Ken Bone Wants to Have a Beer With Barack Obama

By Prachi Gupta | February 23, 2017 | 11:15pm

Politics

NATIONAL HARBOR, M.D.—Kudos to pant-splitting internet sensation Kenneth Bone, who has managed to stretch his 15 seconds of fame from the second presidential debate to nearly five months. Bone and his red sweater emerged at CPAC at a booth he called the “Bone Zone,” where he was greeted a little too eagerly by young Republicans and sold t-shirts of his face with in the style of Shepard Fairey’s Obama ‘Hope’ prints. All press requests were vetted by a man named Matt, who served as Bone’s handler and rushed him in and out of the Bone Zone for what I assume were other celebrity appearances and social commitments. Jezebel news editor Gabrielle Bluestone and I intercepted the man behind the memes just as he was leaving the booth for the day, at around 4:30 p.m. Bone, whose brow was lined with large beads of sweat, greeted us with a smile, commented on our “pretty names,” and then talked to us as we all walked out:

PG: We have one main question for you, which is, “Why?”

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Why am I here? I’m here at CPAC with my partners at Victory Holdings. We’re rolling out our new flagship project called DonorDex. Normally when you want to get into politics, it costs vast amounts of money to form an exploratory committee or to get with a donor consultant, and we help you bypass that. Rather than paying like $50,000 for the traditional way of getting into politics, we hook you up with potential donors for a subscription fee of like a couple hundred dollars a month at the high end. That way, regular people get a voice in politics again. And this isn’t the only event—we’ll be at lots of events all year, not just conservative ones. We’ll be reaching across the aisle, cause I want every American, if they want to run for office and they have good ideas, to be able to do it.

PG: You have quite a speech prepared for a question that didn’t make a ton of sense.

Well, to be fair, I’ve said the same thing probably four or five times in the last two hours, because people ask me a lot why I’m here.

PG: Oh, I’m just asking “why?”

[Laughs]

GB: I have a follow-up question. Obviously, when you became a media sensation, you were undecided at the time. What helped you decide?

I promised myself at the beginning of the election cycle that I would wait until after the debates, all three of them, because that’s where the candidates get to talk to each other and get to have their ideas heard. And I wasn’t super excited about either one of them, to be honest, so I wanted to give them a chance to hear what they had to say.

GB: You voted for Trump?

I voted, but I’m not telling anybody who for.

GB: You’re still not saying?

I’m not saying. I promised that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’m not going too.

PG: If you could have a beer with any politician, who would it be?

Probably Barack Obama, he seems like a great guy to hang out with. We don’t have to agree all the time for me to like him. He seems like a nice guy.

PG: Alright, thank you.

Thank you so much.