The Jon Huntsman Campaign Memorial Function Room at the Stupid Café is one of our most popular features. It's nearly always booked, usually by the weekly luncheons of the various No Labels/Third Way/Both Sides Suck cosplay organizations that have sprung up. It's no surprise, then, that the man for whom the room was named, and his incredibly irrelevant lollipop guild, booked the room for their annual awards. And, boy howdy, did they put on a show.
In order to qualify for its Problem Solver Promise program, all Donald Trump had to do was sign a pledge that he would pursue one of the group's core goals — a set of general fiscally related talking points — in the first "30 days" of his hypothetical presidency. Besides Trump, the other presidential candidates who signed on are Republicans Ben Carson, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich and Democrat Martin O'Malley. The "problem solver" designation does not constitute a formal endorsement by No Labels, according to the group. Still, critics of No Labels have long warned that its approach of designating candidates or elected officials as "problem solvers" just for agreeing to support its not-very-specific agenda could have the opposite of its intended effect, by giving bipartisan cover to politicians who speak and act in polarizing ways.
No dung, Sherlung.
We had no idea when we started out down this road how many candidates would make the Problem Solver Promise," said No Labels's co-chairman and former U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, a longtime Democrat from Connecticut who retired as an independent after losing his party's primary. "Today, six have! I'm glad we got six. We could have gotten zero."
In his next life, Joe Lieberman is going to come back as a spittoon.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
