Tom Steyer thinks our country's problems can be solved by a white guy with lots of money. There's just one problem

I remember a few months ago watching a Tom Steyer impeachment ad and thinking: this very boring white guy is going to run for president, isn’t he? But then he kept promising that he wasn’t going to run for president. In January, Steyer went to Iowa and said, “Most people come to Iowa around this time to announce a campaign for president,” but instead “I am proud to be here to announce that I will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to remove a president.”

But it didn’t smell right. After all, why was this man doing the ads himself if he wasn’t trying to build a presidential-feeling brand? People who aren’t running for president don’t generally feature themselves prominently in the ads they pay for. So I wasn’t much surprised this week when Steyer decided that 23 candidates aren’t enough. That what the Democratic primary contest really needs is yet another white guy.

Perhaps Matt Ford put it best when he wrote in the New Republic: “Though he’s mirroring the language of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other candidates who are running on themes of inequality and corruption, it’s unclear whether a hedge-fund manager with no experience in elected office is the best evangelist of that message.” In fact, a hedge-fund manger running on the idea of taking money out of politics and committing to use $100m of his own money to get there sort of reminds me of a real-estate “billionaire” who ran for president to represent the forgotten men and women of West Virginia.

One might have thought that someone as successful as Tom Steyer would have been troubled by the many, many people across the internet saying what a terrible idea his presidential run would be. You’d think that the fact that a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll last month said that “71 per cent of voters nationwide who said they would take part in a Democratic primary said they would prefer a ‘DC insider, with national-level political experience’ over an ‘outsider with no political experience'” might dissuade the billionaire. You’d think the incredibly frosty reception that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz got might have made Steyer think twice, even, but no. Not even the fact that Schultz actually postponed his campaign gave him pause.

No, Tom Steyer has decided that the Democratic party desperately needs yet another white man to fix the problems caused by a white man, and he feels he is just the white man for the job. So he’s planning to blow $100m of his own money to do it. At a time when the Democratic party seems completely uninterested and unimpressed by rich white men, this rich white man has made the calculation that what the Democratic party is greatly lacking in its enormous candidate pool is another rich white man specifically put his riches front and center.

Steyer spoke to Alex Seiltz-Ward earlier today. "Nobody owns me," he said. "If you look at the top four people running for president as Democrats, they share 73 years either in the Congress or the Senate. It's a question of insiders versus an outsider." But what Tom Steyer — and Howard Schultz before him — seem to have completely forgotten is that the guy in the White House right now, the guy who’s making such an enormous mess, the guy who’s completely screwing up everything? That guy is an outsider who ran on the idea that an outsider could fix it.