Matt Rourke/AP Photo
The former mayor of New York City speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 2016.
Michael Bloomberg has had the functionaries on his payroll not-so-discreetly float his candidacy for president for 11 years now. It began in 2008, when he attended a meeting in January of that year that I called Wankstock, a gathering of old white male politicians-turned-lobbyists for three days of peace, love, and bipartisanship. Touting an agenda of deficit reduction and “renouncing partisan bickering”— something for everyone from random senior fellows in Washington think tanks to people on his own payroll—Bloomberg soon realized that he failed to gain any traction and almost immediately declared he wouldn’t run.
Bloomberg also flirted with running in 2012, and 2016, and earlier in this 2020 cycle, after changing his registration from independent to Democrat. Each time he declined, after realizing that the appeal for a socially liberal, fiscally conservative billionaire doesn’t exist outside of Tom Friedman columns.
But now he’s back for the fifth time, as moderates see their dream of a do-nothing presidency slipping away from them. On Monday, friends of Bloomberg leaked to reporters that Joe Biden’s inability to lock down the Democratic primary has the multi-billionaire rethinking his decision to bow out of the race. If Biden drops out, he’s dropping in, according to unnamed sources.
That Bloomberg, solely by virtue of his indescribably obscene store of wealth, can generate this kind of publicity for his Hamlet act insults our collective intelligence. “I think it’s something he wants,” said one of his staff members paid to float this nonsense to CNBC. Notice that the wants of the public never show up in this analysis.
As I wrote in 2016 in dealing with one of the endless Bloomberg flirtations with the presidency, “An anti-teachers’-union, anti-gun, pro-nanny state, pro-Wall Street, pro-stop-and- frisk, pro-inequality, pro-immigration, pro-surveillance, pro-Iraq War neoconservative is almost surgically designed to repel practically every American voter on some level.” Oh, and he’s 77, in a race where everyone is allegedly longing for a contrast with the septuagenarians currently leading the field.
Somehow, the architect of the paramilitary crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protesters, who said out loud in 2011 “it was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” who saw his role as mayor of New York City to stop by Goldman Sachs headquarters for a pep talk (it’s “my job to stand up and support companies that are here in this city that bring us a tax base and that employ our people,” he said), and who compared wealth taxes to the policies of Venezuela, is supposed to steal votes from Democrats.
Somehow, the guy who has bankrolled gun safety and climate initiatives for years, who endorsed a soda tax and congestion pricing as mayor, is supposed to steal votes from Republicans.
Somehow, there’s supposed to be a mythical center outside the two extremes that has longed for an uber-rich member of the centrist elite to institute austerity economics.
And he’s only doing it, apparently, as a self-protective maneuver for the ruling class, in case someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders wins, and subsequently asks those at the top to sacrifice some of their treasure chests. Because Howard Schultz’s now-dead effort to become the same guardian of the elites gained so much momentum.
We are actually seeing how a Bloomberg primary would play out in real time, courtesy of Tom Steyer’s campaign. Steyer comes from the same financial circles as Bloomberg, is animated by the same climate and gun concerns, and is busily spending the same prodigious amounts of self-funded cash (both Steyer and Bloomberg, when he was considering a campaign earlier this year, floated a $100 million budget, and Steyer spent $12 million on ads in the first six weeks) on ads in the early primary states. This has enabled him to buy his way onto tonight’s debate stage.
Steyer is more overtly progressive than Bloomberg, but the internal contradiction of his campaign is as apparent as it would be for his richer counterpart. This is somebody spending millions of dollars of money gained through hedge-fund investments in distasteful operations like coal and private prisons, now proclaiming that corporations have wrested control of the government? The Steyer money hose has only elevated him to “barely at the edge of the debate stage” status, without having to face a single hard question about that internal contradiction, because what would be the point of going after someone barely scraping 2 percent?
Hilariously, Steyer has tried to paint himself as an “outsider,” I guess because Farallon Capital Management was founded on the West Coast instead of New York. He has punctuated his message with a bunch of “rich guy winging it” ideas like having voters make laws directly through a national referendum process (has anybody else ever seen the hash that California’s initiative process has made of things and thought, “let’s take that national”), or 12-year term limits to sap the institutional memory out of Congress (another gem of an import from California, which has led to lobbyists knowing more about the legislative process than the legislators).
And to be fair to Steyer, his faults are nothing compared to Bloomberg, whose fortune is tied to the financial sector and who sees himself as their human shield. Mike Bloomberg’s base is, literally, the people whose failure brought the country to the brink in 2008.
Having seen the poor man’s Bloomberg in action, why would there ever be a clamor for the genuine article? In 2016, Bloomberg was unknown to anyone outside of the Morning Joe New York/D.C. corridor, and there’s no reason why that wouldn’t still be true today. If there was a height restriction allowing only those living in Manhattan penthouses to vote, maybe Bloomberg would have a chance. As it is, our pesky, hanging-by-a-thread suffrage laws, by allowing too many actual people to vote, makes him unelectable.
There’s a certain arrogance in anyone who sees a president staring back at them in the mirror. But Bloomberg’s decade-plus dalliance with an impossible candidacy is downright offensive. We are barely getting through someone with serious rich-guy syndrome in the Oval Office. We don’t need someone else mistaking the ability to make a bunch of money with the ability to lead.
