John Marshall Mantel/AP Photo
Bloomberg, then mayor of New York, performs a comedy routine with the cast of the Broadway musical ‘Chicago’ in 2004.
Are Democratic voters willing to nominate a completely non-ideological candidate for president? Because if Michael Bloomberg should win their nomination, that’s what they’re going to get.
As he slowly but surely rises in the polls on the back of absolutely gobsmacking spending on advertising ($400 million and counting), Bloomberg is being forced to contend with pointed questions about his past policies and statements. While some of what’s controversial might be problematic for anyone (allegations that he created a degrading environment for women to work in), much of it is specifically about matters that Democratic voters may not feel comfortable with.
Like his aggressive use of stop-and-frisk, a policy that terrorized black and brown people in New York for years, and his defenses of it (“We put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why'd we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids' hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them”). Or the time he likened a $10 an hour minimum wage to Soviet economic policies. Or the time he blamed the 2008 financial meltdown not on Wall Street but on decades-old government efforts to undo discriminatory housing policies.
There are other candidates who have things in their past that liberals will take issue with, and have. But here’s the big difference between Bloomberg and the rest of the field: They all say they want to promote liberalism as an ideology and create a liberal presidency. Even the so-called moderates say this. Consider, for instance, what Joe Biden said on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday when asked if we was running a big, ambitious campaign:
I mean this idea that I'm not the progressive in the race. I mean my lord, if, if I get elected president of the United States with my position on health care, my position on global warming, my position on foreign policy, my position on the middle class, this will go down as one of the most progressive administrations in American history.
You might or might not agree with Biden, but he’s deeply enmeshed in a debate with his fellow candidates about how liberal is liberal enough—for Democratic voters, for the entire electorate, and for the next presidency. How ambitious should their policy goals be? What are the risks of moving too far to the left or being too timid? What’s possible to achieve given Republican opposition?
Michael Bloomberg stands completely apart from that debate, and not just because he was once a Republican.
If you look at the issue positions Bloomberg takes, they actually look like a pretty standard Democratic agenda—not as liberal as Bernie Sanders’s or Elizabeth Warren’s, to be sure, but quite progressive overall. And he has liberal policy goals he has aggressively championed in recent years, particularly on gun control and climate change.
But Bloomberg isn’t selling an ideology. He certainly cares about guns and climate, but there’s never been much evidence that he sees them as anything other than specific problems that need to be solved. In other words, not part of a broader liberal vision that will be ideologically transformative in the way, say, Ronald Reagan was (and Barack Obama tried and failed to be).
When it comes to governing, Bloomberg is a technocrat, and that’s one of the key components of his candidacy. It’s what he argued to voters in New York: I’m a skilled manager who can make this extraordinarily complex enterprise work properly. And to a great extent, he succeeded at that task (Bloomberg is the exception to the rule that when someone says “Elect me because I’m not a politician, I’m a businessman,” it should make as much sense as someone saying “I’m an accountant, not an electrician, which is why you should hire me to rewire your house”).
But the second and far more important thing Bloomberg is selling, the real foundation of his candidacy, is his bank account. Let’s be honest: If he were not worth $63 billion, he wouldn’t have a much better chance of winning the nomination than Bill de Blasio did.
But Bloomberg does have that $63 billion, and a willingness to spend a serious chunk of it to get elected. That pile of cash is what, more than anything else, he is offering the Democratic electorate. You may not like what I’ve said and done before, he’s saying to them, but get a load of this.
Those zillions of TV ads Bloomberg has bought are not only meant to persuade you with their substance, they’re also a performance of profligacy, a relentless demonstration of Bloomberg’s ability to absolutely bury Donald Trump in money (and of course, make the impossibly insecure Trump livid with jealousy in the process). A billion, two billion, ten billion? Whatever it takes, Bloomberg is not just telling them but showing them, he’s willing to spend it.
At the moment, Bloomberg is at around 15 percent in national polls of Democrats—rising, but with a long way to go. When you talk to the undecided ones at the moment, they aren’t considering Bloomberg because they found his TV ads so compelling. It’s because they’re panicked about whether their nominee will be able to beat Trump, and Bloomberg has the one thing no one else does. Should they choose him in the end, it will be because they put aside their hopes about a country remade by a liberal president and decided that beating Trump is the only thing that matters.
Many Democrats, especially the ones who already have a favorite candidate, recoil at that idea. They believe that their chosen candidate has an inspiring vision of the future, and is also perfectly electable. If you ask them, they’ll talk about widening the electorate, energizing the Democratic base, or winning over independent voters. The ideological beliefs—whether farther to the left or more moderate—are not only the whole reason to want a Democratic president in the first place, but a tool that, wielded properly, can put them in the White House.
Michael Bloomberg makes a very different argument. Forget ideology, he says. Forget about transformative change, and the long battle between liberalism and conservatism. What matters is what’s happening right now, the dragon in the White House who has to be vanquished. Only I possess the weapon that can strike him down. And it’s made of money.
