If the Democrats have cluttered the Presidential race with a lot of candidates, Michael Bloomberg may well be the solution to the problem. Bloomberg’s decision to run is a true, unequivocal gamechanger. The Democratic presidential candidates have been sending very mixed messages to the electorate.
Bloomberg is running for the stated reason of removing Trump. No ideological theatrics, no rhetoric, surprisingly little hype. That’s his reason, and it sounds like he’ll be specifically targeting Trump’s many weak spots.
There’s another somewhat less obvious issue here. Bloomberg is a major league billionaire. Trump is nowhere near his size in assets. Bloomberg is a highly respected senior billionaire, too, in the very top tier in the United States. Trump is a relative garden gnome in terms of both assets and multi-sector reach. Think Godzilla vs Bambi, and you see the financial sector perspective. The contrast at business and corporate level couldn’t be more severe. Trump turns over businesses, associates and appointees like cornflakes. Bloomberg has a pretty strong record of doing the exact opposite.
With due respect to the other Democratic candidates – Bloomberg is above all the Democrat who can get respect from the financial sector. He’s one of them, at the top level. He speaks the language of big business, which seems to be a problem for some of the other Democrat candidates.
More to the point from the Democrat perspective – He reaches across the various Democrat factional issues, too. He’s pro-choice, pro-environment, anti-sugar, etc., for example. His position on all the major core progressive issues is clear, and has been for decades.
The Alt Right clichés won’t work on Bloomberg
It’d be a bit difficult for the Republicans (or whatever the GOP post-Trump can be called) to call Bloomberg a “socialist”. There aren’t too many billionaire socialists. You could hardly call a guy who’s been around as long as him a “snowflake”, either.
His commitment to green causes puts him diametrically in opposition to the Trump party. He’s on record as saying the American government may have pulled out of the Paris Agreement, but the American people haven’t. He backed that up with the America’s Pledge coalition, an ongoing response to climate change. So there’s no point in bellowing the usual “climate hoax” at Bloomberg. If the Alt Right runs out of clichés, what does it have? Nothing.
National Profile
Nobody needs to be told who Bloomberg is. He has an almost ideal market profile. Prior to 2016, Trump got more profile on The Apprentice and WWE than he got in US media. Bloomberg has always been somewhere in the mix where the movers and shakers are, and that’s the sort of profile that drives informed voters. The guy oozes experience because he’s had so much experience. That image would be very hard to apply to many candidates in recent history, let alone 2020.
Another thing Bloomberg can bring to the table is nationwide credibility on the ground. Unlike Trump, Bloomberg has vast experience at ground level. As mayor of New York, he got a fairly brusque introduction to the realities of America’s cities. He knows the urban issues, the social issues, and the very tough, seemingly endless problems the cities are facing. He speaks “Municipal American”, a language few can speak, and speaks it well.
Let’s face it – Sooner or later, preferably a lot sooner, America will vote for someone who knows what he or she is doing. It’s more or less inevitable that the next wave will be correcting the previous, as in most major electoral shifts. There are so many issues, in so many areas. The Democrat ticking just about all of the boxes is Bloomberg. The slogan Rebuild America couldn’t be more timely.
