The 16 People Who Will Pick the Next President
Influence has its privileges….
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What to do with a morning newsletter on a typically slow Monday news day, where Nikki Haley’s Sunday night televised town hall made no more of an indelible footprint than a sparrow softly landing on a frozen lake?
Clearly, create from whole cloth and a standing start the kind of list that lights up social media and is good fodder for debate and spirited conversation from the White House Mess to the CAA conference rooms to the Mar-a-Lago patio.
So here are the Top 16 people who will have the biggest impact on the 2024 presidential campaign – not including the candidates.
(Yes, I wrote the whole thing from scratch this morning…so excuse the typos!)
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16. Whoever is in charge of message discipline for Robert Kennedy
When he is good, the Biden rival sounds like a cross (in a good, politically potent way) between Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Isaac Newton, John McCain, and his dad. That has the potential to let him build a coalition in New Hampshire and around the nation that could lead to more momentum-building stuff like Jack Dorsey’s endorsement. When he gets in the weeds, he comes across as a more meandering and less focused combination of Jim Traficant, Gene Sperling, and Carl Sagan. The difference between the two versions of RFK is the difference between his leaving a scratch on President Biden that a dab of Neosporin handles or dismembering the incumbent’s arm in a wood chipper.
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