Bloomberg's First Debate is a Bust

Michael Bloomberg joined the Democrat debate stage for the first time last evening and it was not pretty.  Bloomberg has held himself out as the savior of the Democrats and the best person to defeat Donald Trump in November, yet his rivals were unmerciful in their attacks and Bloomberg confirmed what I had heard one commentator say: debates are not his strong suit. Who actually won the debate may be in the eye of the beholder since all took incoming fire from the rival candidates, but Bloomberg seemingly was the big loser. It is essential that Donald Trump be defeated in November, but I remain uncertain who is the best Democrat - which rules out Sanders who isn't really a Democrat and never has been - to take on Trump. A column in the New York Times looks at Bloomberg's trashing last evening.  Here are excerpts:

You can buy ads and saturate the airwaves with them. You can buy allies, especially with the right budget.

But you can’t buy a debate performance, and that’s why Mike Bloomberg’s on Wednesday night mattered so much. This was the man talking, not the money.

And the man needed rescue — from his bloodthirsty rivals and even more so from himself.

Making his first appearance alongside other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bloomberg knew that he would be under furious attack and had clearly resolved not to show any negative emotion. But that meant that he often showed no emotion at all. Or he looked vaguely bemused, and that didn’t communicate the coolness that he intended. It signaled an aloofness that he very much needed to avoid.

He repeatedly — and laughably — suggested that he wouldn’t tear up nondisclosure agreements with women who have sued him or his company because they wanted the silence as much as he did. Elizabeth Warren hammered and hammered him on this point, but he wouldn’t budge, and that left the impression that he couldn’t budge. The truth would be too ugly.

Ugly: That’s the word for this ninth debate of the Democratic primary season. It had the fewest candidates — six — but the most nastiness, because those candidates clearly felt an urgency to diminish their competitors and elevate themselves before it was too late. A meager haul of votes in the Nevada caucuses this coming Saturday could effectively undo one or more of them; a poor showing on Super Tuesday less than two weeks from now would definitely be the end of the road.

So Pete Buttigieg went after Amy Klobuchar. Bernie Sanders went after Buttigieg. Joe Biden went after Sanders. Elizabeth Warren went after everybody, a Sherman tank bent on flattening everything in her path. And all of them went after Bloomberg. Dear God, how they went after Bloomberg. I’ve seen chum treated with more delicacy by great white sharks. It was the first time since Bloomberg announced his run for the presidency that he was within reach. For three high-spending, high-flying months, he campaigned essentially as a phantasm, ubiquitous in television commercials but averse to interviews, a supposed paragon of electability who had yet to put himself before voters, more idea than actuality, able to be seen but not touched.

But on Wednesday night, that changed abruptly. The apparition became flesh. And it was bruised from the get-go and bloodied soon after.

It was as if the candidates had made a private pact to eviscerate Bloomberg, who has spent hundreds of millions of his roughly $60 billion fortune to climb in the polls and is poised to spend hundreds of millions more before the nomination is decided.

Is he trying to purchase it? Absolutely. But, as he said at the debate, there’s a great cause behind that expenditure — his determination to deny Donald Trump a second term — and his funding of his own presidential bid at least means he’s beholden to no one.

Buttigieg arguably showed Bloomberg some mercy by denigrating him and Sanders together in one stroke. He called them “the two most polarizing figures on this stage,” one of whom thinks that “capitalism is the root of all evil” and the other of whom thinks that “money ought to be the root of all power.”

“We shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out,” Buttigieg said. “We can do better.”

That line was obviously scripted but no less fascinating for it, because it affirmed the nutty extent to which Bloomberg, by dint of financial swagger and aggressive public relations, has created the narrative that he is the leading moderate alternative to Sanders and the most fearsome adversary for Trump. There’s no real proof yet of either. But it’s a notion with enough currency that Buttigieg, who actually leads the Democratic contest so far in terms of accrued delegates, felt the need to chip away at it.

Maybe Bloomberg never stood a chance, not given how prepared his rivals were to tear him apart and the particular exuberance and eloquence that Warren brought to the task. She savaged him not only for his mistakes but for his explanations of those mistakes, so that his apologies were all but erased.

You thought there was acrimony between Warren and Sanders? They’re honeymooning sweethearts compared to her and Bloomberg.

Sanders was the big winner of the night, because he entered the debate as the front-runner but evaded the kind of harsh treatment that a front-runner usually gets. Bloomberg got it instead.

So while Bloomberg warned direly that Sanders would be a disastrous nominee and possibly guarantee Trump’s victory, Bloomberg’s presence onstage may have bettered Sanders’s odds of getting to the general election. It certainly didn’t better Bloomberg’s.

There was another winner: Trump. The candidates flexed so much disdain for one another that they had a limited reserve for him, and I can imagine Trump and his advisers scouring the night’s transcripts for tips on how to take down whoever the eventual Democratic nominee is.

I don’t know how Democrats escape the uncomely chaos of their contest. But I do know that it’s not the ideal run-up to November, and Bloomberg’s billions aren’t magically going to make it all better.

Some Democrat 2020 Candidates Need to Drop Out

Having watched both sets of Democrat presidential debates - although debate is not an accurate description of the format - I , like I suspect many others, have wondered with some of the Democrat gaggle "why the hell are they running?" Is it simply a vanity project when they have a snowball's chance in hell of passing the next threshold, much less winning the primary contest.  Thankfully, the DNC has upped the requirements for future rounds of the debate process so that we begin to better see the difference between those who are serious contenders.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the need to narrow the field and allow Democrats and voters to see more of those with serious chances of winning.  Here are article highlights that considers who makes the next round and who needs to call it quits:

Speaking anecdotally, it’s been clear that the most commonly held opinion about the two rounds of 2020 candidate debates occurring in June and July is that it’s a really bad idea to give so many of these people a nationally televised platform. But now as the “invisible primary” moves to its next, more voter-adjacent phase, the great winnower approacheth, mainly through the significantly heightened thresholds for participation in the September and October debates, set out by the Democratic National Committee.

Put concisely, the DNC is limiting the third debate(s), sponsored by ABC and Univision, on September 12 and 13, to candidates who can demonstrate they have 130,000 unique donors (with 400 in at least 20 different states), and can hit 2 percent (rounded up from 1.5 percent if need be) in four of a specified list of national or early-state polls taken up to August 28. There will be an additional qualifying window for the fourth debate(s) planned for October (date and sponsor TBD), though the criteria stay the same. Not only have the donor and polling thresholds doubled since the first two rounds, but candidates have to meet both, not one or the other, to qualify (dual qualification became a tiebreaker in the early rounds, but was not generally required). . . . Here’s how the field is shaping up:

At present seven candidates — Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren — have already qualified for the September debate.

It’s possible, of course, that qualifying candidates could drop out of their own volition, either because they aren’t doing well (I’m looking at you, Beto), or in order to downshift to a Senate race (also a possibility for O’Rourke, along with the lower-polling Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper).

Andrew Yang . . . . Like Yang, Julián Castro has met the donor threshold and needs one more qualifying poll to make the cut. After two solid debate performances, he should be fine.

Amy Klobuchar has met the polling threshold, and is reportedly just 10,000 donors short of that threshold as well, with a month to get across the line. She should be able to accomplish that. 

From here on projections get very iffy, depending mostly on how the debates affected both fundraising and poll standings.

Billionaire Tom Steyer didn’t even enter the race until July, but his face on the many advocacy ads he’s run since Trump became president should give him a very good shot at meeting the polling threshold by the end of August (he’s already hit 2 percent relevant surveys). And while he doesn’t need the small-dollar money 130,000 donors can give him, he certainly has the resources and the mailing list to buy that qualifier, too. He’ll probably make the cut, but it could get hairy.

Another tardy entrant, Steve Bullock, was long considered a potentially viable dark horse for the actual nomination, though his late start squandered an awful lot of buzz. Like some other “moderates” in the field, he could have really used a midsummer collapse of support for Joe Biden that does not appear to be forthcoming.

Tulsi Gabbard is close to the donor threshold, but has only one qualifying poll. She got attention in Detroit for an impressively efficient takedown of Kamala Harris’s criminal-justice record, and may be building a following of foreign-policy noninterventionists. But she has a lot of media detractors.

So, too, does Marianne Williamson, whose generally well-regarded performance in Detroit gave her a shot at a polling surge, even as it has (based on negative reactions to my own piece about her appeal) definitely enraged her critics. We’ll know very soon if she can begin to make a splash in the polls; she probably does have the capacity to meet the donor threshold given the far-flung nature of her following.

10 Who Should Be Waving Good-bye

Kirsten Gillibrand would seem to have a shot at meeting the donor threshold, but her debate performance and her general positioning in the race seem unlikely to lift her in the polls any time soon. She’s likely to finish as the greatest disappointment of the 2020 Democratic field.

Michael Bennet has impressed some observers with his debate performances — while others have debated which cartoon characters his voice echoes. He’s done relatively well in fundraising (and much better than his fellow Coloradan and former boss John Hickenlooper), but doesn’t seem close to the grassroots donor threshold.

Jay Inslee has won a lot of positive attention for his climate-change-focused candidacy, but his campaign hasn’t taken off in the early states at all. Nothing that happened in the debates seems likely to change that, though on paper he should have as much potential as the more highly ranked Bullock. He has a fine future as a 2021 Cabinet member if a Democrat wins.

John Delaney got a lot of attention during the first night in Detroit (though much of it was negative); he’s got tons of personal money and has been campaigning in Iowa roughly since that state was admitted to the Union. But his candidacy mostly resembles that of Martin O’Malley in 2016: a lot of effort with little payoff. If he makes the cut it will be as the most conspicuous moderate not named Joe.

John Hickenlooper is another credible-on-paper moderate, but one who has not at all distinguished himself in the debates and has struggled to raise money and keep staff.
Everything you can say about Bennet, Delaney, and Hickenlooper you can also say about Tim Ryan, who hasn’t translated his midwestern, white working-class street cred into tangible support so far as I can tell. He’s one of those candidates who could conceivably drop out even if he somehow makes the September cut.

And then there is Bill de Blasio, the presidential aspirant who has united his own city in overwhelming antipathy towards his candidacy.

Three other candidates — Seth Moulton, Mike Gravel, and Joe Sestak — didn’t make the earlier debate cut, and there’s really no reason to think anything has suddenly made any of them viable. Besides, there will soon be a hue and cry for nonviable candidates to drop out that will dwarf any possible groundswell of support for them. [I]t will be time for a number of candidates to take a long look in the mirror and see not the next president of the United States, but just another pol who looked at the current occupant of the Oval Office and thought: Why not me?

Let's hope some drop out sooner as opposed to later.
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Washington Post Slams Sanders' Denial of Reality

In a stinging main editorial, the Washington Post has slammed Bernie Sanders and, in my view, correctly accused him of denying reality.   That reality being the limited ability a president has to force through change given the divided nature of the federal political structure that requires Congress to enact legislation to solidify change and the fact that presidential executive orders have their limits in what they can accomplish.  As noted before, Sanders and Donald Trump have great sound bites that they like to use, but where are the detailed policy positions, and can any of their proposals realistically be put in place without Congress' support?  Similarly, can sound bites win them the general election.  Here are editorial highlights:

“MADAM SECRETARY,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said to Hillary Clinton at Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, “that is a low blow.” But was it? Ms. Clinton had just finished pointing out that Mr. Sanders has at times strongly critiqued President Obama. While she made his criticisms out to be more personal in nature than they were, her core point was nevertheless true: Mr. Sanders is running a campaign based on a blistering — and simplistic — critique of the status quo under this Democratic president.

Ms. Clinton, pointing out that Mr. Obama had to fight tooth-and-nail even for relatively centrist solutions such as the Affordable Care Act, draws the lesson that the next president must have a strong sense of practicality and realism; big rallies cannot wish away the complex politics of Congress. Mr. Sanders, by contrast, claims that Mr. Obama had insufficient revolutionary zeal. That’s why he proposed that the incumbent Democratic president be challenged by a primary opponent in 2012.

Of course, Mr. Sanders’s rejection of realism didn’t start when Mr. Obama stepped foot in the White House. At another point in Thursday’s debate, Ms. Clinton pointed out that the senator from Vermont voted against a 2007 immigration reform bill, a bipartisan deal brokered by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), that would have made the country’s immigration system a little more rational. Mr. Sanders replied that the guest-worker program it envisioned would have been “akin to slavery” and that groups such as the AFL-CIO and the League of United Latin American Citizens opposed it. Such kowtowing to interest groups and indulgence in hyperbole are not uncommon for senators, who are rarely held accountable for failing to get results. But they would make for a disastrous presidency.

Mr. Sanders regularly assures his audiences that he respects Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton. But he attacks the pragmatism they have built their legacies on, even though they had no other option. The system — and by this we mean the constitutional structure of checks and balances — requires policymakers to settle for incremental changes. Mr. Obama has scored several ambitious but incomplete reforms that have made people’s lives better while ideologues on both sides took potshots. A key question in the Democratic race is which candidate would duplicate the president’s work and which would settle for rock-throwing.

Ouch!!