I have a couple of Jewish friends in their 60’s who I’m quite certain voted for Trump. I’m reasonably sure they would vote for Bloomberg this time around. So we got that going for us. I can definitely see Bloomberg buying his way into office. But I do think his VP choice is a bigger deal than it normally would be. I’m thinking we’ll be getting a failed Presidential candidate as a running mate regardless of who wins the nomination. Or do we get Tim Kaine again?
He did #goonchapo so he’s likely a bernie bro.
He’s the leader in delegates so maybe he’s just a big fan of things like the electoral college.
Yeah, no, I absolutely get it. To say he’s viewing the problem incorrectly is a huge understatement. The way to fix ‘black crime’ is to fix black poverty full stop. Povery = crime.
Part of the problem from a mayors perspective though is that poverty is a national issue, and you’ll never, no matter how much of the cities budget you dedicate to it, solve that problem.
Bloomberg wanted NYC to be the best city in the world when he ran NYC. The way he chose to get that done was to expel the minorities (who like most places in the US were disproportionately poor) from the city with official harassment to make way for gentrification. And today NYC has insanely low crime rates because there are by comparison no poor people left to commit those crimes.
I want to be super clear here, nothing about that is OK. At the same time I feel like every city in America over the last 20 years has been doing the same shitty tragedy of the commons math.
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Crime rates fell everywhere. Gentrification happened everywhere. Crime fell in LA where community policing was embraced and broken window policies abandoned (results of oversight after abuse). Bloomberg will surely continue to get credit because God damn this country loves busting heads, but it’s unearned.
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I don’t disagree… but I think it’s fair to say that LA has gone through quite a bit of gentrification as well right?
If you remove the poor people from an area crime falls. The problem in 2021 is that the way we did that was to force them to leave instead of uplifting them to the same economic level as their neighbors.
And let’s be really clear crime rates fell nationwide and in most places, but definitely not everywhere. In quite a few places that are majority minority they stayed the same or got worse.
I’m not denying crime and poverty are linked, just that Bloomberg doesn’t deserve credit.
Oh yeah no I’m not trying to give him credit. I’m trying to explain his thinking. He, as a mayor, was trying to make his city look like his idea of an ideal city… and in that vision there were no poor people almost at all. Stop and frisk made life extremely unpleasant for a community that was disproportionately poor. That was a feature not a bug.
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I’m likely not a good measure for these kinds of things due to being a little odd and out-of-touch with the mainstream, but his adds come across to me as very awkward and even cringeworthy.
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I think what a lot of us are relieved about is that it seems like Biden is donezo. If we have to have a dem E, it has to be an anybody but Biden situation at this point.
https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1227441327551500290?s=20
FACT CHECK: bernie sanders is a US senator from the northeast
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Bernie at least was a middle class mayor though, so Pete not far off.
I didn’t realize I lived in the industrial Midwest. Where’s my diner expose in the NYT?
The more I think about the potential of Bloomberg winning, the more I think that he’d also be the end of American democracy. Instead of a fascist authoritarian regime, he’d usher in a never-ending string of freely elected oligarchs.
Once all the multi-billionaires know they can buy the election and know the price tag, there will always be one doing it, and they’ll almost always win.
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Trump to Bloomberg certainly wouldn’t be a good sign.
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You guys who think billionaires can just buy these elections really need to explain Steyer’s polling numbers.