Everybody hates Nick Ayers

If you hate this man, you are not alone.

​Nick Ayers, the super-flack wunderkind running Tim Pawlenty's campaign, is making enemies fast.

Ayers was rumored to be leaving the Pawlenty campaign in favor of Texas haircut Rick Perry, if Perry announced he was in the race. Pawlenty's spokesman Alex Conant and Ayers quickly rejected the rumor.

Seizing on the rumor, the Daily Caller's Matt Lewis is asking a more important question: Does anybody even like this kid?

In an opinion piece on the conservative website, Lewis says Ayers is "probably the most hated among the political operative set" in the Republican party. Lewis points to other flacks' jealousy and Ayers' relentless self-promotion as the reasons for this hatred, but City Pages can think of at least a couple more reasons.

The rumors that Ayers was out the door, first brought up by the Huffington Post, were rejected out of hand by campaign talker Alex Conant.

"That's insane," Conant told HuffPo. "That's on the record."

Ayers merely laughed at the suggestion, and you know he just laughed in a smug way.

Lewis writes that Ayers' rapid rise through the party ranks came thanks to good timing and good placement. By working as executive director of the Republican Governors Association, Ayers got closely tied to the  Mississippi Gov. Hailey Barbour, the powerful fundraiser and former super-lobbyist. With those connections, and the unrelated success of Republican governors nationwide in 2010, Ayers leapfrogged an entire generation of operatives.

What followed, in terms of attitude, is to be expected:

Still, 2010 made Ayers look like a rock star, and it was during this time in that Ayers' contemporaries began to notice a change in him. "He's a very ambitious kid. He's a smart guy. He's not evil. But his ego grew along the lines of the federal deficit," said one strategist who worked with Ayers in the past.

"It's all about him," said another operative. "He's David Hasselhoff."

Sources confirm that being described as "David Hasselhoff" is not a positive thing in the Republican Party.

If anyone needs another reason to root against Ayers, there's the pathetic DWI arrest he got as a 24-year-old campaign manager 2006.

Plenty of people that age get a DWI. Most of them don't cry, then try to schmooze the state patrol officer and use their political connections to make it go away.