Hey there, folks!
It’s time to add another writing from my past to The Vault. This piece has quite an interesting history behind it.
It was November 2019 and we’ve already had four Democratic Party presidential debates. Biden led polls with 27% while Warren and Sanders battled for second place with both polling a little under 20%. There was fifth debate the next day and then, whispers of a Bloomberg shadow campaign crop up.
I hated Michael Bloomberg.
I still hate Michael Bloomberg.
Ultimately, this piece came about out of frustration towards him and the other two billionaires (Trump and Steyer) running in this election. I became more of a populist-type in the 2020 cycle while I was figuring out my general political beliefs and that definitely guided a lot of my writing.
While I still have a bit of a soft spot for populist left-wing campaigning and consider myself a progressive, you can definitely see in my writing here a lot more of this than you’d see today.
Writing this piece for my student newspaper, here’s an interesting caveat that garnered a bit of controversy.
I didn’t choose the title of this piece. That was the editor’s job.
When I saw my article published with the headline “Stop letting billionaires run for president,” I let out a deep sigh. Listen, I knew what they meant by the article title I wrote the content, but boy could it be taken a whole other way.
And it was.
I remember in particular this one person calling me an “anti-democratic piece of shit” for the article. All I could think back was “well… you definitely didn’t read past the title.”
I promise you, folks, I don’t think we should ban people from seeking the presidency solely due to their wealth!
If *I* had been given the ability to name the title, I probably would’ve labelled it “Being A Billionaire Doesn’t Qualify You To Be President” Or “Billionaires Shouldn't Run For President Just Because They Can.” But alas, that wasn’t the case.
Let me know what you all think of the article!
Stop Letting Billionaires Run For President (or, alternatively, “Being A Billionaire Doesn’t Qualify You To Be President”)
Originally published: November 18, 2019
Sometimes you can only sigh and roll your eyes when certain things happen.
On Nov. 8, Michael Bloomberg, former Republican/Independent mayor of New York City and 14th richest person in the world, filed to be on the ballot for Alabama's Democratic presidential primary.
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