By Matt Rooney
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Have you seen Clint Eastwood’s Wall Street Journal interview, Save Jerseyans? Check it out.
The legendary silver screen actor, director, and rare right-of-center Hollywood icon is pulling for… Mike Bloomberg. That’s right. The last man alive who embodies the rugged Western individualism pictured in many of his own films is openly supportive of the guy (Bloomberg) who embodies preachy coastal elitism.
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Look: I think it’s always a mistake to read too much into any one person’s thought process. Like Bloomberg, Eastwood has been all over the partisan map for years (Republican, independent, and now libertarian). Still, his movies tend to please the Right more than the Left. He was an independent mayor for two years in a small town and famously endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012.
How can a self-professed libertarian get behind a guy who hates guns and banned soda?
“The politics has gotten so ornery,” Eastwood told WSJ, and while he does like “certain things that Trump’s done,” Eastwood says he’d prefer it if the incumbent president conducted himself “in a more genteel way, without tweeting and calling people names. I would personally like for him to not bring himself to that level.”
“The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there,” Eastwood concluded.
I’m going to play amateur shrink and make some assumptions here, but I believe they’re pretty good ones:
1) FYI: U.S. presidential politics is and always will be primarily personality game, even in the current super-charged, unusually ideological climate. There are people out there – a lot of them – who believe “the man” is far more important than the issue. They aren’t single issue voters or platform scrutinizers. They don’t necessarily assign credit for good news including the robust economy though they sometimes assign blame if things get bad enough. Some even think issue agnosticism is proof that they’re smarter than the ideological types.
2) A lot of other people (and there’s considerable overlap with the category above, of course) are simply looking for an excuse to vote against the Donald in 2020. Duh. They don’t like him. The way he talks, tweets, combs his hair and brushes his teeth. Eastwood is obviously one of them. They want a another reset after the Trump reset, and everyone who feels this way isn’t a confirmed socialist.
3) Bloomberg undeniably exhibits autocratic tendencies (most mayors of the Big Apple do). Many of his ideas are confirmed Leftist positions including his call for massive tax hikes and openness to a modified version of the Green New Deal. All of that aside, his business successes, outspoken criticism of socialism, and the general perception that he was the last “good” mayor of New York after Giuliani are probably enough to give some Trump haters – possibly a lot of Trump haters – the necessary comfort level to at least hear Bloomberg out.
4) Trump is a populist, not a conservative. One of the vulnerabilities of this approach? The loyalty he’s getting from conservative voters is almost entirely predicated on his being a firewall against the Leftist hordes. These voters care less about “making America great” so much as “keeping America from being a Nordic socialist hell dystopia.” If the Democrat candidate doesn’t seem too scary? Their loyalty could – not definitely, but could – weaken a bit.
5) For all of these reason, Mike Bloomberg is probably the Donald’s greatest threat at the moment. I’m not saying he’ll win! Relax. Only that he’s got a far better chance of winning a general than Comrade Sanders, Uncle Joe or the rest of the Democrat clown car. Forget all of the (largely self-interested) critical debate reviews you’re reading and hearing. It obviously didn’t dissuade Dirty Harry. Debates almost always matter for very little. Money and narrative are co-regents in this realm especially in the primary stage. Billionaire Bloomberg has the money is abundance. The narrative part is trickier; he’s presenting “sane” enough to appease many Trump phobic voters at the moment, but his vision remains undefined. He needs more than an anti-Trump message. A lot more. He needs a real answer to ‘Keep America Great,’ a problem Democrats have struggled with for four years now. My only point is that if he does come up with something – and he’s got big money people working for him that are good at marketing – he’s the best positioned Democrat to make a go of this thing.
6) POTUS can’t take 2020 for granted. I think there’s a growing sense of complacency among some Trump supporters given the Democrat field’s almost comically-long list of troubles; I picked up on it a bit from my conversations at the Wildwood rally. A certain sense of inevitability is creeping in? And I know his core supporters showed up in force in Iowa and New Hampshire this winter, but it should be a real concern. He doesn’t need Eastwood’s vote out in California, true, but he does need non-MAGA hat wearing, Eastwood-like voters in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to break his way (again) in November to maintain his tenuous grip on the Electoral College map. I’m not suggesting he bail on Twitter. I am suggesting it might be time to talk about something other than Hillary Clinton’s emails and the now concluded impeachment process – how about the stellar economy?! – to keep more “Eastwoods” from looking elsewhere.
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