Nothing new or surprising here from Eastwood. He pretty right leaning and him being ok for the most part with Trump yet backing a different racist rich white dude is apropos for him. Thankfully i don’t care what he has to say.
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Bloomberg has already spent damn near half a billion dollars in about 2 months of campaigning. That’s closing up on half of what a full presidential campaign costs.
If he genuinely cared about more than himself. Throwing that much money at voter registration and turn out, unconnected to any specific candidate. Would probably guarantee a Trump loss and seriously shift the face of the American electorate long term.
Instead he’s explicitly campaigning on his ability to buy an election. On the claim that only some one who can buy the election out of pocket can beat Trump.
Carville’s on most TV news these days. His involvement in Bill Clinton’s election fucking 25 years ago has given him an image as some sort of political savant who can clearly see what’s going on. With predictions and analysis that’s worth listening to. Nevermind that he’s been wrong on every election post Clinton and hasn’t been all that directly involved in politics since then 90’s.
He’s basically some one your grandma remembers being important who’s good for colorful sound bites. Which is why you only see and hear about him on the TV news Networks, and only in election years.
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To give him credt, he apparently was already doing that even before entering the race:
And quite a lot of his prodigious advertising so far has been anti-Trump, not anti-other-candidates, though of course also pro Bloomie.
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Common interest in recreational police thuggery?
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Carville may be dead to Democrats but the fear of Bernie among centrists is alive and well. There’s even rumors that Bloomberg will ask Hillary to be his running mate.
Bloomberg will be poised to pull the people who are scared of Bernie and Trump on both sides.
I don’t think “centrists” are sufficiently scared of Bloomberg. He is a Republican and his supposed “realist” appeal is actually petty authoritarianism. His personal wealth and conflicts of interest are staggering, and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say his election would signal the end of a functional republic (if that hasn’t already happened). He owns a giant news org for crying out loud… He’s basically Crassus, except unlike him, I don’t think we can count on Bloomberg getting beheaded in Turkey.
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Eastwood’s endorsement isn’t an indication of how much centrist Democrats fear Bernie. He’s an indication of how much establishment Republicans loathe Trump.
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I have heard the “I wish trump wouldn’t tweet so much” concern from some of the trump supporters I know. I think it is the good hearted folks who know they are in a corner when pressured to defend his statements.
So this “less tweeting” thing is more about Trump’s big mouth making him look bad, and not necessarily his actions.
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I guess Eastwood is OK with the whole children in cages thing, as long as no one says it out loud?
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“Trump says the quiet parts loud, and that’s just unpleasant for everyone. Otherwise, I like him.”
Ugh. Don’t you have some jingoistic propaganda to make, Clint?
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Eastwood speaks for the people afraid of Trump on the right. Carville speaks for people on the left afraid of Bernie. I’m speaking for people afraid of Bloomberg capitalizing on those fears.
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Unlike the chair, Trump says the quiet parts out-loud.
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Or they’re not really looking at his actual actions, but instead believing the alternate reality Trump/Fox/Uncle Lou on Facebook assessment that Trump is helping America and all good people by kicking the right asses and taking names.
He also dumped millions into propping up at risk GOP congressmen in 2018 because they were amenable to his particular take on gun control. Which may have helped maintain the narrow control the GOP have of the Senate.
There is spending in there that’s generally beneficial. But the biggest expenditures since 2016 have been pretty narrowly focused on Bloomberg’s interests and not in any sort of consistent push back against Trump or the GOP.
And his more direct, traditional campaigning for the nomination has been almost entirely anti-Sanders with a side line in anti-Warren. To the point where those strategy leaks a few weeks ago outlining his campaign’s stock responses to criticisms and weak spots included a lot of changing the subject to attacking Sanders or scaremongering about progressives.
It’s not for nothing that his first major move in his first debate was to ape GOP “communist Russia bad” attacks. His attacks on Trump have mostly boiled down to “I’m a real billionaire” and “I can beat him”, with very little substance or actual policy proposals. And even in regards to testing other candidates, there’s been very little substance to his attacks on Sanders and Warren.
He is very much openly trading on GOP and investor class fears about the rise of progressives. So frankly I don’t think all that money he’s spending is helping the situation. And I’d expect that voter registration push is more about generating votes for himself, than in generating up and down the ballot success for the DNC.
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From this article we get this quote, possibly referencing the experiment I was initially searching for:
“Other studies found that both people and monkeys pay more attention to high-status individuals and are more likely to follow their gaze.”
And then there’s this one:
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I agree heartily; I just can’t like this.
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Gotcha. I miss facts, a lot.
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They’ve already said that the campaign won’t take Bloomberg’s money, and that’s the right choice.
If Bloomberg wants to run a bunch of anti Trump ads on his own, that would be great. (Probably, his ads have been seriously hit-or-miss so far.)
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Even Buttigieg and Biden are going after Bloomberg for the baldness of his campaign spending. And his staffers are getting banned from social media for astroturfing.
Even if there’s a practical why the fuck not case for going along with it. Bloomberg’s spending is turning into a negative storyline in its own right. At a certain point directly engaging with it is maybe more of a problem for any other candidate than it is a benefit.
That sort of speaks to the dumbfuckery of his run. He’s not well liked across the board in NY, and not well known outside of NY. He’s not a consensus figure, not involved in Democratic politics. He hasn’t held elected office in nearly a decade. His major connections are to the investor class who many play both sides, and vote GOP. And to the media, where he’s highly visible because he’s part of their industry.
His major case for his campaign is that he can beat Trump because he’s rich. Not really anything on a policy or movement front. And he’s barrelled directly into the divisive spat he wants to blame on progressives. On behalf of a subset of big money donors that seem to be the prime instigators of that spat, for the sake of wining that spat.
So he doesn’t exactly have fertile ground for actually building support, outside of media assumptions that he sounds like the sort of candidate that can appeal to some nebulous average American.
If his actual interest is in using his money as a hammer to undercut Trump. Running is kinda tainting that attempt.
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His actual interest in using his money as a hammer to undercut Sanders. Trump isn’t going to raise his taxes.
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