Count me among the people that consider Notorious B.I.G. one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. His rapping had a certain flow and authenticity to it that seemed damn near impossible to replicate and his assassination in 1997 was a real tragedy to popular music. All that being said Biggie was a straight up criminal. Before he made it big in music he provided for himself by dealing drugs, but he never really gave up the drug dealer lifestyle even when he got rich and famous.
After the second presidential debate, Chris Hayes of MSNBC brought up Biggie's song "The 10 Crack Commandments" in his assessment of Romney's performance. Namely Romney violated Biggie's "Never get high on your own supply" commandment by showing that he genuinely believed his own BS (and Hayes needed a TV-friendly way to say that). This was further reinforced by the election postmortems that revealed that Romney and Ryan were "unskewing" their own internal polling and genuinely thought they would win comfortably.
This analogy got me thinking, why stop at that one commandment? Why not have a little fun and take a look through all of Notorious B.I.G's suggestions on how to be a better crack dealer and apply that to presidential politics. We'll see how well each candidate adhered to the commandments and see if there's a correlation to who ultimately won the election. If Obama wins this, Biggie's song can serve as guidelines for successful campaigns to follow in the future. If Romney wins, he can rest assured that he'd make a pretty good drug dealer should he decide to take up that profession in his retirement.
What follows is my assessment of how well both the Obama and Romney campaigns followed Biggie's advice in the Ten Crack Commandments.
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