The Most Horrific Takeaway of a Possible Bloomberg Nomination
I despise Mike Bloomberg. I always have. He governed New York City using the kind of naked patronage that would make a mob boss blush while fancying himself a messianic overlord willing to step over everybody's civil rights and personal freedoms to achieve his preferred ends. To whatever extent Donald Trump governs like a strongman, Mike Bloomberg gift-wrapped the playbook of how to govern like a strongman in America, only doing so without any imagination. He simply plowed over his dissenters and paid off the people who would be most likely to object to their being plowed over in the way only an oligarch can. It's possible Bloomberg's less of a clinical sociopath than Trump, but I'm not fully convinced of that either. Look at his record. He treats his constituents like chess pieces on the board of his own personal fiefdom, completely comfortable with the idea that his personal fortune entitles him to do so.
And now, Mike Bloomberg is taking his 12-year autocratic reign of New York City and going national with it, changing parties three times along the way to accommodate his soulless ambitions. And because of a combination of a messy series of events, the unbelievable good luck that has followed him every step of his career, and hundreds of millions of dollars of one-sided advertising that nobody else has the resources to counter, Bloomberg appears to be on a glide path to the Democratic nomination. The party that has assailed the rise of oligarchy and the risks associated with unbridled income inequality seems poised to sell its soul and start worshiping this golden calf in a moment of "whatever it takes to stop Trump" desperation. The ramifications for the future of our democracy are endless, and I will mostly focus on that in the paragraphs ahead.
I think just about everybody inside and outside of the Washington bubble underestimates the tremendous competitive advantage of one-sided advertising. Back in 2008, Barack Obama had a war chest of cash twice as large as Republican opponent John McCain, enabling him to campaign in states where McCain couldn't afford to play ball. For example, Obama advertised tirelessly in Wisconsin and Michigan months after McCain pulled out, and it's no coincidence that Obama dramatically outperformed the traditional Partisan Voting Index of Democratic Presidential nominees in both states. Ditto for Obama's one-sided 2008 advertising forays into Indiana, where he pulled off an unlikely victory, as well as North Dakota, Montana, and Missouri, which he lost but strongly outperformed any other Democrat in a generation.
With Obama's 2008 precedent, it should have been easier to predict that Bloomberg's strategy of swamping Super Tuesday states with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads that no other candidate could afford to counter would significantly move the needle. The collapse of Biden and resulting muddle of low-resource center-left alternatives scrambling for the same voters was less foreseeable but even if Biden had performed acceptably in Iowa and New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg's saturation advertising directed to low-information, low-intensity voters would still have had a tremendous impact on this race.
So what's the lesson here? It's a pretty obvious one. Billionaires get to create their own sets of rules in American elections. If Democrats aren't able to stop Bloomberg in the next two weeks, then every present and future oligarch realizes their cash enables them to circumvent a process carefully crafted to avoid this sort of thing. Up until now, the primary process has been reasonably effective in preventing resource-heavy candidates from simply buying the nomination, but it never had to contend with an oligarch quite as resource-heavy as Bloomberg. If his strategy works, it shows a dozen or so other multi-billionaires they can do it too. And regardless of whether any of the other dozen or so multi-billionaires is instinctively political, they are all ambitious. Knowing that a small fraction of their personal empire is all it would cost them to rule the free world for at least four years, rewarding their allies and punishing their enemies every step of the way, would be a deal almost none of them could refuse.
So I ask this question? If Bloomberg's gambit of buying the Democratic nomination--and potentially the Presidency after that--works, then how can ever avoid self-funding multi-billionaire major party nominees cycle after cycle? How could we stop the richest people in the nation from seizing their competitive advantage of endless saturation advertising to circumvent the nomination process in every election? Will we ever have a President who's not a self-funding multi-billionaire again?
For all of the endless boo-hooing about small unrepresentative states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina having an outsized role in picking our Presidents, Bloomberg's rise is Exhibit A of why that process is so important, or at least has been before Bloomberg was the first to test and perhaps exceed previously unforeseen limitations of that process. By putting a premium on retail politics and giving dark horses a chance, these four small states with relatively cheap advertising markets have kept would-be Bloombergs in check in the past. If Bloomberg renders them irrelevant moving forward and shows an oligarch can bypass the process entirely and buy it, rendering the intense efforts of less oligarchic challengers who can't afford to compete at their level meaningless, then American democracy will never be the same again. At that point, the outsized role of Iowa--and enraged cable news analysts apoplectic that caucus results weren't yet ready by 10 p.m. on election night to accommodate their live broadcasting--will seem like pretty quaint problems by comparison.
Two weeks. The Democratic Party has two weeks to stop this oligarchic strongman with a shady personal past and an unthinkable political past from buying the nomination. And on top of his record, he has not participated in the debates or had any of the kind of in-person scrutiny of Presidential candidate skill that a serious Presidential contender needs--and that voters deserve--to sufficiently determine if he's worthy of the job. Whether he wins or loses in November, nominating him would be a historic mistake, and a mistake with incalculable ramifications on the Democratic Party and democracy generally for generations to come.
And now, Mike Bloomberg is taking his 12-year autocratic reign of New York City and going national with it, changing parties three times along the way to accommodate his soulless ambitions. And because of a combination of a messy series of events, the unbelievable good luck that has followed him every step of his career, and hundreds of millions of dollars of one-sided advertising that nobody else has the resources to counter, Bloomberg appears to be on a glide path to the Democratic nomination. The party that has assailed the rise of oligarchy and the risks associated with unbridled income inequality seems poised to sell its soul and start worshiping this golden calf in a moment of "whatever it takes to stop Trump" desperation. The ramifications for the future of our democracy are endless, and I will mostly focus on that in the paragraphs ahead.
I think just about everybody inside and outside of the Washington bubble underestimates the tremendous competitive advantage of one-sided advertising. Back in 2008, Barack Obama had a war chest of cash twice as large as Republican opponent John McCain, enabling him to campaign in states where McCain couldn't afford to play ball. For example, Obama advertised tirelessly in Wisconsin and Michigan months after McCain pulled out, and it's no coincidence that Obama dramatically outperformed the traditional Partisan Voting Index of Democratic Presidential nominees in both states. Ditto for Obama's one-sided 2008 advertising forays into Indiana, where he pulled off an unlikely victory, as well as North Dakota, Montana, and Missouri, which he lost but strongly outperformed any other Democrat in a generation.
With Obama's 2008 precedent, it should have been easier to predict that Bloomberg's strategy of swamping Super Tuesday states with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads that no other candidate could afford to counter would significantly move the needle. The collapse of Biden and resulting muddle of low-resource center-left alternatives scrambling for the same voters was less foreseeable but even if Biden had performed acceptably in Iowa and New Hampshire, I'm pretty sure Bloomberg's saturation advertising directed to low-information, low-intensity voters would still have had a tremendous impact on this race.
So what's the lesson here? It's a pretty obvious one. Billionaires get to create their own sets of rules in American elections. If Democrats aren't able to stop Bloomberg in the next two weeks, then every present and future oligarch realizes their cash enables them to circumvent a process carefully crafted to avoid this sort of thing. Up until now, the primary process has been reasonably effective in preventing resource-heavy candidates from simply buying the nomination, but it never had to contend with an oligarch quite as resource-heavy as Bloomberg. If his strategy works, it shows a dozen or so other multi-billionaires they can do it too. And regardless of whether any of the other dozen or so multi-billionaires is instinctively political, they are all ambitious. Knowing that a small fraction of their personal empire is all it would cost them to rule the free world for at least four years, rewarding their allies and punishing their enemies every step of the way, would be a deal almost none of them could refuse.
So I ask this question? If Bloomberg's gambit of buying the Democratic nomination--and potentially the Presidency after that--works, then how can ever avoid self-funding multi-billionaire major party nominees cycle after cycle? How could we stop the richest people in the nation from seizing their competitive advantage of endless saturation advertising to circumvent the nomination process in every election? Will we ever have a President who's not a self-funding multi-billionaire again?
For all of the endless boo-hooing about small unrepresentative states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina having an outsized role in picking our Presidents, Bloomberg's rise is Exhibit A of why that process is so important, or at least has been before Bloomberg was the first to test and perhaps exceed previously unforeseen limitations of that process. By putting a premium on retail politics and giving dark horses a chance, these four small states with relatively cheap advertising markets have kept would-be Bloombergs in check in the past. If Bloomberg renders them irrelevant moving forward and shows an oligarch can bypass the process entirely and buy it, rendering the intense efforts of less oligarchic challengers who can't afford to compete at their level meaningless, then American democracy will never be the same again. At that point, the outsized role of Iowa--and enraged cable news analysts apoplectic that caucus results weren't yet ready by 10 p.m. on election night to accommodate their live broadcasting--will seem like pretty quaint problems by comparison.
Two weeks. The Democratic Party has two weeks to stop this oligarchic strongman with a shady personal past and an unthinkable political past from buying the nomination. And on top of his record, he has not participated in the debates or had any of the kind of in-person scrutiny of Presidential candidate skill that a serious Presidential contender needs--and that voters deserve--to sufficiently determine if he's worthy of the job. Whether he wins or loses in November, nominating him would be a historic mistake, and a mistake with incalculable ramifications on the Democratic Party and democracy generally for generations to come.
posted by Mark at 10:56 AM
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