Republicans: Democrats are socialists and communists and they want to give everything to blacks and Mexicans and wimmin!
Establishment Democrats: Sanders is a socialist and a communist and he doesn't want to give anything to blacks or Latinos or women.
Status Quo Joe Biden: We can't let Sanders or Trump win because I'm Obama's, Obam-, I'm was his guy. And we have to protect the Supreme, the top one, the court - you know the thing! And Medicare for All, we can't - it won't - it's a lyin' dog face pony-soldier program."
That's pretty much the state of the race as we head for another big Tuesday.
There’s a perception (inaccurate though it may be) that elections go to the highest bidder, and Bloomberg’s bid was astronomical. He was trying something fundamentally new in political history, and for a while it was working. ...
He spent more to win the presidential election than any general election candidate in American history, and he reached that lofty perch nine months before Election Day. That doesn’t even include what he spent to buy political support, from candidates he previously showered with campaign contributions and mayors whose initiatives he funded through his philanthropy. ...
Even before [the Democratic debate in the week prior to Super Tuesday], progressive messaging on Bloomberg took hold. Yes, he was successfully labeled as the avatar of stop and frisk. But others, including the Prospect, expressed the great danger a plutocratic presidency would present. A Bloomberg coronation was likely to lead to austerity cuts, union busting, and authoritarian violence against protesters, as it did in New York City. But more than that, it would mean our elections could be bought, that our institutions had no use other than as a plaything for an egomaniac with money.
And then Bloomberg’s first debate, in Las Vegas, confirmed the smallness of this man, his lack of virtue. A silent billfold behind the podium would have done better. Yes, Elizabeth Warren did the heavy lifting on Bloomberg, particularly over the sexual misconduct cases at his company and the nondisclosure agreements he forced women to sign. But the stage was set in the week leading up to that debate, with a sustained argument from the left that handing Bloomberg the keys to the Democratic Party would represent the formal end of the Democratic Party in America. Bloomberg’s only response was a grumble. [my emphasis in bold]
But as his article's title notes, the aspiring Democratic Presidential candidate provides a lot of cash to Republicans:
He may no longer be the Republican mayor who endorsed George W. Bush and hosted the Republican National Convention in 2004, but his financial support for the GOP continued through 2018.
Since 1987, according to Federal Election Commission records, Bloomberg donated over $900,000 directly to Republican candidates’ campaigns, national GOP party committees, and federal PACs of state Republican Party committees. Recipients include former Rep. Dan Donovan of Staten Island, New York, whom he has given a total of $10,800, including $5,400 in 2018; former Sen. John McCain ($13,700 total); Giuliani, who has become one of Donald Trump’s closest devotees ($5,000); and Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby ($4,000).
Bloomberg has given $4.6 million to New York state GOP party committees and roughly $300,000 to Republican state and local candidates.
But the billionaire’s donations to outside political spending groups, including one he founded, represent far more money, and some of these groups have helped Republican candidates win elections.
Not surprisingly, spreading money around is a major tool for Bloomberg in politics. As Molly Olmstead notes in Michael Bloomberg Is Good at Throwing Money at Elections and WinningSlate 12/05/2019, 2018 brought "a rearrangement of Bloomberg’s identity as a donor" tilted more toward Democrats.
"Money talks in this business and bullshit walks. And it works the same way down in Washington." As Congressman Michael Myers said in the most famous quote during the Abscam case, "I'm gonna tell you something, real simple and short. Money talks in this business and bullshit walks. And it works the same way down in Washington." (See: Charles Babcock, Rep. Myers Is Convicted Of BriberyWashington Post 08/30/1980) And in those days, the Supreme Court hadn't yet laid waste to limits on campaign financing and spending. The Abscam case was the real-world story behind the 2013 film American Hustle.
Bloomberg's actual and potential donations are something to keep very much in mind when seeing and hearing how establishment Democrats react to his hostile-takeover candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Bloomberg is also making huge media buys, which TV executives including those at MSNBC certainly have very much in mind.
Benjamin Dixon earned the ire of mainstream reporters by digging up these comments from Bloomberg on his notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program in New York City, relying on a source that mainstream reporters can't easily access, i.e., they were available online for years. Meet the Journalist Who Exposed Bloomberg’s Racist Defense of Targeting Black & Brown YouthDemocracy Now! 02/12/2020:
Far from changing course over the mayor’s focus on “racial equity,” as he has since claimed, the practice was clawed back by several lawsuits, which charged that the law enforcement program violated the basic constitutional rights of residents. U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, in a scathing decision, noted that over the course of 2.3 million frisks, weapons were found only 1.5 percent of the time. The decision pointed out that over half of the stops included African Americans and about third Latino, with less than 10 percent targeting white people.
The Bloomberg administration fought alongside New York’s notoriously aggressive police union to continue the program, arguing that the stop-and-frisk effort was focused on suspects with “furtive movements,” in “high-crime areas” and those with a “suspicious bulge.” But the judge knocked down those assertions, noting that such claims are vague and subjective.
He kinda-sorta apologized for his notorious racist stop-and-frisk program when he started running for President. It was all to help minority kids, you see - at least according to him. Sonny Hostin confronts Michael Bloomberg about Stop and Frisk 01/15/2020:
Lisa Cooley has provided a long, very helpful tweet thread of links to articles describing important aspects of Bloomberg's political style:
As a New Yorker, please let me explain why Bloomberg is not a viable candidate. But also, let me explain why. At @sarahkendzior’s suggestion, I read Wayne Barrett’s 1992 book on Trump. It’s all there, the lies, the mafia connections, the shamelessness. The media failed to vet him
The Bloomberg who came into office as the anti-politician, promising to transform city government, has been transformed himself. Some of us liked him precisely because his wealth insulated him from the kind of horsetrading that diminished his predecessors. But seven years later, Bloomberg has not only proved himself to be a master politician, as hungry for power as anyone we’ve ever seen, but he’s also ended up putting nearly everyone who deals with the city deep into his political debt.
And, apparently, oligarchs gonna oligarch:
... the large number of Bloomberg fans who are also Bloomberg beneficiaries makes it harder and harder to distinguish enthusiasm from interest. His control over a vast city budget, hundreds of millions in private donations, and billions in undisclosed personal investments cloud the authenticity of every nice thing said about him. And a day-after-Christmas decision last year by the Bloomberg-appointed Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) has made his money trail both more expansive and more elusive. At his request, the board decided that he would no longer be restricted to salting away his money in “large, professionally managed mutual and exchange-traded funds.” The COIB now allows Bloomberg’s influential investment advisor, Steve Rattner, another big third-term booster, to put Bloomberg’s estimated $20 billion fortune to work in a wide variety of investments, so long as he and the rest of us never find out precisely what they are. [my emphasis]
Barrett elaborated:
His message, and it once was true, was that he owed nothing to anybody. He began parceling himself out in the 2005 campaign, when he did five contracts with unions that endorsed him and spent more of our money to re-elect himself than his own. And since his re-election was never in doubt, he dipped into his money and ours, it turned out, for vanity: It merely increased his margin of victory. Imagine how many own a piece of him now.
... a series of stories about him, accumulated over decades, that suggests in the aggregate a distinct pattern when it comes to his treatment of women: reports of disparaging comments made about women’s bodies and appearances. Allegations of a deeply sexist work environment at the company that Bloomberg founded and, for many years, ran. Stories that linger like exhaust in the air every time Mike Bloomberg is mentioned as, potentially, the next president of the United States.
Check out some more of the items on Lisa Cooley's thread. Including this one from the Washington Post's Josh Rogin:
