MIKE !

          As I write this, the Iowa Caucuses ended 48 hours ago and we’re expecting the results to roll in somewhere around St. Patrick’s Day, but that’s not what I’ve come here to talk about.

          I’m here because I’m reading and hearing commentary from supposed wise guys and insiders and experts to the effect that the skids are being greased to slip the Democratic nomination to Michael Bloomberg.

          “Mark my words,” they say.  “This is all being set up for Bloomberg behind the scenes.  Don’t doubt me on something like this.  The powers inside the party will not let Bernie win and they can see Biden doesn’t always know what state he’s in, and they already offered it to Michelle Obama but she doesn’t want it, so they decided it’s gonna be Bloomberg and his billions.”

          They’re always so certain.  That’s the tell.

          What makes this type of thing interesting is that the people who do it are not just blowhards, though there are plenty of blowhards who do it too.  Often they will have “insider” credentials and a substantial resume in the politics business.  And there is no reason to believe they are being dishonest.  They’re wrong because they are insiders and they are so deeply embedded in the bubble that they can’t see the world around them has changed.  Louis XVI was the last guy to get the memo about Robespierre and his buddies.  Czar Nicholas II never quite figured out he was going to be the last czar of Russia until, suddenly, he was.

          Hugh Hewitt is a syndicated radio host who seems to know everything there is to know about the Republican Party and elected Republicans.  He knows the names of their wives and their kids, and he knows what percentage they got in the last election and who they beat.  It’s his niche in conservative radio.  He’s a party guy rather than an ideologue.

          A little more than three years ago, he interviewed Jeb at least a dozen times on the radio and made it clear that Bush would quickly rise to the top of the Republican field.  Hugh is sufficiently pan-Republican that he didn’t guarantee a Bush nomination, but there was no doubt where his sympathies were focused, and there was no doubt of his belief that Bush’s nomination was inevitable.  He held this view for months, even as Jeb! spent $125 million winning exactly one delegate.  And he was far from alone in this opinion.  I won money from people who knew the fix was in for Jeb and that he couldn’t be stopped.

          And I am no genius. Tens of millions of Republicans understood from the get-go that after two dreadful, timid candidates like John McCain and (especially) Mitt Romney, a soft-spoken, low-energy reiteration of the Bush family would go nowhere.  It was only insiders who believed in Jeb, along with a few Democrats who had no idea how Republicans think.

          Michael Bloomberg brings the same aroma of “you-must-be-kidding!” to this year’s Democratic race.

          It’s the money, of course.  Bloomberg has spent $250 million on commercials getting himself to the point, at 6% in the national polls, where a lot of people now have a vague sense of who he is.  I guess the idea is that once he spends another $250 million, he will get to 12%, and so on and so on.  About $2.5 billion in TV ads will get him elected in a landslide.  Right?

          Or if that’s not the plan, well, what is the plan?  What Bloomberg’s electoral strategy actually reminds me of is the South Park underwear gnomes.  As you may recall, their 3-step plan to acquire unimaginable riches was as follows:

          1) Steal underwear from celebrities.

          2) ????????????????????????

          3)  Profit!!!

The Bloomberg variation appears to be something similar:

          1) Spend billions showing pictures of yourself talking to African-Americans.

          2) ???????????????????

          3) Be inaugurated president on January 20, 2021!!!

          Money is nice, of course.  Candidates always wish they had more than they do.  But if money could buy the presidency, we would now be in the 4^th year of the Hillary administration.  The final numbers from the 2016 election had her spending $768 million to Trump’s $398 million---almost a 2 – 1 ratio.

          In addition, what’s so wonderful about the guy?

          The best thing Bloomberg has going for him at the moment is that all anybody knows about him is the fluff on his TV commercials.  No one has attacked him politically because they haven’t yet taken him seriously.  But that will change.

          For example, whatever happened to all those sexual harassment complaints about Bloomberg?  They always seemed to pop up in the news and then vanish a day or two later.  I wonder if any of those young ladies could be persuaded to come out of the woodwork now that we’re in the age of #MeToo.  More importantly, where “stop-and-frisk” is concerned, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were pretty much Thing 1 and Thing 2 in the Big Apple.  Over the course of 25 years or so, the two of them cut the murder rate in NYC by 85% by concentrating police resources in the areas where murderers were murdering.  For Democrats, of course, this was a VERY BAD THING because, well, it’s racist to stop young black men from murdering other young black men.  (Don’t stare too deeply into the logic of it.)   But once Democratic voters find out Bloomberg prevented all those murders, and that there are thousands of black men still alive in NYC because of Bloomberg’s efforts*, he won’t look nearly so attractive as a candidate.

          Then there’s the China connection that has thus far gotten zero attention in the political press.  Because the reflexive attitude among Dems is to like everything Trump hates (e.g., open borders, gun confiscation, infanticide), it is possible no Democrat will try to attack Bloomberg for his links to Chinese businesses and the Chinese government and his ownership or part ownership of hundreds of Chinese companies.  But Trump will.  Trump will not be at all shy in pointing out that almost all of Bloomberg’s vast wealth can be traced to his Chinese connections, and that it’s probably more accurate to call to him a Chinese billionaire than an American one.

          Plus, he’s short.

          And finally, there’s another Giuliani echo in the Bloomberg story.  Recall, if you will, the 2008 Giuliani campaign for the Republican nomination for president.

          Rudy G was something of a national hero at the time.  He was “America’s Mayor,” the man who had single-handedly shepherded NYC through the horrors and the aftermath of 9-11.  National polls had him atop the field for the nomination, and while early polls don’t necessarily mean much (as we are seeing now), Giuliani was regarded as the front-runner for several months.

          Plotting his strategy, Rudy decided to skip the early votes in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, where his New York persona and manners might not play with the masses, and concentrate on the Florida primary instead.  He spent several months there, and had the state pretty much to himself.  The theory was that Florida (with all its ex-New Yorkers), would love him and that his huge victory in the primary would catapult him to victory in the remaining primaries.

          The problem was that all the news media and all the excitement was in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Giuliani was not, so he was forgotten.  On his big day, the day he had pinned all his hopes upon, he finished third in the Florida voting.  The next day, he dropped out of the race.

          The rules and the primary dates are somewhat different now, compared to 2008, but Bloomberg’s plan to skip the first year of campaigning and the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina), does not have much of a track record.  The only guy to have tried it, Rudy G, went from heir apparent to laughingstock in one day.

          For Bloomberg, that nightmare day could be Super Tuesday, March 3, when delegates in sixteen states are on the line.  Of particular interest will be California with its 416 delegates, which are 22% of those needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot.  The last polls I saw show Bernie Sanders with a healthy lead on the field and Bloomberg still below 10%.  That may change a bit as Bloomberg spends another $100 million buying up Instagram influencers, but does anybody believe Bernie can lose California to Michael Bloomberg?

          And if, following Super Tuesday, the Bernie flag is still flying high while the Bloomberg juggernaut has been somewhat tarnished by its encounter with electoral reality, the myth of Mike’s inevitability suddenly becomes a lot less believable.

          Prediction: the Bloomberg bubble bursts long before the Democratic National Convention.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki    

            

*Thanks to Ann Coulter for recently making this particular point, that there are thousands of young black men who survived into adulthood in New York because Giuliani and Bloomberg made it extremely inconvenient for other young black men to murder them.