The Bloomberg Is Off the Rose... Conrad Black

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The Bloomberg Is Off the Rose

The former New York City mayor remains the Democrats’ best bet, but his bantam rooster-moneybags routine is off to a rocky start and at this point he is no match for Trump and his army of supporters and strong record in office.

Conrad Black
- February 21st, 2020

Instant dismissals of Michael Bloomberg’s Wednesday night performance in the Democratic debate as a disaster are exaggerations of what happened. But there is no question the reality of him was a let-down to such an idolatrous, $400 million advertising build-up. Bloomberg was not overly articulate or ingenuous, and he was too impersonal to satisfy a party that likes to think of itself as impassioned. As someone who had been preceded by such a mighty fanfare, he was the victim of his own largesse—more than 20 times the advertising expense of his nearest competitor.

The public had been led to expect the arrival of a demiurge, but Bloomberg has little physical presence (unlike Trump), and is far from a stem-winding speaker. He handled the disparagements of his status as a billionaire ably—“I worked hard for the money and I give most of it away to charities each year.” But he got the worst of the predictable questions about stop-and-frisk, and bombed badly when asked about the alleged sexual harassment episodes which were settled with pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements.

Bloomberg only really excelled when taxes and economics were the focus. Here he (rightly) derided the views of all of the other candidates as “ridiculous,” and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) accused him of a “cheap shot” when Bloomberg said Sanders’ socialism was really “Communism and that was tried and didn’t work.”

“Marxism” would have been more accurate than Communism, but Sanders opened the kimono for such a reflection by amplifying his call for confiscatory taxation on high wealth and incomes, and redistribution to the lowest third on the economic scale, along with the outright nationalization or heavy regulation of the private sector. It is an insane program and Bloomberg’s dismissal of it was authoritative.

more
https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/21/the-bloomberg-is-off-the-rose/

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You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
Bloomberg can use his billions to get on the ballot, but he can't make people vote for him.