Former San Francisco mayor and California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown has declared that only Hillary Clinton can defeat President Donald Trump in 2020 — and that the current candidates left him with “depression.”
“Depression over the current field was swirling through my head the other day,” Brown wrote in his latest column Saturday for the San Francisco Chronicle, before a portrait of Muhammad Ali had him thinking about a “rematch.”
“Think about it. Hillary is still the smartest of the bunch. She’s also better known than any of the candidates, so she doesn’t need a lot of money,” Brown argued.
“Clinton is the only candidate short of Barack Obama who has the brains, the battle-tested brawn and the national presence to take out Trump. And Obama can’t run.” he said.
Brown’s latest vote of no confidence in the current Democratic field echoes his earlier pronouncements. In February, he had already declared that none of the candidates — including his former girlfriend, Kamala Harris — could beat Trump.
The Democratic candidates “all have impressive credentials, winning personalities and positive messages, but none displays the “people personality” that our media-savvy president has mastered,” Brown wrote at the time.
The most recent Public Policy Institute of California poll showed Harris in a distant fourth among likely Democratic primary voters in her home state, while former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) were locked in a dead heat for first place.
“However, among voters with a candidate preference, more than half (53%) would consider supporting another candidate,” the PPIC poll added.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.