Tom Steyer: As Seen on TV!

Tom Steyer is now in second place in South Carolina, ahead of both Sanders and Warren.

Tom Steyer? Really?

"This economy isn't working for the vast majority of Americans. Overall growth has been taken by rich Americans and corporations, and that's just a fact."

Steyer's campaign should be impossible.  He is the wrong messenger at the wrong time to win the Democratic nomination.

His role, if any, according to common sense and American punditry, would be to fund third party criticism of Trump from the outside, and then support whomever the Democrats nominate. The alternative is the Democratic horror story: to siphon votes from Democrats by running an independent third party campaign.

Steyer faces a wall of resistance from progressive Democrats. Bernie Sanders puts American economic injustice in terms of perennial class struggle, the rich oppressing the workers, because that is what they do, now and always. Elizabeth Warren describes it as corruption of the system, made possible by unlimited money flowing into politics on behalf of people rigging the rules. It isn't that wealthy capitalists are bad, per se, but they do bad things to preserve a bad system.

Either way hurts Steyer. How could he possibly be trusted to change a system that rewarded him so richly? Besides, look at 2016. What with her speeches to Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton was an archetype apparatchik of the status quo, so of course she lost. Steyer is a white male, Yalie, Stanford billionaire who got rich on Wall Street and lives in California. Another elite apparatchik. Make the same mistake again? No way.

And yet, something is working for Steyer. He has moved way up in the polls in South Carolina and Nevada.

It is pretty simple. TV is not yet dead. 

TV makes people familiar and familiarity give people credibility as spokesmen. Trump had been a TV celebrity for decades, branded as a tycoon in the big leagues, a decisive executive, on TV at least. He got onto Fox and Friends every week. He had a message that resonated with people with partisan dislike of Obama, that possibly he faked his birth location.  

This is not rocket science or new. Trump had a brand and message that resonated. From the very beginning his campaign could fill an auditorium. He said interesting, outrageous things that got on the news.

Steyer, too, in his own way is a TV celebrity saying interesting things. Steyer said to impeach Trump, and said it first and publicly. It got noticed. He said to deal with the climate crisis, a Democratic litmus test. And--the surprise part--he is a sharp critic of corporate influence, with a message that is as hostile to corporate corruption and influence of our politics as the messages of either Sanders or Warren.

Steyer was on CNN this morning, talking to Jake Tapper, using the time to position himself as a man with the right qualifications to take on Trump and corporations, both. After all, he said, he spent a career dealing with corporations. 

I have had two occasions to talk with Steyer personally. In New Hampshire I suggested he immediately start putting supporters in his ads, since after all, he is attempting to show he leads people, not that he is a lone wolf prophet. He said he agreed and that his ads would be changing and they did, shortly after.

It takes a Wall Street expert to fix Wall Street

In Iowa I suggested to him it wasn't enough to have gotten rich and then give money away. His Wall Street experience also had to give him unique insight on how to fix the structural problems he identifies.

His message has changed. Corporations, he says, moved from a stakeholder focus to a shareholder focus, with huge consequences he understands and that now require a new regulatory environment he can direct.

I don't claim he took my advice. He or his communication team no doubt realized on their own that Steyer had an intractable credibility problem. He had to reposition his Wall Street experience from a disqualifier into a qualifier.

He did.

Now Steyer has a shot. A long shot, but a shot.