I came across Buddy Roemer by chance on a TV talk show about three weeks ago, and again last night after the dreary rehash in New Hampshire some call the Republican debate. Roemer’s running for president on the Republican ticket.
So why wasn’t he in the debate? Because the present slate of ditto-heads locked him out. He’s an honestly viable candidate, so his presence among the current bunch would expose them for the non-entities, nut-cases, and clowns that they are.
A former congressman and governor of Louisiana, he has a degree in economics, refuses to take large anonymous donations. and his major plank is “to eliminate money from politics.” He kind of boasts that in the same period that Rick Perry raised 17 million dollars, he raised, $126,000. He recently spent time walking around in Zucotti Park talking to Wall Street occupiers, and came out saying, “Very peaceful. A real mix of Americans.”
He’s easy to listen to, genially southern, calm, collected, confident. And everything I heard him say makes sense, except his notion that American politics can be scrubbed clean of money. That’s radical. Like when Jesus of Nazareth kicked money-lenders out of the Temple where they’d been doing business for centuries.
Roemer said, "Money and politics has created institutional corruption... It is Main Street that is being foreclosed on and it is Main Street that is suffering while the...greed of Wall Street continues to hurt the middle class. Too big to fail banks have only gotten bigger thanks to government bailouts... and as president I will end the corporate tax loopholes that un-American corporations take advantage of only to ship our best jobs overseas."
Wouldn't you like to hear more from this guy?