Politics
In addition to his publishing and real-estate interests, Zuckerman is also a frequent commentator on world affairs, both as an editorialist and on television. He regularly appears on MSNBC and The McLaughlin Group and writes columns for U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News.
"While Zuckerman has always randomly switched back and forth between the parties," since the late 1970s, he has donated more than $68,000 to American political candidates with $42,700 going to Democratic politicians and $24,000 to independent interests.
On July 12, 2010, Zuckerman claimed in an interview that he helped to write one of President Barack Obama's political speeches. Long-time Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes disputed the claim and asserted that neither "has ever met or spoken to Mort Zuckerman." Zuckerman later published a clarification of his remarks, stating that his help had come in the form of private conversations with various political officials in which he had offered advice and perspective on different issues.
Zuckerman, a long-time supporter of the Democratic party who cast his vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, was critical of President Obama on several fronts. Following the downgrade of US treasury debt by Standard & Poor's in 2011, Zuckerman wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country." After initially supporting President Obama's call for heavy infrastructure spending to revive the economy, Zuckerman criticized the composition of the plan, stating "But if you look at the make-up of the stimulus program, roughly half of it went to state and local municipalities, which is in effect to the municipal unions which are at the core of the Democratic party."
On President Obama's healthcare reform bill, Zuckerman stated: "Eighty percent of the country wanted them to get costs under control, not to extend the coverage. They used all their political capital to extend the coverage. I always had the feeling the country looked at the bill and said, 'Well, he may be doing it because he wants to be a transformational president, but I want to get my costs down!"
Read more about this topic: Mortimer Zuckerman
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.”
—Mario Puzo, U.S. author, screenwriter, and Francis Ford Coppola, U.S. director, screenwriter. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)
“While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)