Yesterday evening, NBC’s Lester Holt and his colleagues tried valiantly to ask questions of six presidential candidates in Las Vegas, ahead of Saturday’s Second in the Nation Presidential Caucus, even as thousands of Latinos and other people of color are voting early (but we thought that to caucus, you had to be there in person…)
One former Republican — Michael Bloomberg — and one former Liberty Union Party member, who proudly and defiantly describes himself as a Democratic Socialist (but not a Communist) stood on a stage in the Gambling Capital of the United States.
Michael Bloomberg was a Democrat until he did a switcheroo and became a Republican to run for Mayor of Gotham — as a
Republican — in 2001. He won a second term as Mayor in 2005 and left the Republican Party two years later. At that time, New York City had a law that said nobody could be elected Mayor for a third term, so Bloomberg told New Yorkers to change Gotham’s laws so he could run for a third term, which they did; then he became an Independent on the Republican ballot line. His final day as Mayor of our biggest city was the last day of 2013, when we still had a good President.
Bloomberg is the ninth-richest person in the United States and the twelfth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $61 billion, and he’s proud of that. He’s far richer than Donald Trump, and, at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, he gave a rousing speech in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and against Trump, but Hillary failed to pay attention to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and our exceptional nation has been paying a very heavy price for her bad campaign, ever since.
Another man on the stage at the debate, broadcast by NBC, was Bernie Sanders, who, like Bloomberg, is 78. Yes, Sanders was a Liberty Union candidate more than once — and right now polls show him leading in California….
After Bernie moved to Vermont, he ran, in 1972 and 1976, for Governor as a member of the Liberty Union Party, which started as an anti-war movement party during the disastrous Vietnam War. He also ran as the candidate of the Liberty Union Party for U S Senator in 1974 (Bernie did a lot of running in those days), and he’s still running hard; but Bernie is the 2020 version of George McGovern, who won Massachusetts but not his home state of South Dakota.
In his 1974 Senate race, Bernie came in third behind Patrick Leahy, a Democrat (unlike Bernie), and Senator Leahy is the Green Mountain State’s Senior Senator.
Then, in 1980, Bernie was elected Mayor of Burlington by a margin of ten votes. By then, Bernie proudly held himself forth as a Socialist.
In 1985, Sanders hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky (a man Donald Trump is totally unaware of). Introducing Chomsky, a True Radical if there ever was one, Bernie praised Chomsky as “a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America.”
Bernie is an Independent, but he caucuses with the Senate Democrats, and the DNC graciously allows him to run in the Democratic presidential primary — and Trump seemingly now wants Bernie to be his opponent, now that he’s done great damage to Joe Biden.
At the debate yesterday evening, Elizabeth Warren went after Bloomberg straightaway, and much of the debate was consumed by the attacks on Bloomberg.
(We here at AP love Bloomberg’s anti-gun initiatives, but we have lots of reservations about his late, late candidacy, and his self-funding, which is greatly benefiting all the media outlets to whom he is paying millions and millions of big bucks.)
Our candidate, AMY KLOBUCHAR, and boyish Mayor Pete, got into it quite a bit; but they are both part of the ABT (Anybody but Trump) Movement, to which we wholeheartedly subscribe.
Joe Biden was on the stage too, and he reminded everybody that he came from Scranton from a working class family.
Today, Klobuchar was in Aurora, Colorado, at the Stanley Marketplace, and your solitary reporter was there, with at least one thousand cheering fans, while Donald Trump was, as usual, making a lot of noise, at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.
Aurora is the site of the infamous Aurora Theatre mass shooting.
At her rally at the Stanley Marketplace, Klobuchar gave a rousing speech, in which she listed, in detail, her positions on gun control, immigration, how to help students reduce their staggering student debt, and, most importantly, how to improve the Affordable Care Act instead of wiping it out, as Bernie wants to do.
Again, Bernie Sanders is the George McGovern of 2020 — both
idealists — but, folks, we gotta be sensible.
We predict that Klobuchar will do very well in Colorado, and elsewhere, on Super Tuesday.