Vice President Mike Pence took a dig at 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg for his comments about farmers.
The vice president, who hails from the agriculture hub of Indiana, tweeted on Monday a commercial made by Dodge for the 2013 Super Bowl, with the caption, “So God Made a Farmer.”
So God Made a Farmer ?? pic.twitter.com/sbXSugMNyO
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) February 17, 2020
The commercial features a 1978 speech from radio broadcaster Paul Harvey.
“God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.’ So God made a farmer,” Harvey said.
In remarks that resurfaced in recent days ahead of the Nevada debate on Wednesday, Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, told an audience at Oxford University’s business school in 2016 that he “could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”
Bloomberg continued: “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98% of the world worked in agriculture, now it’s 2% in the United States.”
Pence wasn’t alone in mocking Bloomberg for his oversimplified take on farming, as outrage spread on social media.
[Read more: Deep blue Democratic Virginia spurns Bloomberg]
Time and time again we see Bloomberg insulting the middle class and the working class, union members and not yet union members
Maybe it’s time for pundits to stop pretending he’s just another candidate
Bloomberg is an oligarch spending his play money to buy the White House https://t.co/9ybob6ztID
— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) February 16, 2020
Farmers work with astonishingly sophisticated information technology every day. But I suspect Mike Bloomberg doesn’t know a lot of people with modern combines. https://t.co/ftY2wmfFPc
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) February 16, 2020
Bloomberg: mocking American #farmers is no way to unify the country. He might as well have called them #deplorable #rubes. Way to reveal yourself https://t.co/MSQB2z4Vi3
— John Kass (@John_Kass) February 17, 2020
So far, oppo research on Bloomberg has dug up past comments alienating…
African-Americans
Women
Farmers
Teachers unions
Civil libertariansAt this rate, there won’t be anyone left to be offended by Super Tuesday. https://t.co/zKEovgDueF
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) February 17, 2020
Bloomberg’s campaign responded to the backlash.
“It’s a shameful turn of events to see Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump deploy the very same attacks and tactics against Mike, but the reason is clear. At this point, the primary is Bernie’s to lose, and ours to win. Bernie knows this. Trump knows this. That’s why they are united in the campaign against Mike,” Bloomberg’s team said in a statement.
