There are 6.4 million people in the state of Tennessee.
From these it only needs to find two senators and seven representatives to send to Congress. That’s all, just nine people to choose out of 6.4 million.
Let’s narrow that down a bit. Tennessee has around 3.4 million registered voters.
And let’s narrow that down even further, since we’re just concerned with Democrats here. In the 2008 national election, 1,087,437 registered voters in Tennessee cast their votes for Democrats.
So about a million people then. Tennessee Democrats had a million people they could have chosen as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
And instead they chose this guy.
His name is Mark Clayton. He will carry the Democratic party banner in this fall’s matchup against Sen. Bob Corker, because his name was listed first on the primary ballot and Tennessee Democrats have lost the will to live. His platform veers a touch typical cookie-cutter Democratic fare: It’s basically Paultardism garnished with even more virulent homophobia and concerns about a Schwarzenegger-led restoration of Nazism. You can extrapolate pretty easily from here — what, say, does he think about the Google? Correct, reader! He does in fact think that the Google, in collaboration with China, is out to get him. And so on.
Clayton, it turns out, is a disciple of our old friend Tim LaHaye and his mix of End Times paranoia and John Birch Society nuttery.
Tim Murphy of Mother Jones reports that:
Mark Clayton believes the federal government is building a massive, four-football-field wide superhighway from Mexico City to Toronto as part of a secret plot to establish a new North American Union that will bring an end to America as we know it. On Thursday, he became the Tennessee Democrats’ nominee for US Senate.
Clayton, an anti-gay-marriage activist and flooring installer with a penchant for fringe conspiracy theories, finished on top of a crowded primary field in the race to take on GOP Sen. Bob Corker this fall. He earned 26 percent of the vote despite raising no money and listing the wrong opponent on his campaign website. …
On his issues page, Clayton sounds more like a member of the John Birch Society than a rank-and-file Democrat. He says he’s against national ID cards, the North American Union, and the “NAFTA superhighway,” a nonexistent proposal that’s become a rallying cry in the far-right fever swamps. Elsewhere, he warns of an encroaching “godless new world order” and suggests that Americans who speak out against government policies could some day be placed in “a bone-crushing prison camp similar to the one Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sent or to one of FEMA’s prison camps.” (There are no FEMA prison camps.)
Oops. And congratulations Sen. Bob Corker on your re-election.
More than a million Democrats in Tennessee and voters there, instead, nominated someone who is opposed to everything they stand for (and who is also opposed to many things that do not exist).
Thus, inevitably, “Tennessee Democrats Disavow Senate Candidate Mark Clayton“:
The only time that Clayton has voted in a Democratic primary was when he was voting for himself. Many Democrats in Tennessee knew nothing about any of the candidates in the race, so they voted for the person at the top of the ticket. Unfortunately, none of the other Democratic candidates were able to run the race needed to gain statewide visibility or support.
Mark Clayton is associated with a known hate group in Washington, D.C., and the Tennessee Democratic Party disavows his candidacy, will not do anything to promote or support him in any way, and urges Democrats to write-in a candidate of their choice in November.
Can’t anybody here play this game?
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