Steve Bannon is back... he's a big admirer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he wants to find a Republican AOC and he's got to say this about the GOP:
“We’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party,” said Bannon, relaxing at a table with an autographed photo of Trump behind him. “Now, interestingly, we don’t have any elected representatives who believe that, but that’s a legacy issue. We’ll get over that. We’ve got to find our AOCs.”
He's also a little bit envious on the Democrats:
The Democrats and their supporters have “better casting”, Bannon admitted. “They did an amazing job in 18. I keep saying I admire AOC. I think her ideology’s all fucked up, but I want her. I want to recruit bartenders. I don’t want to recruit any more lawyers. I want bartenders.”
And he thinks that without Bloomberg's meddling behind the scenes Trump would not be impeached:
Congressional Republicans are dominated by ageing white men from comfortable backgrounds. Among Democrats, Bannon also pointed to military veterans such as Max Rose of New York and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, both elected as the party swept the House of Representatives in 2018. “That’s perfect casting. That’s why we got smoked.”
Democrats were boosted in the midterms by Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, who spent $110m through his own political action committee. An impressive 21 of the 24 candidates he supported won their races. Bloomberg is now also running for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 US election.
“People are missing the point about Bloomberg,” said Bannon, who co-hosts a radio programme about Trump’s impeachment called War Room. “Trump wouldn’t be impeached if it were not for Bloomberg. It’s Bloomberg’s hundred million dollars that won the seats … The Democrat party is just like Republicans: a pass through. There’s no actual people to do anything. They’re not out in any state ringing doorbells. Those activist groups are. That’s where Bloomberg put his hundred million dollars.”
Also on Brexit:
He added: “Obviously Corbyn had issues, a personality that seemed to rub people the wrong way, particularly some of his core voters, but this is much deeper than that and you just can’t just turn it off to ‘one guy was more popular than the other’. This was, I think, a very serious vote and people paid a lot of attention to this and wanted to get Brexit done.”
Bannon said he was fascinated by focus groups he saw on British TV during the election campaign. “These were Labour voters and they were not going to vote for Labour and the reason was they kept asking, ‘How are these programmes going to be paid for?’ What I was most impressed with was the specificity and the granularity of the questions.
“People don’t want to be spun any more. They don’t want to be BS’d any more. They want to know what you’re laying out and how you’re going to effectuate it and, most importantly, how you’re going to pay for it and ‘if paying for it means more increased taxes or less opportunities for me, you’re not going to get my vote no matter how good it sounds’.”
He added: “I think the Democrats, on whether it’s Green New Deal or healthcare for illegal aliens or whatever, ought to take the lessons of the working class. These are lifetime Labour members that voted for a Tory.”
The rest is in here anyway:
The former White House strategist and far-right agitator hails the British election as a ‘victory for populism’ with lessons for the US
www.theguardian.com
