touches on his platform or challenging others to a duel or a debate. Rather, he was having a good time, something we all, including myself, should have been doing all along. Every time I see John, I picture him in his room in Nuevo Laredo, beer bottles and cigarette butts all around his keyboard, laughing his tail off at the dumb things the rest of us do. He is unique to U4Prez—there are liberals and conservatives galore, and Dems and Reps and Indies are all over the place, but there is only one MejicoJohn. For every Hawk, there are a hundred just like him on U4Prez, not quite so high-profile, but still stewing in his own juices, playing partisan bullshit games, denigrating U4Prez for his own amusement. You can say the same about me, or many others.

While others are trying to dissect tort reform and pollution policy and stem-cell research to their finer components, John has flat out said his desire is to be King of North America, to run the country under a pseudo-dictatorship, where he basically ends all the dumbshit once and for all, all the corruption in Washington, all the deficit spending, all the wars-for-profit, and sets us back on a Constitutional course. There are no fine details to hash out with John, nothing to negotiate. He has no desire for longterm aggrandizement, he is no Fidel Castro seeking to liberate his countrymen and then hold himself in power for the next fifty years. He is blunt, decisive, and has the kind of simple feel for the tone of the American public many believed George W. Bush had in 2000.

John is no Dubya, far from it. I liken him to George Washington. I am dead serious about this. Washington in the Cincinnatus argument, where, once he won the War for Independence, when clamored by many to take over and use his strength of character and leadership to mold the new America in his own image, he simply returned to his farm in Virginia. And again, once elected President under the new Constitution, after two terms, he could have ran for a third and stayed in power for the rest of his life; instead, he served, and then he went home. Throughout all of human history, with rare exceptions, every leader of a revolution has ultimately betrayed the ideals they fought for, and the populations they claimed to liberate, for the sake of power. MejicoJohn, like George Washington, is an exception to history, an anomly, a fly in the ointment.

Did you like me comparing John to Washington? Here’s another for you. In his Republic, Plato daydreamed the perfect political system being run by a “benevolent despot”, one who was raised as part of a ruling elite to do nothing more than run a government. He was not to be rewarded handsomely, for to Plato, power was a burden, and certainly not something to profit from. MejicoJohn is U4Prez’s benevolent despot, the kind of singular leader that can take a nation, shake it clean, and set it back on course, all the while sipping a beer and eating hot peppers straight from the jar.

One aspect I’ve always appreciated from John is his self-deprecating humor. The first one he laughs at is himself. His videos are genuinely funny, not by bullying opponents or making fun of anyone, but because he looks like he is really enjoying clowning with us. Who else has his own anti-campaign, the NOMJOHN campaign? Many of us have enemies who make no bones about it, and some have even come up with anti-campaigns for the elite. I’ve seen my share of anti-Olivia campaigns, Kempite’s seen anti-Kempite campaigns. But no one would dare talk himself down like John does.

As for me personally, I have supported MejicoJohn for a long time, and in terms of time and energy, I do feel I assisted him a little. We came to know one another, and in our talks, we rarely talked politics. We always talked about our personal lives. That’s something I’ve learned can’t be easily done with sincerity. While many of us talk about our jobs and families in a general way, John put his life out there for all of us to watch and enjoy. When John was having problems concerning his father and moving to Nuevo Laredo, I think we all held him in our hearts, hoping for the best.

The third video I made was devoted to MejicoJohn, even though it was titled “Antipartisan Pledge #9”.



When I became Independent Leader this summer, I took a video I was working on and turned it into a campaign promo for the Independents on the whole. MejicoJohn’s face was among the dozen-or-so Independents on that video.



I used the Independent Leader profile as a sort of billboard for promoting Independent candidates, and any Indy with a video was on there. MejicoJohn had nearly forty short videos all over YouTube, and I always put one of them on there that summed up his political beliefs.

Then, on that fateful day in July, the fifth, when the moderator fell asleep at the wheel and almost screwed MejicoJohn out of his place in the primaries, I raised holy hell to get the situation rectified and gave up my own position in that primary in protest. With the moderator asleep at the wheel and John in the midst of moving and dealing with his family and not being about to come online at all, let alone campaign, I felt like I had to act. For those of you who felt I was grandstanding, how important is it now that I did that, how necessary was it for me to not let an Independent get screwed out of his position? How many Republicans or Democrats similarly got screwed, and are sitting on the outside now, voting for President instead of being voted for? This is where I indeed will pat myself on the back a little bit, because MejicoJohn did emerge from that Independent Convention as our nominee, and had he lost his chance to compete in the June primary, the whole history of U4Prez would now be different. No offense at all to Icababe or CoryF or Maditude, had it been them screwed by moderator apathy, I am sure I would acted the same as I did with John. But it remains that it indeed was John that was in that position, victimized by moderator ineptitude, for a moment gone from the race. That may have been his only real shot, considering how Independents up until that time never even had a primary of their own.

And now he is on the verge of being President. Yes, I take a good amount of personal satisfaction in that.

While I do believe Faustus is the best out of all of us in terms of political polish and professionalism, I can’t desert my Independents, I put far too much of myself into out “party”. And I put a lot of personal capital into MejicoJohn, not only in terms of promoting him and getting him back in the running, but in terms of our shared experience at U4Prez. My dear friend and Photoshop extraordinaire Donny Wiz made a series of pictures of us together, and while they were made in fun and jest, they were also personal. They meant something to John and me.



When I left U4Prez in August, MejicoJohn was one of many who unfairly received heat for my exile and blog. On one memorable night, on Kempite’s talk show, John was put in the position of defending me, something I wouldn’t want anyone close to me to ever have to do. He gave the Hard Right no issues of importance, nothing they could use, no ammunition. I am sorry they put him in that position, having to defend me, when he had no idea what was going on. And yet, there he was.

In the future, I hope to continue to work with Faustus and MejicoJohn to improve the U4Prez experience. My head says to vote for Faustus, because he is indeed the best. My heart, though, says to vote for MejicoJohn, because I have put so much of myself into him, and because I think we do have a respect, admiration, and, dare I say it, love for one another that makes no sense in reality, but perfect sense here. That’s not to say I’ll start posting John Averitt memorials whenever my ratings start going down, but it means, so long as we are a part of U4Prez, he will always have a special place in my heart.



Hence, I am putting my heart above my head.

I am voting for MejicoJohn, and while I would like others to do the same thing, I would be just as thrilled to see Faustus win.

One last thing—as happy as I am that a true Hard Right candidate did not make it to the general election, Musicman is in their sphere of influence. I will work with him should he be voted in President, but it won’t be pretty. I called Musicman a pussy on plenty of occasions, mostly because he is a decidedly partisan candidate who decided to sign the Antipartisan Pledge, yet started to cry like a little girl whenever I called him on it. I don’t care what he did and does in the real world, on U4Prez, he is a whiner, a NeoCon, and a perfect lackey for the Hard Right cabal. He shows no signs of leadership, deciding to try to shout me down when I was defending John’s place in the June primary. How does that look now, Musicman actively seeking to squash John’s chances of fairly staying in the primaries, now they’re both in the general election. I realize the Republican Convention became a battle of attrition, but I don’t know how anyone could vote for someone as whining, as hypocritical, and as opposed to someone standing up for what’s right.

If you vote with your head, vote for Faustus.

If you vote with your heart, vote for MejicoJohn.

And if you vote with your ass, vote for Musicman.

I will vote with my heart. How are you going to vote?