He has been called a genius, a Trump toady and a rising star in the Republican party. Nikki Haley called him “scum” and Vanity Fair calls him a “smug jerk”. He’s a Libertarian, vegetarian, Hindu, Harvard and Yale-educated, self-made millionaire biotech entrepreneur with a foreign last name and a freakish toothy underbite who wants us to think of him as a regular guy. The man can take a joke and he’s not above handing out free beer to get Iowans to listen to his presidential pitch. So why didn’t anybody vote for him?
If the Iowa Republican Caucus has taught Vivek Ramaswamy anything, it’s that selling your brand to Iowans can be tricky. Ron DeSantis couldn’t get traction with his “anti-woke” campaign. Nikki Haley’s argument that the Civil War was about state’s rights, not slavery, fell flat. And just what does Vivek stand for?
Well, he claims the LGBTQ movement is a “cult”, he promised to fire 75 percent of all federal employees, he’s opposed to affirmative action, he thinks the 9/11 attack was an inside job, he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, the FBI, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service and he doesn’t think there should government subsidies for electric cars. He even announced that if he were president, he would rule by “executive fiat”, meaning he would be a my-way-or-the-highway-style administrator. Oh, and Vivek says the US needs two walls, one along the boarder with Mexico and the other, keeping out those marauding Canadians. Why would any voter listen to such nonsense? For the free beer, of course.
At 38 years old, Ramaswamy believed he had a special insight into the minds of young Iowans, since, unlike Joe Biden and Donald Trump he is still a long way from age 100. So, he came up with “Free Speech and Free Drinks” parties to lubricate impressionable minds while he sold his slick form of fascism. Unfortunately, these alcohol-fueled rallies at Iowa State and University of Iowa quickly degenerated into rowdy, vulgar chants about Biden and, largely drowning out Vivek’s message altogether. The boozy town hall in Ames completely fizzled in about 20 minutes.
Bribing voters with booze is nothing new in American politics. George Washington once successfully plied voters in a local Virginia election with a half-gallon of beer or rum each. James Madison, who loved beer, even proposing to appoint a cabinet-level Secretary of Beer, claims he lost an election in 1777 because he refused to entice voters with “the corrupting influence of spiritous liquors.”
The Hindustan Times News reported that the Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian satire website (yes, there is such a thing) joked that the new Trump administration would appoint Ramaswamy to the “very important cabinet position” of running the White House 7-Eleven store, adding Vivek was already training for the job by learning to fix the Slurpee machine. Some accused the Bee of racism since it played on the stereotype of Indians running convenience stores—like the Simpsons character Apu.
But Ramaswamy showed he was not only not a sore loser, in spite of having spent millions of dollars of his own money on a failed campaign, but he was a good sport. He tweeted back to the Bee, “Thank you for coming and don’t forget to grab a Slurpee!”