AWDHEO Makes its Endorsement for President
McConaughey 2024: Make America alright, alright, alright again!
Americans Who Don’t Hate Each Other is formally announcing its endorsement of Matthew David McConaughey for president of the United States.
Mr. McConaughey was born in Uvalde, Texas, the site of a gruesome school shooting in 2022. In the wake of the atrocity, the town native returned and played an active role in helping the community grieve and begin to heal.
McConaughey is the son of a small business owner and substitute teacher, the kind of unglamorous, hardworking background that resonates with millions of Americans. After graduating high school, he left home and moved to Australia for a year, where he washed dishes and worked on a chicken farm, meaning his narrative also includes the quest for self-discovery through menial labor that voters always romanticize.
Also, although it’s an unscientific sample, based on the number of his movies that, through decades of dating and relationships, I was “told” that I would be watching by various companions, it’s safe to safe to say that McConaughey holds a distinct appeal to numerous women, America’s largest bloc of registered voters. Besides having an advantage in absolute numbers, women turn out to vote at notably higher rates than men, and, with McConaughey at the top of the ticket, many will be even more enthusiastic to participate.
However, McConaughey is more than just an on-screen heartthrob. He is also a producer, spokesperson, professional sports team owner, author, university professor and philanthropist. In other words, he’s a doer and a striver, both qualities that voters admire.
But, while McConaughey is involved in a wide spectrum of activities, he is obviously best-known as an actor. Of course, the same could once have been said of a 28-year veteran of the screen named Ronald Reagan.
McConaughey’s acting career can be seen as an extension of the previous search for self he embarked upon after becoming an adult. His breakout role came in 1993, as the famously infamous David Wooderson in the coming-of-age classic Dazed and Confused, which was set in the mid-1970s. The actor portrayed an assortment of characters through the rest of the decade, but, in the 2000s, he became a staple in “chick flicks,” which pigeonholed him as a rom-com king.
So, at the end of the decade, McConaughey reinvented himself, following another protracted self-discovery period. He started to appear in more eclectic roles again, similar to how he began his career. Audiences and reviewers embraced the evolution, and he started to receive critical recognition for his work, highlighted by his 2014 win at the Oscars for Best Actor for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club (2013).
After transforming his Hollywood career, McConaughey also expanded his other pursuits. In 2015, he became a visiting professor at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, and, in 2019, he was elevated to the position of professor in practice. In 2016, he was formally honored for his labors in conjunction with his youth-serving, charitable foundation, just keep livin, by unite4:humanity, a gala that recognizes humanitarians around the globe. And, in 2019, he became co-owner of the Major League Soccer team Austin FC.
In 2020, the then-50-year-old published his first book, Greenlights: Your Journal, Your Journey. The hybrid of memoirs and self-help reflections became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received widespread critical acclaim.
On the press junket for Greenlights, McConaughey began to speak regularly about his unconventional political views. In a Nov. 2020 interview with podcaster Hugh Hewitt, the author called politics a “broken business right now” and called for fundamental changes in the way we approach it in language that prefigured AWDHEO and my forthcoming book, The Anti-Partisan Manifesto:
“I want to get behind personal values to rebind our social contracts with each other as Americans, as people again…. No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, or as I said earlier, denomination, we have broken those social contracts. We don’t trust each other…”
But, it was a 2022 piece that he penned for Esquire Magazine that first drew me to the A-lister, politically. I was hammering away at the second draft of the Manifesto and chiseling its basic outline into form when I read the money quote from his account of his visit to his hometown after the shooting there:
Because most Americans, myself included, don’t stand on the political fringes. We are reasonable and responsible, and we share more values than we’re being told we do—and we believe that meeting each other in the middle is in service of the greater good. We have the majority. We have the numbers.
That’s why it’s high time we take the megaphone back from the extremists who’ve been manufacturing these false fractures among us. They’ve been selling us soft porn at the pep rally for too long. It’s time to kick them off the port and starboard sides of the boat on which American democracy sails... or at least relegate them to mopping the deck.
(Personally, in my baser moments, I have daydreamed of consigning the professional dividers in politics, the media and other fields to work out the rest of their days in windowless rooms where they would have to audit all the myriad forms of damage they have done to our country. But, making them deck swabs would be equally fitting.)
I read and reread and reread McConaughey’s statement, as I find myself doing again now. In two paragraphs, he had encapsulated the spirit of the Manifesto, and, suddenly, I was combing through my manuscript, trying to find somewhere to incorporate his quote into the quicky crystallizing text (alas, I could not, which makes it gratifying to be able to acknowledge his words now).
McConaughey’s work toward gun law reforms in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy led to the signing of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in June 2022, a month after the massacre. BSCA, the most substantive gun law in decades, strengthened background checks for gun purchases and provided billions of dollars for school security, enhanced mental health support in schools and other school and community interventions.
McConaughey deserves a significant share of the credit for the enactment of BSCA. Elected officials from either party pay lots of cheap lip service to the idea of “bringing both sides together” to pass legislation for the good of Americans. But, McConaughey actually did it, going to Washington and meeting with members of a stalemated Congress from both sides of the aisle, helping to break the gridlock and secure the bill’s passage.
McConaughey’s tack contrasted sharply from many of his celebrity peers. Numerous Hollywood-types faithfully played their parts as gun-grabbing grandstanders, fulminating to their outrage to fans and followers in the press but failing to do anything that could actually fix anything.
McConaughey explained his distinctive approach in a column for the Austin American-Statesman after BSCA was signed into law, again presaging AWDHEO and the Manifesto:
This bill is an example of the bipartisan meeting of the minds and hearts that can lead us to reclaim true Democracy in America.
This bill is a representation and reminder that no single party is Democracy itself. No single party is America itself, AND no single party in American politics has the claim to independently own the values by which they define themselves.
Republicans and Democrats don’t have a license on the “values” they often posture themselves as owning. Values are free trade, there to share and bring to bear for all of us.
To heal and save our Democracy, we need to apply these same bipartisan efforts to countless other issues. Only then can we become the America we’re capable of becoming.
In 2023, McConaughey and his wife, Camila, built upon the work they started in conjunction with the BSCA with the launch of the Greenlights Grant Initiative. The program helps school districts obtain billions of dollars in school safety funding through grants available through BSCA and other laws.
McConaughey’s political musings and down-the-middle activism, along with his leadership after Uvalde, have led to questions about his own, potential run for office, something he hasn’t discouraged. In 2021, he briefly considered a bid for the governorship of Texas, before ruling it out “at this moment.”
But, McConaughey continues to stoke speculations about the possibility of a political future. Last month, at the National Governors Association meeting, he described himself as on being “on a learning tour,” adding “I have been for probably the last six years.”
According to the Associated Press, it’s possible that McConaughey could eventually run for office as a party candidate (don’t go to the dark side, Matt!). However, the self-described “aggressively centrist” McConnaughey doesn’t talk about politics like any partisan we’ve ever heard. He talks like an anti-partisan.
Accordingly, Mr. McConnaughey should accept the nomination of the Anti-partisans of America for president in 2024 and take the top slot on our ticket.
This would seem to immediately pose some legal and logistical problems, starting with the fact that there are no Anti-partisans of America, and they don’t have a ticket. There’s an anti-partisan in America, who’s trying to convince everyone else to become one, but he doesn’t have a ticket either.
But, we can still write in his name. Each election, voters write in all kinds of names on their ballots. In 2016, thousands of them wrote in votes for Harambe the gorilla.
A handful of states don’t allow write-ins, and most states require you to file for write-in status in order for the votes you receive to count (start gathering signatures!). But, even without the states in which McConaughey would be banned from competing, there would be more than enough electoral votes left to reach 270.
The only question is, who should his running mate be? Someone who is also aggressively centrist, naturally. McConaughey/Gebeau?
Google doesn’t seem to think there are any other moderate stars with whom he could partner. Every permutation of related search words brings up multiple articles that identify a smattering of conservative celebrities, but none that are middle-of-the-roadsters.
So, Mr. McConnaughey just may be a political unicorn. All the more reason we should elect him.
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