Skip to main content

The Billionaires Club

By



Normally, lining up a whole bunch of billionaires to support you would be a bad call, but in this election year it seems anything goes.  Hillary has gotten the support of billionaires ranging from Michael Bloomberg to Meg Whitman.  When you add the net wealth of these two along with Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban, George Soros and others it is well over $150 billion, dwarfing the $10 billion Trump claims to have.

However, Trump being Trump, belittles all these heavy hitters, calling Bloomberg "Little Michael," and retracting all the nice things he once had to say of Warren Buffett.  He even palled around with George Soros at one time, but not anymore.  His campaign advisers are probably glad Soros threw his considerable resources behind Clinton, as George is generally seen as a "bad guy" in conservative circles.

You have to think Berniecrats are none too happy about this strategy of fighting a billionaire with billionaires.  It is kind of like fighting fire with fire, everyone gets burned.  But, the Hillary camp seems to think having all these billionaires line up behind her diminishes Trump stature, and elevates her economic creds.

To be fair, Warren Buffett has repeatedly said that billionaires have to pay a greater share of the tax burden and is a major advocate of alternative energy solutions.  He has poured big money into wind energy and seems keen on breaking the oil cartel.  But, still a billionaire is a billionaire even if he came from very humble origins, unlike the Republican nominee Donald Trump.

I suppose there is a good story in all this that Hillary can sell to Americans.  No one represents the Horatio Alger myth better than Warren Buffett who began building his fortune as a teenager off pinball machines.  Bloomberg also has a humble background and has given billions through his philanthropic foundations to a wide variety of concerns.  These are billionaires with clear consciences, so we can't say all billionaires are bad.  However, what drives Buffett and Bloomberg is of little interest to those who support Donald Trump, and the Donald knows this, which is why he feels he can belittle them even if these two are worth a hell of a lot more than he is.

It's similar to the way Putin has brought billionaires to heel in Russia, although it is argued that Putin may very well be the richest man in the world.  Putin has been able to successfully present himself as a "proletarian," by maintaining a relatively frugal standard of living on the surface in contrast to the Russian oligarchs conspicuously blowing their money on sports teams, high end flats in New York and yachts in the Mediterranean.

Trump doesn't worry about the frugal part, but he does try to present himself as one of the folks with his trucker caps and coarse language.  This is what separates him apart from the likes of "Little Michael," who holds himself above everyone else with his haughty airs.  Trump would like persons to think of him as Cledus Snow, whose handle was "Snowman" on Smokey and the Bandit.  It's the perfect theme song for his campaign, much better than "You Can't Always Get What You Want."  Who knows how this election will play out, but it is safe to say that lining up billionaires in your support isn't going to stop Trump, anymore than Sheriff Buford T. Pusser was ever able to get Snowman and the Bandit.

Hillary has to start thinking outside the box as her 9-point lead isn't going to hold up once the Khan story plays out.  They Olympic Games have already muted it.  Her campaign has to find creative ways to battle Trump, puncturing holes into this myth he has created of himself as a "blue collar billionaire."  What they need is the original "silver spoon," and force him to gag on it.  Let's say, reviving that old show, This Is Your Life, but making it look like The Twilight Zone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more