Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Sunday that he would run for president in 2020, bringing his enormous wealth and eclectic political biography into the tumultuous Democratic primary and seeking to win over skeptical liberal voters by presenting himself as a multibillion-dollar threat to President Trump.His introductory video is centrist and generic, but it's compelling:
The candidate himself? Not so much. He's old, short, uncharismatic, and nasal-voiced. And when you go to YouTube to find a recent Bloomberg speech, what turns up? Bloomberg giving an address to the Harvard Business School Class of 2019.
Yeah, that's a great look for someone trying to take on Donald Trump as a candidate of the people.
But can't Bloomberg just buy his way to the nomination, or at least to top-tier status? Well, he did win three elections as mayor of New York. But the first one was a fluke. The liberal city was ready for a Democrat after eight years of Rudy Giuliani. Then -- on Primary Day -- the 9/11 attacks happened.
Voting was suspended. The primary was rescheduled for September 25. Bloomberg won the Republican primary easily, but the Democratic primary was close. There was a runoff on October 11.
Mark Green emerged the winner, after three rounds of voting. And for a while it looked as if he might be elected easily. In an October 24 Quinnipiac poll, Green led Bloomberg 51%-35%.
But on October 28, Giuliani -- who by then had abandoned his effort to extend his own mayoral term by a few months -- endorsed Bloomberg. Giuliani, who prior to 9/11 had worn out his welcome in the city, even among white voters, was now winning praise again after the attacks.
Giuliani's endorsement and $74 million in campaign spending got Blooomberg a win. But he won by only 2.4% -- 35,000 votes out of more than 1.4 million votes cast.
Bloomberg won big in 2005 -- 58%-39% over Fernando Ferrer. (He spent $85 million in that race.) But in 2009 he had another close call. This time, he spent $102 million -- fourteen times what was spent by his opponent, Bill Thompson. And yet he won by only 4.4%.
None of Bloomberg's opponents had passionate followings. Even in a Democratic city, they were regarded as mediocre party hacks. No one would have ever stood in line for hours to take a selfie with any of them. No one would have ever devised a corny-viral dance step on their behalf.
A series of events over which Bloomberg had no control led to his first campaign win. He outspent three uncompelling opponents and barely beat two of them. He's not going to be able to win this nomination just by writing a lot of fat checks.
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One more point: Bloomberg probably won in 2009 in part because the popular new Democratic president, Barack Obama, refused to give Bill Thompson more than a lukewarm endorsement -- the endorsement was, in the words of The New York Times, "delivered in the conditional tense, without using the name of the candidate, and coming from a presidential spokesman."
“The president is the leader of the Democratic Party, and as that would support the Democratic nominee.”Obama assumed Bloomberg would win easily and wanted to stay on his good side. Bloomberg, for his part, rewarded Obama by sandbagging him a few months later on the issue of New York City trials for 9/11 prisoners held at Guantanamo.
The Obama administration on Wednesday lost its most prominent backer of the plan to try the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the trial should not be held in New York City.This dovetailed nicely with GOP demands that no trials be held on U.S. soil at all. If you're angry about the fact that Gitmo is still open, Mike Bloomberg deserves a considerable amount of the blame.
The mayor’s reversal was a political blow to the White House’s efforts to resolve a landmark terror case a few blocks from where Al Qaeda hijackers rammed planes into the World Trade Center, a trial that the president saw as an important demonstration of American justice.
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