Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has lashed out at former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg as reports indicate that he may enter the 2020 US election race, even though the billionaire and media magnate has yet to make an official statement on the matter.
“When people look at the White House and see this multi-millionaire messing up so many things, I don’t think they think, ‘Oh, we need someone richer.’ I think you have to earn votes, not buy them”, Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
When asked to comment on a Bloomberg adviser’s remarks that the former Big Apple mayor fears that no Democratic candidate will beat Trump in the 2020 race, Klobuchar said that she doesn’t think “you can just waltz in” and that “instead of saying, ‘I’m good enough to be president,’ your argument is that the other people aren’t good enough”.
“I’m looking forward to debating Mayor Bloomberg but not if his whole purpose is to say the rest of the field isn’t good enough,” the Minnesota Senator added.
Bloomberg Reportedly Files Papers for Alabama Primary
She spoke after Bloomberg, who has an estimated personal fortune of a whopping $51.1 billion, registered to enter the Alabama presidential primary last Friday, in a sign of reversal of his statement in March that he wouldn't run.
Some media outlets cited “sources close” to Bloomberg as saying that he is preparing to enter the 2020 US presidential race amid other reports that billionaire Amazon owner Jeff Bezos had asked Bloomberg to run.
Trump, for his part, remained downbeat about Bloomberg’s chances to succeed in the election race.
“He's not going to do well, but I think he's going to hurt [Democratic candidate Joe] Biden, actually, but he doesn't have the magic to do well. Little Michael will fail,” Trump said.
The Hill has meanwhile cited an unnamed Democratic strategist as saying sarcastically that “the Bloomberg bandwagon is literally storming across the country”.
The strategist, however, added that “there is a dynamic there that is real — that there is a sense of nervousness around the state of the field and it is not confined to any one candidate”.
According to them, “there are concerns about the top four or five candidates. … They have all kind of plateaued.”
Klobuchar Announces Her Presidential Bid
As far as Klobuchar is concerned, she signalled her readiness to run for president in the 2020 election back in February.
"I stand before you as the granddaughter of an iron ore miner, as the daughter of a teacher and a newspaperman, as the first woman elected to the United States Senate from the State of Minnesota, to announce my candidacy for President of the United States," Klobuchar pointed out in a statement at the time.
She pledged that as the president she will "focus on getting things done" and "lead from the heart".
"It is time to organise, time to galvanise, time to take back our democracy, it's time… to get the dark money out of our politics," Klobuchar underlined.