Less than three days into his deadly serious bid for a 2020 presidential nomination, rapper Kanye West has already begun accruing powerful must-haves for his eventual run. We’re not talking about his massive fame and worldwide name recognition, though, nor the winking endorsement he received from the Democratic Party. No, what Kanye has on his side now is something far more powerful, the most important tool in an American candidate’s political arsenal: a SuperPac.
Operating under the name Ready For Kanye, the committee was filed with the Federal Election Commission earlier this week. Formed with no apparent input from West, the committee—an independent organization that can raise money to fund messages supporting a candidate’s political views, or possibly just to promote its members’ love of Hall And Oates—was formed by Baltimore political activist Eugene Craig
Interestingly, Craig is a Republican, and expressed his hope that West would run with the GOP when 2020 rolls around, “barring a sitting Republican president.” Apparently having mastered his candidate’s “joke-that-is-maybe-not-a-joke” style of political discourse, Craig says his support of West is both totally sincere while still giving the impression that this is as much an act of political satire as anything else, telling Rolling Stone, “In the age where Donald Trump is the leading contender for Republican nomination, anything is possible.”
Craig was careful to note that Ready For Kanye has no plans to do any fund raising at the moment, only saying that “it would be nice to have some data mined and voters reached,” if West actually goes through with his announcement, and this doesn’t turn out to just be the rapper’s way to fulfill his lifelong dream of seizing full creative control of The Gap.