Oh My God Look at This Sad Weird Loser

John Hickenlooper’s crusade against socialism is going rather poorly. The former Colorado governor’s presidential campaign is failing to crack even 1 percent in polling, and essentially his entire senior staff quit last week as everyone with a brain continues to push him to run for a winnable Senate seat instead.

While Hickenlooper maintains that he will keep on keeping on in the presidential primary, he gave a pair of interviews this weekend which illustrate just how sad his campaign is becoming. Speaking with AP yesterday, Hickenlooper laid the self-loathing on thick while stressing that he still thinks he can win Iowa, emphasis mine:

“Certainly the vast majority of the problem with the campaign was me not being as good of a messenger as I need to be, but you can’t switch or trade in a new candidate,” he said in an interview with a local reporter after a town hall in Perry, Iowa.

Hickenlooper acknowledged that “there’s just a bunch of skills that don’t come naturally to me” that are essential to campaigning — “like being a really good debater, being real smooth with wealthy donors.”

Hickenlooper might not be “real smooth” with wealthy donors, but he’s a hell of a lot better at that than he is with not-wealthy donors, considering that nearly 90 percent of the $2 million he raised in the first quarter of 2019 was from large individual contributions, according to OpenSecrets.

Still, Hickenlooper told the AP he’s “committed to growing and working and getting better,” and that “sometimes, the longshot becomes the legend.” Folks, I promise to do better at being the 19th-most notable candidate running for the Democratic nomination for president, and that includes beginning to emulate the Fyre Fest guy in normal conversations. That’s the Hickenlooper guarantee.

As the AP story noted, Hickenlooper has been confronted by audience members at town halls about why he won’t run for Senate against vulnerable GOP incumbent Cory Gardner, and he expanded on this in a separate interview for CBS News published early Monday. His reasoning lies somewhere between Marianne Williamson and George W. Bush, emphasis mine again:

“I don’t think that’s my calling,” Hickenlooper told reporters about running for the Senate after a “meet and greet” event in Perry. Hickenlooper admitted he has discussed it with his staffers, saying they have told him he would be a “lock” to defeat Republican Sen. Cory Gardner.

“If I think of what God wants me to do, if there’s a beam of light coming down from heaven, what it’s illuminating for me is taking the things I’ve done, putting teams of really unique individual skills, and putting those teams together so that we really take on the big challenges of this country and of this world,” Hickenlooper said.

The guy drinks fracking fluid once to prove that it’s good, and now he thinks he’s got a direct line to God. Move over, Beto: the Democratic presidential primary just found its new Weird Guy.