I’m a skeptic, especially when it comes to the political conventional wisdom. The more people repeat the cliches of the day, the more skeptical I become. In my experience, the CW is usually wrong. We’re being told how wonderful outsider candidates who rail at the establishment are. Some are but many aren’t: The Platner shipwreck is ample evidence of that but I can go back farther. Let’s set the Wayback Machine to 1976.
The ultimate outsider candidate of my misspent youth was Jimmy Carter. I was young so I bought into the CW of the day as well as Carter’s promises to provide a “government as good as the American people” and to never lie. It was an outsider campaign in response to Nixon’s dishonesty.
Carter failed to deliver on either bit of campaign rhetoric, which opened the door to the so-called Reagan revolution and worse right-wing movements such as the Tea Party and its obnoxious offspring, MAGA. The disastrous 1980 election is when I set my BS detector on maximum and learned to be a skeptic.
Ross Perot was another outsider candidate hyped by the media. He ran as a populist businessman ready to clean up the country’s financial mess, which was caused by the party Perot had just left: The GOP. Perot did well in 1992, but his movement didn’t endure. It reemerged in less salubrious form as the Tea Party. Perot was NOT a racist but the Tea Party emerged because many GOPers were bigots energized by the election of a Black president.
As a New Orleanian, I experienced the outsider mayoralty of C Ray Nagin. He promised to run city government like a business, which was a fatuous and unkeepable pledge. He gave up on the job after being reelected in the wake of Katrina and the Federal Flood. C Ray went to jail on corruption charges after leaving office in disgrace. Holy cautionary tale, Batman.
Then there’s John Fetterman the prototype for Platner type candidates. Unlike Platner, he had won elections before winning a senate seat but he appears poised to horseshoe his way out of the Democratic party. It wouldn’t surprise me if Platner walks the same perverse path based on his hurt feelings and grievances against the forces he thinks are conspiring against him. Platner is a fuck up who cannot take responsibility for his actions. Go throw your pity party elsewhere, asswipe.
The best example of an outsider politician in 2026 is an Insult Comedian with a dead nutria pelt atop his head. Say no more.
The current outsider obsession is mostly driven by young men who want Democrats to jump in the deep end of the broverse without looking. My mama told me to never leap before looking, which the broverse boys think is a swell idea. In my opinion, they need to grow the fuck up and give up their adolescent fever dreams. Do they really think Democrats should be more like 58-year-old man child Joe Rogan? I do not. I never did. I never will.
There’s a great piece in The Guardian about the outsider obsession. Its premise is a simple and elegant: White men’s mistakes are overlooked unlike errors made by women and people of color. The title says it all: ‘White men get to fail’: Graham Platner collapse illuminates toxic double standard in US politics
The same people who excused Platner’s inexcusable conduct also think they have the right to tell Kamala Harris not to run again. I’m undecided about who to support for president in 2028, but she has the right to give it another shot. Republicans have done quite well with candidates who ran and lost before winning. Come on down Nixon, Reagan, Poppy Bush, and Trump. Why is the former Veep excluded from this company? She’s a woman of color. She doesn’t get to make the same mistakes as white men and recover from them.
It’s time to take a step back from the outsider obsession. It’s become part of the conversation because of the populist wave found in many countries. That wave seems to have crested in America as MAGA’s popularity has taken a severe beating in 2026. I take as dim a view of populism as I do of outsiderism. It rarely turns out well. It certainly hasn’t in our country.
The featured image is a de-lettered version of the poster for the 2020 HBO series, The Outsider. It’s based on a novel by Stephen King who knows a thing or two about scaring people. Many of the outsider obsessives believe that scaring the shit out of people is good politics. I do not. It’s what MAGA does. My current motto is: whatever MAGA does, do the opposite.
The last word goes to Rodney Crowell:
