democratic candidates 2020

UPDATED: I corrected a typo. Originally, the paragragph on Bloomberg said "Bernie" instead of "Bloomberg."

As the political season gets underway, I figure it's time for me to give my in-depth rundown of the men and women fighting for the Democratic nomination. Rather than try to cover all 4,581 of these candidates, I'll limit myself to the six who have something approaching a realistic chance of getting the nomination.

Joe Biden
The interesting thing about Joe Biden is that you can build his last name up from a one-letter word using the following rules:
1) start with a one letter word (it has to be a real English word, which means either "a" or "i";
2) add a letter either at the beginning of or at the end of the word you have, creating either a legitimate Scrabble word or the candidate's name;
3) If step 2 gave you the candidate's name, you're done. Otherwise, repeat step 2.

In the case of Biden, the successive words are: i, id, bid, bide, biden.

There have been five presidents whose names can be built up like that, none of whom were twentieth-century presidents. I also note that I am including Obama in that list, which depends on using the word "bama," which seems to be an insulting slang term for an unsophisticated hick -- derived from "Alabama." I doubt that "bama" is in the Scrabble dictionary, but I'm relying on dictionary.com.

Michael Bloomberg
If Bloomberg gets the nomination and wins, he would, at the moment he becomes President, be the oldest president ever -- older than Reagan when he left office. Which also means that, if he gets the nomination, he and Trump will be the two oldest candidates ever.  I guess that's also true of Biden, though I didn't mention it. See above.

Pete Buttigieg
If Buttigieg gets the nomination, then this will be the first time that the two major party candidates each have last names that contain informal terms for a person's backside. So the jokes will be writing themselves. If Buttigieg gets the nomination and wins he will be the youngest president ever. Also, he'd be the first president whose last name has multiple occurrences of three different letters.

Amy Klobuchar
If Klobuchar gets the nomination and wins, then we'd have a president named Amy before we have one named Marc. This is only relevant to me because my sister's name is Amy. I blogged about that a while ago. See here.

Bernie Sanders
See Bloomberg, only older.

Elizabeth Warren
If Warren gets the nomination, she'd be the second woman heading a major party ticket. And if she wins, she'd be the first woman President. I guess that's also true of Klobuchar, though I didn't mention it. See above. Also, Warren would be 71 years old -- the second-oldest major party candidate to ever seek a first term. The oldest was John McCain who was 72 on election day, 2008. And if she wins, she'll be the oldest to assume office.   I guess that's also true of Biden, though I didn't mention it. See above. It's also true of Bloomberg and Sanders and I didn't mention it explicitly. But it's kind of implicit in what I did say about him.

Policy
I have my own opinions about the candidates, their policy positions, suitability for office and which ones are better and which ones are worse. But I'm not interested in getting into all that on the intertubes. Try reading their website or watching debates. Or check out whatever media you trust.