The trouble with Tom Steyer is that he just doesn’t know his place.
The billionaire investor is not supposed to be running for president. He and his bottomless wallet are not supposed to be distracting from the dozens of Democratic politicians already climbing the greasy pole and struggling to raise a few measly bucks. As Democrats see it, Steyer is just supposed to be bankrolling them, even as they shrug off his pet causes.
The nerve of this guy.
He’s spent $50 million since President Trump’s election trying to rally voters around impeachment. Congressional Democrats view it as too politically risky. He’s spent hundreds of millions more to help elect Democrats by rallying voters around climate change. He spent $8 million in just one 2013 race, $73 million mostly losing races in 2014, $100 million mostly losing races in 2016, and $80 million with a few wins (but also a lot of important losses) in 2018.
He doesn’t seem to have learned the lesson that if your main issue is a dog like climate change, then no amount of money can buy any election. But he does at least seem to have learned a few things about Democratic politicians.
Democrats have, over time, learned how to bow and scrape for Steyer’s money while paying him mere lip service. In 2014, they even tied up the Senate floor with a meaningless all-night discussion of global warming, for the sole purpose of getting him to give money. They didn’t produce or propose any legislation, nor even work to get media coverage. It was all for an audience of one. As with this year’s vote on the Green New Deal, congressional Democrats are big believers, right up until it’s time to deliver.
So perhaps Steyer has finally figured out the game. If you want something done right, do it yourself.
A billionaire’s entry into a presidential race wouldn’t normally change things that much. What’s one more leftist on a stage of two dozen of them? And who, aside from the one-of-a-kind Donald Trump, has ever walked out of the business world and into the presidency as his first elected office?
But Steyer may be right in gambling that the Democratic race of 2020 looks a lot like the Republican race of 2016. Perhaps the Democratic Party of 2019 is ripe for a hostile takeover. In a crowded but leaderless Democratic field, with no obvious next-in-line for when the flagging and gaffe-prone Joe Biden inevitably burns out, a candidate who is ready to drop in $100 million of his own money could really shake things up in New Hampshire and California.
“Nobody owns me,” Steyer told NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald on Tuesday. “If you look at the top four people running for president as Democrats, they share 73 years either in the Congress or the Senate. It’s a question of insiders versus an outsider.”
Say what you will about a fool and his money, but don’t say that Steyer can’t read the signs of the times.
