Elizabeth Warren destroyed Michael Bloomberg and ended any chance he had to win the nomination. The beneficiary of her hit job: Bernie Sanders.
Everyone acknowledges that last night’s Democratic Presidential debate was a disaster for Michael Bloomberg. He was weak, timid, meek, defensive, and appeared utterly incapable of taking the fight to Donald Trump in November. And if there’s one thing the Democratic base wants, it’s a fighter who can prosecute the case against Trump and win the general election.
Bloomberg did not in any way, shape or form appear to be that fighter. Quite the opposite: it was all too easy to imagine the Michael Bloomberg whom we saw last night getting destroyed by Trump and his minions.
The question is: how significant was last night’s disaster? Does it do irreparable harm to Bloomberg or can he recover? Andrew Egger argues in The Dispatch that Bloomberg can recover. His electoral strategy, he argues,
has never hinged on scoring an effervescent victory on the debate stage.
In fact, there’s a sense in which the whole thesis of the Bloomberg campaign is that, in a divided field that overwhelms voters with options, a big enough infusion of cash can short-circuit the system and render sorting mechanisms like debates irrelevant altogether…
It’s hard to see how one bad debate performance sets it [Bloomberg’s big money strategy] back much. After all, the voters Bloomberg is targeting are the ones least likely to have seen that performance at all.
I completely disagree, and here’s why.
As we’ve explained here at ResCon1, despite his boomlet in recent weeks and sudden rise in the polls, Bloomberg was always exceedingly unlikely to win the Democratic nomination.
There are too many candidates in the race; his opponents, especially Bernie Sanders, have too much underlying political appeal and organizational strength; and the Democratic primary electorate is too fractured for Bloomberg ever to have had any hope of getting a majority of the delegates before the party’s convention in July.
Bloomberg’s only hope all along has been to deny Sanders and Biden a majority of the delegates, build up a big head of political steam and momentum going into the convention, and fight it out there in a 21st-Century version of what the political pros call a “brokered” or contested convention.
But that strategy always depended on Bloomberg performing well and demonstrating not just political appeal to a Democratic base that is increasingly woke and progressive, but also that he could win and defeat Donald Trump. The problem with last night’s disastrous debate performance is that it demonstrated (conclusively, I think) that both of those things are manifest untrue and won’t change.
No Political Appeal. Bloomberg’s political appeal to the far-left Democratic base was always suspect—because of his phenomenal success as a businessman and because of his record as Mayor of New York City, where he supported “stop and frisk” police tactics and school choice, among other heresies.
But what last night proved is that Bloomberg has other big problems with the left, which he never effectively addressed. Acting as the party’s ideological enforcer and referee, Elizabeth Warren led the charge and absolutely eviscerated Bloomberg with laudable prosecutorial skill and precision:
I’d like to talk about who we’re running against, a billionaire who calls women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians.” And, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.
Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop and frisk.
Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is. But understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.
This country has worked for the rich for a long time and left everyone else in the dirt. It is time to have a president who will be on the side of working families and be willing to get out there and fight for them. That is why I am in this race, and that is how I will beat Donald Trump.
Those were Warren’s opening remarks, but it got even worse for Bloomberg as the debate progressed.
When he was asked about allegations that his company was a hostile workplace for women, and that he had publicly admitted to making sexually suggestive remarks to former employees, Bloomberg meekly responded that had no tolerance for bad behavior toward women; and that lots of people who have worked for him in high positions are women.
Warren immediately responded with direct rhetorical jabs that had Bloomberg reeling with no response and no fight.
I hope you heard what his defense was. “I’ve been nice to some women.” That just doesn’t cut it.
The mayor has to stand on his record. And what we need to know is exactly what’s lurking out there. He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace.
So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements, so we can hear their side of the story?
Bloomberg’s lame and politically disastrous response: “They signed the agreements and that’s what we’re going to live with.”
There are other instances in the debate of Bloomberg floundering and showing his political ineptitude and tin ear; but the bottom line is this:
The Democratic Party in 2020 is not gonna nominate a candidate whom major party leaders such as Elizabeth Warren compellingly charge with being a misogynist and a racist. It’s simply not gonna happen. The party is too woke for that.
If Bloomberg had been able to respond effectively to these charges and had demonstrated real political skill and capability, then he perhaps might have overcome this problem.
The Democrats, after all, want nothing more than to defeat Donald Trump. Thus they might well have been willing to forgive Bloomberg for his transgressions and heresies if he had demonstrated some ability to win. But the fact is Bloomberg did not respond effectively because he is incapable of doing so. He cannot win and he cannot defeat Trump.
The Democratic base knows this now and won’t ever rally to Bloomberg—not now in the primaries and not at a brokered or contested convention.
Sure, Bloomberg may be able to buy 15-30 percent of the primary vote through the political equivalent of carpet bombing—i.e., saturating the airwaves and cyberspace with political advertising—but he’ll never exceed 15-30 percent. That’s a ceiling he can’t possibly overcome.
Nor will Bloomberg ever overcome the disastrous first impression that he created with his abysmal debate performance. A leopard never changes its spots, and Bloomberg can’t become something he’s not. The Democratic base knows who Bloomberg is now and he is not someone whom they want. He’s finished, even as he limps forward into Super Tuesday and beyond.
Bernie’s The One . The big winner, without question: Bernie Sanders. None of the other candidates laid a glove on him. They were too focused on going after Bloomberg and attacking each other.
Warren, in fact, went out of her way to largely defend Sanders when he was attacked by Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg for pushing a healthcare plan that would take away private-sector health insurance from millions of Americans. Buttigieg, she said,
really has a slogan that was thought up by his consultants to paper over a thin version of a plan that would leave millions of people unable to afford their health care. It’s not a plan. It’s a PowerPoint.
And Amy’s plan is even less. It’s like a Post-It note: “Insert Plan Here.”
Bernie has… a good start, but instead of expanding and bringing in more people to help, instead, his campaign relentlessly attacks everyone who asks a question or tries to fill in details about how to actually make this work. And then his own advisors say, “Yeah, [it] probably won’t happen anyway.”
In other words, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are not serious about health insurance reform, but Bernie is. However, Bernie needs to be less defensive and more accommodating of outside input.
The bottom line: the Las Vegas debate is notable and historic because it has irreversibly altered the trajectory of the Democratic presidential primary race.
Before the debate, Bloomberg was rising in the polls. He had created an opportunity for himself to challenge Sanders for the nomination. It was, as I’ve explained before, a slim chance, but it was a chance nonetheless.
Now, though, that chance is gone. Warren effectively closed if off by exposing Bloomberg as ideologically out of synch with the Democratic Party and politically inept and weak. Steel yourself, then, for socialist Bernie Sanders to be christened the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nominee.
Feature photo credit: CNN.