Bloomberg is setting the trap, he knows Trump will take the bait and say something way crazy. Countdown until he calls him a jew b*stard or says something about loving money. Naw he will probably just retweet a wildly offensive anti Semitic tweet.
My prediction. If Bloomberg makes it the next 2 weeks and nothing else comes out thats wildly problematic I think he shoots up to the lead. People are gonna like him taking it to Trump.
Oh yeah. He knows what he's doing. Put it this way: He entered the race by telling Trump he'd give him $10 Billion to leave the White House in 24 hours. The man knows how to draw attention. I will consider Bloomberg the front runner until he bows out or loses primaries in double figures.
My favorite has been Klobuchar but never had any belief in her ability to win the primary. I therefore go for Biden because I think he can win. Now he seems shakier than ever. Id be good with Bloomberg. I’d vote for any of the three of them in a heartbeat. Mayor Pete just not convinced he can win a national election. obviously I’m not in favor of Bernie.
"So you want to buy an election?" https://theweek.com/articles/894142/want-buy-election essay: Billionaire Mike Bloomberg has made it clear he is going to try to buy the presidency. His campaign spent over $188 million of his own money in just the last quarter of 2019, more than all other candidates combined, and he has already spent more than $300 million on ads. He says he is prepared to spend a billion dollars of his $61 billion fortune. If he is going to buy this election, though, he should at least do it more directly. So far, basically all of Bloomberg's money is going to highly-paid political consultants and to giant ad buys directed to television networks and massive social media companies. Sure, he is offering $150 to people with modest followings on social media to try to make him look popular, but this firehose of campaign money is mostly directed at people and companies with plenty of money already. Let's at least make sure some of this tsunami of cash trickles down. What Bloomberg should do is pledge to donate $5 to worthy causes for every $1 dollar he spends on traditional campaign tactics. This would do four things: 1. Let him shamelessly try to buy the election more directly by putting money in key voters pockets. 2. Prove he is serious about his plan to raise taxes on rich people like himself, since $5 billion is easily how much more he would have paid if his tax plan had been in place before. 3. Prove his commitment to specific issues that are important to Democratic voters. 4. Have zero negative impact on his life because even after giving $5 billion away he would still be one of the 20 richest people on earth. Bloomberg could prove his commitment to climate change while courting super Tuesday voters by promising to personally pay for major public transit system fares this year, making them free in the Boston area ($664 million), the San Francisco Bay area ($479 million), Los Angeles ($285 million), Denver ($149 million), Dallas ($63 million), Houston ($62 million), Salt Lake City ($53.4 million), and Austin ($22.5 million). All together that would cost less than $2 billion. Bloomberg could also show support for teachers and education by reimbursing every teacher for the amount they currently spend out of pocket on school supplies, which is around $459 dollars per teacher. That would be only about $1.5 billion. Or Bloomberg could show his concern for the least fortunate by personally paying for interim housing for every unsheltered homeless person in the city of Los Angeles for a year, which would cost just $657 million. Or his commitment to reproductive rights by directly covering the cost for the 53 percent of women who pay out of pocket for an abortion. This would be only about $320 million. Or his commitment to children by personally paying off all school children's current meal debt to end lunch shaming this year. This shouldn't cost more than $100 million. Bloomberg could, in fact, do all of these things this year and still not spend $5 billion.
"Bloomberg vs. Trump would be a clash of oligarchs": https://theweek.com/articles/895717/bloomberg-vs-trump-clash-oligarchs excerpt: The number one priority of Democrats in 2020 is to beat President Trump. But their second most pressing goal must be to keep Michael Bloomberg from becoming the person who gets to try and eject him from office in November. I'm no Marxist and don't usually don't find class-based analysis especially compelling. But this is an exceptional case. The president of the United States is a billionaire businessman from Manhattan, and a rival billionaire businessman from Manhattan is using vast sums of his personal wealth to buy the opposition party's nomination for president so he can take the other billionaire down. That's bad. Really bad. If we saw it happening in another country, we'd say it shows that the country is a place where politics at the highest levels amounts to a popularity contest between feuding oligarchs. And we would be right. more at the link
Is it really any worse than the Kennedy or Clinton or Bush nominations where we picked people partly based on family connections (successful or not)? What are the odds that George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush all would have independently made Presidential runs if not for their names? Or Hillary? or all the various Kennedys that have held office and largely revered?
I find all of it some what disturbing, but I will gladly take Bloomberg over Trump. We do not want the country to be ruled by the ultra rich at the policy level, but I also think it is some what convenient to come down hard on Bloomberg because of who the current President is.
you know you're a shitty Democratic candidate if you've lost Robert Reich https://www.truthdig.com/articles/robert-reich-bloomberg-wants-to-buy-our-democracy/ excerpts: RBloomberg Wants to Buy Our Democracy by Robert Reich Bad enough that a tyrant is destroying American democracy. Now an oligarch is trying to buy the presidency. Michael Bloomberg’s net worth is over $60 billion. The yearly return on $60 billion is at least $2 billion – which is what Bloomberg says he’ll pour into buying the highest office in the land. I’m not saying that great wealth should disqualify you from becoming president. America has had some talented and capable presidents who were enormously wealthy – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, for example. The problem lies at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain great power. This is how oligarchy destroys democracy. So far, Bloomberg spent over $380 million on campaign advertising. That’s more than Hillary Clinton spent on advertising during her entire presidential run. It’s multiples of what all other Democratic candidates have spent, including billionaire Tom Steyer. Encouraged by the murky outcome from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, Bloomberg has doubled his spending on TV commercials in every market where he is currently advertising and is expanding his campaign’s field staff to more than 2,000. *** Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee is putting Bloomberg onto the debate stage by abandoning the individual-donor threshold that it used for the first eight debates, presumably because Bloomberg – the self-funded billionaire – doesn’t take donations. To participate in the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, Democratic candidates need to show at least 10 percent support in four national polls. Bloomberg’s wall-to-wall advertising makes that pretty much inevitable. He recently came in third place in a Morning Consult tracking poll, behind just Sanders and Biden. And he’s in the top four in many Super Tuesday states. Bloomberg has some attractive policy ideas about gun control, the environment, and a more progressive tax. But he’s also a champion of Wall Street. He fought against the reforms following the near meltdown of the Street in 2008. His personal fortune is every bit as opaque as Trump’s. Through his dozen years as mayor of New York he refused to disclose his federal taxes. Even as a candidate for president, he still hasn’t given a date for their release. And because he hasn’t taken individual donations, hasn’t appeared on the debate stage, and bases his entire campaign on TV advertising, he isn’t being held accountable for his despicable record on race and criminal justice – the discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy he implemented when he was mayor, or his defense of red-lining. And, remember, he’s trying to buy the presidency. The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people. Since 1980, the share of America’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has declined. The richest 130,000 families now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent – 117 million families – combined. The three richest Americans own as much as the bottom half. Michael Bloomberg is the eighth richest. Big money inevitably engulfs politics, which is why a handful of extremely rich people like Bloomberg have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons of the early 20th century. Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else. And as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else has become dis-empowered. Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy. Bloomberg is indubitably part of that oligarchy. If the only way we can get rid of a sociopathic tyrant named Trump is with an oligarch named Bloomberg, we will be forced to choose the oligarch. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Oligarchy is better than tyranny. But neither is as good as democracy.
I think it's weird, but I also think it's all overstated. And we have a long history of picking candidates for dumb reasons, so he's not unique in that regard. You can buy lesser offices because people don't otherwise know the candidates, but you can't buy the Presidency - money is overrated after a certain level in these campaigns. No one is likely voting for Bloomberg because they hadn't heard of Biden or Bernie. And Hillary's campaign had twice as much money as Trump's. The money can get him on the stage, but he'll still have to win it on his own merits. We hate lobbyists because of their influence and we hate that politicians spend so much time fundraising. Now we have a person that completely eliminates both of those and we hate that too.
Nevada early Caucus is tomorrow. I think I'm pulling the lever for Bloomberg. The wife is a big Bernie supporter in spite of all the taxes he is going to raise on the middle class. To his credit, Bernie is at least honest about those taxes.
