"Please, Democrats, don’t tell me you need Sanders’s big, ill-thought-through, revolutionary grand schemes to get inspired and mobilized for this election."

"You want a revolution? I’ll give you a revolution: four more years of Donald Trump, unencumbered by the need to get re-elected. That will be a revolution!...  [You can win] by not only talking about how to redivide the pie — which we need to do — but by also talking about how to grow the pie, how to create more taxpayers and how to inspire more innovators. Ours is a capitalist country.... I was glad to see candidates with this kind of message, like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, trending better in Iowa and New Hampshire.... But there is one candidate on the Democratic side who not only has a track record of supporting all those issues but also has the resources to build a machine big enough to take on the Trump machine...  This candidate is not cuddly.... He’s made mistakes, especially around stop-and-frisk policing in New York City.... His mistakes, though, have to be weighed against a record of courageously speaking out and devoting enormous personal resources to virtually every progressive cause — gun control, abortion rights, climate change, Planned Parenthood, education reform for predominantly minority schools, affordable housing, income inequality and tax reform.... In an age when political extremists go all the way, and moderates tend to just go away, Bloomberg has the right stuff — a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake...."

From "Paging Michael Bloomberg/Democrats need to nominate the right person to prevent Trump from winning a second term" by Thomas L. Friedman (NYT).

I wonder how Democratic and independent moderates who have watched Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg fight their way to the front, with endless travel and events and debate, will feel about shunting them aside and embracing the latecomer who's using his vast wealth to barge to the front without all that trouble. I myself am a moderate independent, but I'm not as upset with Trump as the Democrats continually tell me I should be.

There was a big attack on Bloomberg yesterday, with the release of audio recordings of his harsh talk about the need to stop and frisk young black men. I keep hearing questioning whether black people will vote for Pete Buttigieg, but what's the word on whether black people will vote for Bloomberg? The Daily Beast has "Black Voters Turn to Mike Bloomberg/His belated and convenient stop-and-frisk mea culpa might be good enough for voters concerned with beating Trump, and protecting the fraught gains of the past half-century" by Christina Greer (a polisci professor who specializes in "black ethnic politics").

I have spoken to three black NYC political operatives who are quietly thinking about joining the campaign, which is gaining momentum, hiring nationwide, and paying top dollar. These aren’t mercenaries but self-defined pragmatic progressives who believe Bloomberg has the best chance at an electoral victory against Trump in November. I have spoken to a friend who says his black fraternity’s message boards—full of college-educated black men of diverse financial backgrounds, in various professional sectors, living in towns and cities across the country—are full of favorable talk about Bloomberg....

Black voters are strategic voters.... Candidates like Bernie Sanders propose blowing up the ship, but it is black voters who built the ship, as wayward as it may be. Joe Biden presented a more moderate vision... but his promise that he can beat Trump has been sorely tested by the struggles of his campaign so far. Other moderates, like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, are viewed as out of touch by many black voters...

I'm struck to see the phrase "like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg" in this column because it was also in the Friedman column, and I almost took the trouble to make fun of it when I saw it the first time. Obviously, the column writers don't mean candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. They mean Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. It's sloppy writing, but when I see it twice, in such similar columns, I feel as though the writers are working off the same talking points memo.