"If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people."

Said Mike Bloomberg, just last year:



Via "‘Some guy wearing a dress’: Bloomberg reference to transgender people in 2019 video prompts outcry" (WaPo).

The "he, she, or it" is especially bad.

But if you like the kind of blunt speech we've been getting from Trump, you might welcome a Democratic candidate who does the same thing.

But it's inconsistent with Mike's presentation of himself as the one who speaks in a "presidential" style, as he does in this ad, which the Slate author who ranked all the Bloomberg ads put at #1. Here's the ad — sorry I can't find a version with embed code) — "Bring 'Presidential' Back."

That ad, hilariously, features LBJ (along with JFK) as the model of "presidential" speech. The most uplifting LBJ/JFK snippets are intercut with Trump's crudest lines (including the grab-them-by-their-pussy line that wasn't even part of a public presentation). But LBJ was notorious for very crude speech.

The Bloomberg ad shows LBJ's "We shall overcome," but (from MSNBC (censored by me)):

Lyndon Johnson said the word “n*gger” a lot.

In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the n*gger bill.”...

[LJB biographer Robert A.] Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it....

In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, “when I appoint a n*gger to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a n*gger.”

According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffer [sic], described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “ni*gger” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n*gger, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”...