It’s a classic Hollywood film script. The ‘good’ gunfighter has to buckle on his six-gun just one more time to take on the ‘bad’ gunfighter. Whether the ‘bad’ guy is coming in on the noon train or waiting down behind the livery barn, there is always a lot of worrying and fretting by the town folk.
And all you have to do is substitute billionaire for gunfighter and you have the current situation in the good-old U.S. of A. It is multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg pitting his billions against Donald Trump’s billions to see who spends the next four years running things from the White House.
It has come to who wants to spend the most money. The expert at this is actually Bloomberg. He spent hundreds of millions on his three self-financed campaigns for the New York mayoralty, while his wealth kept growing by the billions. And when you are among the 15 richest people in the world, what’s another 100 million dollars?
Compared to Bloomberg, Trump might be considered just a petty grifter who bamboozled his way to a few billion.
The serious difference is that Bloomberg built his empire on his skills as a security broker with high technology smarts and a sense of what the business audience really needs: timely news and information.
In practice, Michael Bloomberg is considered more of a right-wing liberal, than a social conservative. He seems to be able to live with abortions and same sex marriages but some of his business-oriented solutions to social issues, while mayor of New York, came to unhappy endings. He has been both Republican and Democratic and is quite independent. And with the money he has to spend, why not?
He is only a year younger than Bernie Sanders but obviously better preserved. You can be sure he would not want Bernie Sanders on the Democratic ticket with him. That would be unless his pollsters told him he needed more credibility on Medicare.
But it has come to this, ladies and gentlemen. One presidency is up for auction. Gone once, gone twice, sold to the gentleman at the back of the room with $58 billion to spend.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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