Screen Shots Show Bloomberg Put Norfolk, Virginia, on Wrong Side of State
Billionaire grouch and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the presidency the same way he wants your guns: very badly.
The best place to start, he figured, was in Virginia.
Virginia is a state that’s turning from purple to blue with relative rapidity. It’s the kind of place where a Democratic governor can have been revealed to have appeared in blackface during the first half of the year and end up on TV celebrating electoral victories in the state legislature and saying the Republican president is “an embarrassment to this country” during the second half.
However, Bloomberg decided to kick off his 2020 presidential campaign in the Virginia city of Norfolk because it proves “with the right candidate — we can turn areas from red to blue.”
Norfolk may indeed be red, although that’s not going to matter much in the presidential election. (Once somebody on his staff explains the Second Amendment to him, could he or she perhaps deal with the Electoral College next?) However, if Bloomberg is hoping to get Norfolk’s votes in the Virginia primary on Super Tuesday, hey, I guess that’s a place to start.
If that’s your strategy though, Mike, here’s a little tip for you: Consider finding out where in the state Norfolk is.
Here was Bloomberg’s original tweet, along with a helpful directional reminder about where exactly he was in Virginia, from Ben Jacobs of the Jewish Insider:
Um, Norfolk is not southwestern Virginia . . . pic.twitter.com/5eJuxJaqKd
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) November 25, 2019
So here’s a helpful guide for the former mayor just in case he didn’t check Google Maps on his iPhone before speaking in Roanoke:
As you can see, Norfolk is on the other side of Virginia from that state called West Virginia; if it’s on the other side of the state latitudinally from said state, that would probably make it east Virginia by process of elimination, no?
Someone eventually got it right:
I’m kicking off my presidential campaign today in Norfolk because southeastern Virginia proves that— with the right candidate—we can turn areas from red to blue. https://t.co/QWA4ZgwUqC pic.twitter.com/GqnnxBMe9M
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) November 25, 2019
Yeah, I’m sure he’s going to turn that red area on a map blue by not figuring out where it is. Good call.
Breitbart did note that Bloomberg got the area right during his speech when he said being in southeastern Virginia “proves that with the right candidate, we can turn areas from red to blue.”
“And we need to do that all across this country,” he said.
Let’s see how many times he brings out that line in speeches across this fruited plain. Can’t you just see it now: “I’m glad to be here in Miami to show that with the right candidate, we can turn the Florida Panhandle blue”?
I’m sure that candidates have survived worse campaign kickoffs, but is this really the old rich white guy you Democrats were waiting for?
This was supposed to be the great moderate hope (until Hillary Clinton gets into the race, of course). OK, so he was going to take your AR-15s (and a lot more, to be honest), but he was rich, which meant he wasn’t going to get into that wealth tax-y stuff, and he was grumpy and gruff, which meant there was going to be none of that airy-fairy progressivism.
Even without this mistake, I’m curious what anyone was seeing in this guy. With Joe Biden faltering and the electability of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in question, were the Democrats under the impression that what we really needed was a tech billionaire Mr. Wilson telling all of us Dennis the Menaces that he was going to fix climate change and do away with large sodas?
If you’re going to be a late entry to the field, you’d better bring something pretty spectacular to the table. Bloomberg exudes all the excitement of someone undergoing colonoscopy prep. His ideas, such as they exist, are indistinguishable from those held by a field of candidates that’s already failed to produce an individual over whom voters can get particularly jazzed. But, uh, he’s got money.
That’s how the former New York mayor got past the velvet rope in the first place. Only he forgot where the club he’d gotten into was, and nobody could figure out why he was there anyway.
Bloomberg apparently already has spent $37 million on a historically large ad blitz for his campaign.
I don’t know if you can get a receipt for that kind of thing, but if so, I certainly hope he kept it.
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