John Locher/AP Photo
Give Elizabeth Warren credit for confronting Bloomberg with his record, his policies, his callousness—in a word, with himself.
I’ve been trying to come up with the nicest thing I could say about Michael Bloomberg based on his debate performance last night. Here ’tis:
At his best, he reminded me of Michael Dukakis, without the charisma.
The only moment in which Bloomberg was not on the defensive and actually made a case for his candidacy came in his closing statement. “The presidency,” he began, “is a management job, and Trump is not a manager.” The job, Bloomberg continued, required teamwork, and he had the experience and credentials to do it while Donald Trump plainly did not.
As such, Bloomberg’s closing bore no resemblance to the other candidates’. Each sought to encapsulate the values and issues that motivated them, and how they differed from the values that Trump exhibits and the issues he promotes. Not so Mayor Mike, whose cri de coeur was that his management skills vastly exceeded the president’s.
As Bloomberg spoke, a grim image rose from the graveyard of the politically dead: that of presidential nominee Michael Dukakis’s acceptance speech at the Democrats’ 1988 convention. “This election isn’t about ideology,” Dukakis declared, “it’s about competence.”
That November, Dukakis carried ten states.
If Bloomberg’s campaign serves a useful function beyond funding an ocean of anti-Trump ads, it may be to expose the limited perspectives—emotional but also cognitive—of even the more enlightened denizens of our financial elite. Those perspectives on race, gender, and class were on painful display last night, but it also became clear that Bloomberg doesn’t quite understand the substance of either Bernie Sanders’s or Elizabeth Warren’s politics.
Responding to Sanders’s truncated case for giving workers a growing share of their companies’ stock, Bloomberg equated the proposal—which originated with the Swedish labor movement—with communism. That doesn’t mean a President Bloomberg would go to war against Sweden for the communist threat it poses, of course, but it does suggest that Bloomberg has no idea why, in a recent Gallup poll, 57 percent of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism—by which almost all of them meant the social democratic policies prevalent in Scandinavia—and only 47 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. To billionaires of a certain age, apparently, such views are incomprehensible.
On the plus side for Bloomberg’s prospects, he has swamped much of America, and will soon swamp the rest, with attractive ads making a case against Trump and, secondarily, showing Bloomberg to be a somewhat forward-looking guy. On the minus side, there’s Bloomberg himself, who, unfortunately for his cause, showed up for Wednesday’s debate.
The mantra for his handlers after last night’s performance has to be that of the con artist passing himself off as the Wizard of Oz when the curtain concealing him is pulled back: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he shouts. That, in a nutshell, has to be the Bloomberg strategy: He can only win if Democrats see only his impressively crafted image and ignore who he actually is.
Give Elizabeth Warren, who was on fire last night, credit for confronting Bloomberg with his record, his policies, his callousness—in a word, with himself. Amy Klobuchar may have been the former prosecutor on the debate stage, but Warren came off as the Grand Inquisitor (and not, like Dostoevsky’s, in any way hypocritical). Warren, plainly determined to boost her prospects with a bang-up debate performance, also went after Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg for proposing policies not equal to the challenges we face. She doubled down on her fighter persona, but sought to gentle it, if not entirely successfully, by bringing up stories of actual people who have suffered, and will suffer some more, unless our policies on health care or bank practices or immigration are radically changed. Her more successful moderating moment came when she chastised Buttigieg for attacking Klobuchar for forgetting the name of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, rather than on matters of policy. By so doing, she effectively banished Mayor Pete to the kids’ table, where he belongs.
The night, in short, was Warren’s, though how much it will help her return to the top tier of candidates we don’t yet know. Sanders and Joe Biden had good nights, too. Sanders more or less navigated the contretemps that arose when Culinary Local 226—the 60,000-member union of Vegas hotel workers—strenuously condemned his Medicare for All plan for threatening the very good coverage they’ve won for their members. His parting of the ways with the local on that one issue underscores what may be the single greatest irony of his campaign: that of all the social democratic and even outright socialist policies he supports, it’s the one he stresses most—Medicare for All—that engenders the most opposition. Poll after poll shows the American public overwhelmingly backs a wealth tax, free college tuition, paid family leave, universal child care, reining in finance, massive investment in infrastructure, and having workers sit on corporate boards. Unlike Medicare for All, none of these policies require dismantling a system of benefits already in place, however partial and deficient that system may be. The keystone of Sanders’s campaign is actually the weakest link, politically, in the social democratic agenda. It might behoove Sanders to talk up these other policies somewhat more.
In last night’s undercard event, Buttigieg and Klobuchar went after each other so often, so avidly, and with such evident loathing that they became a separate subset of the field. In Vegas parlance, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Warren were the entertainment on main stage; Pete and Amy were the lounge act, waging a terrific battle for fourth or fifth place to a smaller crowd that frequents the lounge for more raw material. (Think: Don Rickles.)
By the way, if Klobuchar takes credit one more time for bringing out more voters than the other candidates, I’ll scream. Minnesota has long had the highest rates of voter turnout of any state, beginning decades before Klobuchar ran for anything, and in recent times, in every year she’s been on the ballot (for senators, that’s once every six years) and in every year she’s not.
