In quick succession on Monday and Tuesday, two high-profile Democrats moved into the definite ‘no’ column for a 2020 presidential bid. That’s 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, who both announced they won’t be running.
“I’m not running, but I’m going to keep on working and speaking and standing up for what I believe. I want to be sure that people understand I’m going to keep speaking out.”
Oh, I think people already understand that.
Clinton spoke to a crowd at Rutgers University last March.
Someone asked her what her response is to people who say she should “get off the stage and shut up” after losing the election to Donald Trump in 2016.
The former secretary of state answered:
“They never said that to any man who was not elected.”
Dude, we never heard this much from the men who were not elected!
We would have said the same thing to them.
We hardly heard a peep out of Mitt Romney after he lost in 2012. Just an appropriate, tasteful amount of debriefing statements and then he ghosted.
He’s even a U.S. senator for the state of Utah now after winning an election in 2018, and we still haven’t heard from him like we’ve heard from Mrs. Clinton: Mitt Romney made one blip in January with a hackneyed anti-Trump op-ed.
But we haven’t heard out of him a tenth of one percent of the noise Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has made since pulling Rep. Joe Crowley’s seat out from under him.
I wonder how many people even know Mitt Romney’s a senator now.
We heard a lot from John McCain after he lost in 2008, but that’s a different story. He was still a senator after he lost, and we hadn’t stopped hearing from him since the 1970s already. He was a loud, ambitious, attention hog like HRC.
Billionaire Wall Streeter and former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday :
“I know we can do better as a country. And I believe I would defeat Donald Trump in a general election. But I am clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.”
He was being realistic about his chances in what is shaping up to be an absolute media circus of a 2020 Democratic Primary competition to rival the show Republicans put on for the nation in 2011 and 2012.
Instead, Bloomberg is launching “Beyond Carbon:”
“[A] grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean-energy economy.”
Actually, Elon Musk already launched that.
Instead of lobbying lawyers to centrally plan the economy, Musk entices people to voluntarily spend their money to build the clean, renewable energy infrastructure of the future.
If Bloomberg wanted to make an interesting announcement he should have said he’s launching Beyond Carbon, a cutting-edge, high-tech solar panel startup.
But instead of building something good for the environment himself, he’s going to force taxpayers to build it for him and then take the credit. Just like he did as the mayor of New York City.
Just like he supported forcing the taxpayers to rebuild New York City’s busted finance industry when he supported the 2008 TARP bailouts for Wall Street banks.
The fading away from 2020 of these two giants of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg, signals the Ocasio-Cortez / Sanders wing is advancing.
So too does the vociferous opposition we saw from Democrats to Howard Schultz’s outside-the-party-system, moderate-liberal-independent 2020 campaign.
Wall Street billionaires and high finance stalwarts like Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton just won’t do for the Democratic Party of today. Honestly, they weren’t up to scratch for 2016, but as we now know, they kept a grip on power through less than honorable means.
Bernie Sanders came within a striking distance of defeating Hillary Clinton in what was supposed to be an inevitable 2016 coronation for her after waiting her turn behind Obama who cut in line spectacularly in 2008.
Now he’s running in 2020, and the former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who resigned from that position to chair his 2016 campaign, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), is running too.
Meanwhile, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders’ far more telegenic protégé, has won near Trumpian levels of attention from the mainstream media and Twitterati.
One might say the young Turks are loose in the Democratic Party and ready for their turn to – as AOC herself actually said – “run a train on the progressive agenda.”
But the actual Young Turks of history wanted more constitutional government and less absolute government authority.