Former New York City mayor and billionaire prick Michael Bloomberg barely won his last election. In 2009, after he rammed through an exception to the city's term limit for mayors, he ran for a third term as a Republican and spent nearly $100 million on his reelection. While that's sofa cushion money for Bloomberg, it was unheard of in a local race, and he outspent his Democratic rival Bill Thompson 14 to 1. Yet, after supposedly having had two successful terms to run on, after dropping all that coin fluffing his own public image like an aging porn star injecting his dick for the third time in a day on the set, all Mayor Mike managed to get was 50.7% of the vote. Enough to win, sure, but Thompson still got over 46%.
The point here is that a hundred million bucks bought Bloomberg a just eked-through victory. There is certainly no guarantee that the $400 million and counting he's spending on the Democratic nomination will do more than give him a brief novelty surge that dies down as soon as everyone remembers "Oh, right, he's that prick."
And it's so easy to find Bloomberg being the goddamndest asshole all the time. Between the odious sustained assault on non-whites in New York City that was "Stop-and-Frisk" to his completely demeaning treatment of women in his circle, Bloomberg has left a trail of bullshit that's visible from miles away. Then there's the strongman tactics that he used as mayor to break up Occupy Wall Street, which involved a violent raid on the protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park in defiance of a court order. I was there in the aftermath, and I saw kids slammed to the ground by cops and listened as Wall Street fucks laughed about the arrested getting raped at Riker's Island. I'd bet anything they were Bloomberg voters. The thing about Bloomberg is that, until he apologized, he seemed to get off on this shit.
It's so simple to find a fucked-up quote from Bloomberg. Here he is in 2010 after then-Gov. David Paterson signed a law that prevented police departments from keeping the data they got from every single stop-and-frisk suspect, including those where nothing was found. Bloomberg scoffed, "And what's wrong with keeping the data? We have data on everything. You wait until we have facial recognition software, and somebody's going to have a record of every person that walks down by your house. You just point a camera at them, the software will do it. That's coming. I mean, these days of, we put license plates on your car. You can read those by computer now, and we know where you're driving." He wasn't wrong about the technology, but his enthusiasm sure makes it seem like he may misuse the larger data collection capabilities of, say, the NSA. Ask the Muslim community of New York how that surveillance ended up.
I'm attacking Bloomberg in a way that, frankly, I haven't attacked the other Democrats for the simple reason that Bloomberg isn't a Democrat. Unlike Bernie Sanders, most of Bloomberg's views throughout his career have never really lined up with the Democratic Party platform. He spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, but, prior to that, he spoke at the 2004 Republican Convention, which was being held in New York City (with protests that were met with their own overzealous response from the NYPD).
Basically, until a couple of years ago, Mike Bloomberg is what we used to call a "moderate Republican," back when such political creatures existed in the wilds of the GOP. The best way to define "moderate" was someone who was conservative on financial shit but was sane on guns, gays, and abortion and understood that climate change is real. In other words, a Republican who believed in science and medicine. He should have run as a Republican and used his billions to force Trump into spending his war chest fending off a primary opponent. He might have actually been able to drag the GOP back to having a toe on the sane side of the line of demarcation between sanity and madness. And he would have significantly weakened Trump.
But, alas, instead, Bloomberg, with his authoritarian impulses and his record of racism, sexism, and violence, has decided to be the turd in the Democratic punch bowl, plopping into the election to ruin the thing for everyone who's been there. Already in second in national polling, with way too many people who should know better accepting his apology for Stop and Frisk, he has a real chance at the nomination. And way too many people are champing at the bit for the Democrats to have their own douchebag billionaire to face down the worse douchebag "billionaire" in the White House. Jesus, you know how fucked a nation that makes us?
To be fair, Bloomberg's website is filled with Democratic kibble in its section on his plans, so he's still better than Trump in the way that a rotting cheese sandwich is better than Trump, but it's still a rotting cheese sandwich. You'd rather toss it in the garbage than see it inaugurated. But if that's all we got...
I could see this going another way, too. That same national poll showed that Bernie Sanders has opened up a 12-point lead on second place, with 31% choosing him, his biggest margin yet. Faced with the possibility of Bloomberg, progressive Democrats and those who are just fuckin' skeeved out by Mayor Mike might be moving towards Sanders as a way of getting this goddamned thing over with before a just recently-converted former Republican buys the nomination.
Let's hope that Bloomberg is chewed up and spit out at the Democratic debate tomorrow night, making him spend his billions where he should if he's so goddamned concerned about 2020: on the Senate races.
