Michael Bloomberg’s Anti-Trump Superhero Cosplay Will Only Go So Far—Right?
Michael Bloomberg's plan was to parachute into the 2020 Democratic primary on Super Tuesday, ignoring Iowa and New Hampshire and the traditional Momentum Model that has dominated American political narratives for decades to focus on delegate-rich states like California and Texas. Like any sensible paratrooper, he hoped the ground would be softened up for him a bit with a $350-million ad blitz before he jumped out of the plane. Except events of the last week have forced him to crash-land into the primary conversation early, even as he blankets Instagram with an astroturfed campaign across the biggest meme-aggregation (read: meme-thieving) accounts. All together now, folks: FuckJerry!
You see, people keep posting tape of Bloomberg being racist. There was the clip where he essentially discussed black men between the ages of 16 and 25 as a criminal class. This was not just in defense of his stop-and-frisk policies as New York mayor, but of a more general policing regime where you flood black and brown neighborhoods with cops and lock people up on minor offenses like marijuana possession. A CNN person reacted to this by questioning the motives of the person who dug the clip up, despite the fact it's been on YouTube for years.
Then someone posted tape of Bloomberg suggesting that getting rid of redlining—a policy wherein black Americans were denied the opportunity to buy homes in middle-class neighborhoods, a pillar of building wealth and getting a decent education in America—was somehow responsible for the 2008 housing crisis and the resulting global financial meltdown. That's right: it's not Bloomberg's Wall Street buddies or the firms to which he sold Bloomberg terminals who are to blame, even if they engaged in reckless behavior and created an incentive structure that rewarded risky lending. It's the people who fought against racial discrimination in housing!
This is particularly gross considering the Great Recession decimated black wealth, in part because banks targeted black homeowners with predatory lending practices, to the point that the average white household now has 10 times the wealth of the average black household. That's worse than in 2007.
All this should serve to remind people that Bloomberg is essentially just a wealthy Republican in the mold of, say, Mitt Romney. He's disgusted by Trump's personal conduct, and by his inaction on the climate crisis and gun violence. (Romney, in fairness, doesn't give a shit about climate change. Bloomberg's record on that front is strong.) But Bloomberg basically thinks the system as presently constructed is working, that it is delivering fair and just results for our society, that the powerful people within it are nearly always right and deserve to be where they are, and that the powerless are where they are because of their personal failings. Also, as mayor of New York City, he had something of an authoritarian streak.
Bloomberg would almost certainly be a better president than the current one, if only because he seems to have full access to his cognitive faculties and is not a two-bit grifter with shady financial connections that sprawl across the multinational underworld. (Full disclosure: I once interned in the mayor's office in 2012, while Bloomberg was mayor. I primarily worked on updating spreadsheets keeping track of the fire hydrants on Randall's Island. City government!) He's also receiving all this highly justified scrutiny because he has gained some serious ground in the polls. He's up to 14 percent nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling average, behind only Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. He may take a hit after this week's attention, particularly because he's actually been attracting quite a few black voters from Biden's faltering campaign. Then again, he's also getting plenty of endorsements from black Democratic leaders.
Bloomberg's rise is rooted in his astroturf strategy, a campaign which seems to exist only in the commercial blocs between television programming segments and in the corniest precincts of social media. In the latter case, part of his strategy seems to be to bait Donald Trump into personal back-and-forths, so that America can get what it truly deserves: two alleged New York billionaires—only Bloomberg's status is truly assured in that department—arguing about their comparative heights, intelligence, and facial complexion in order to determine who should run the country. Thursday brought Exhibit A—or maybe J.
There's reason to believe that this strategy might just pay off for Bloomberg. First of all, people buy astroturf. It's like grass, but you don't have to water it! With Bloomberg, people might feel they won't have to pay attention to politics all the time anymore, which could appeal to professional-class coastal liberals who, like Bloomberg himself, generally like the economic status quo and are tired of being mad. (This impulse is understandable and also a huge part of why American democracy is in severe decay.) There is also reason to believe that a segment of the Democratic base is hungry for an Anti-Trump Superhero to do battle with the president on top of the Empire State Building or whatever. As our tangerine generalissimo has himself shown, the aesthetics of personal combat are powerful in American politics, if only because it feels like someone's doing the fighting for you.
For a while, the anti-Trump Resistance adopted Special Counsel Robert Mueller as their avatar, putting full and unflinching faith in the aging lawman to bring down a lawless scoundrel at high noon. It was approaching a messiah-complex situation, and even featured cartoon caricatures of the 74-year-old that, in the vein of the pro-Trump stuff, depicted him as a buff hyper-patriotic warrior. (You might call this Krassenstein's Monster.) Then Mueller bowed before a Justice Department rule against indicting the president, outlining obstruction-of-justice charges without calling them that, and he then testified before Congress in a performance that failed to produce the TV spectacle required to move the needle on anything in America. Meanwhile, the increasing sprawl of Trump's activities in West Asia, combined with the treachery of Mueller's eventual boss in Attorney General William Barr, raises questions about whether he really got to the bottom of what happened.
Similarly, when Trump swept to power with a fully Republican Congress in 2016, there was no institutional bulwark against his renegade behavior except the free press. Democratic leadership in the House and Senate appeared particularly weak. And so we should have seen it coming when a brash, tough-talking young lawyer came on the scene representing a thorn in the Trumpian side—Stephanie Clifford, d.b.a. Stormy Daniels—and made himself into a Resistance Hero. Michael Avenatti was "everything Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats were not: aesthetically combative; dismissive of the when-they-go-low-we-go-high mentality of the previous election; and a budding rival to Donald Trump in his sheer ability to garner publicity." Or at least, that's what I wrote when the news broke that Avenatti had been arrested on a string of federal charges, including those related to an alleged attempted shakedown of Nike.
Back in the glorious present day, Bloomberg is positioning himself as the Anti-Trump Candidate now that Biden is really starting to slip. Unlike Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or even fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, he is not running on the basis that much of anything outside the Oval Office is broken in this country. Only Amy Klobuchar has anything resembling his singular focus on Trump, and getting rid of El Jefe is the number-one concern for Democratic voters. It could work, particularly because Bloomberg is unlikely to meet the same fate as either of those onetime Anti-Trump Superheroes. He is not a gutter-brawling grifter in the Avenatti mold, and he seems a little more lively than Mueller did in those congressional hearings in which he so reluctantly participated.
He also has more money than God, and can keep the firehose of ads going regardless of how much negative coverage he gets in the press. This, of course, raises the question of whether Bloomberg merely represents a different kind of threat to American democracy than does Trump, who openly denies any legitimate power outside his own. If American oligarchs exist, Bloomberg is one. Certainly, he's a plutocrat. And he seems decently well-positioned to skip along the gold-brick road all the way to Oz, a state of affairs which would lead the Democratic Party towards Rockefeller Republicanism. Then the choice for the electorate would be between that and the modern Republican Party's reactionary ethno-nationalism. Where's your money on what working-class folks would choose four years later?
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