What did Michael Bloomberg get for his money? He spent more than $1 billion running as a candidate, completely and embarrassingly failed, and then spent over $100 million on Biden...

... in Florida and $15 million in Ohio and Texas — and Biden lost in all of those states, Business Insider reports. 

What an astounding record of fruitless political spending! I was going to say, this record will last for ages, but then I realized... no. It will be smashed within the next 10 years. Don't you see why?

Bloomberg is super-rich with $55 billion, but that only puts him at #14 on the Forbes' list of richest people in America.  Jeff Bezos — #1 — has more than 3 times that much money. Why wouldn't he spend $3 billion or more if he ran for President... or just wanted to back one party's candidates? 

And since Trump won the presidency in his first run for office, spending his own money, why wouldn't other businessfolk think they have a shot? Just because Bloomberg failed so so badly? Some will resist the lure, but not all. Somebody's going to have the vanity and extra money to think they can be the next Trump and they're not going to be the next Bloomberg. In any case, Bloomberg was not a newcomer to politics. He'd been the NYC mayor for 12 years. He wasn't just parachuting in with his business expertise and money. He was more grounded in political reality. These other billionaires don't have that limitation. They can think, If Trump could do it....

"Interviews with dozens of Democratic Party officials, including 93 superdelegates, found overwhelming opposition to handing Mr. Sanders the nomination if he fell short of a majority of delegates."

The NYT got the interviews and reports:

[O]nly nine of the 93 superdelegates interviewed said that Mr. Sanders should become the nominee purely on the basis of arriving at the convention with a plurality, if he was short of a majority.

“I’ve had 60 years experience with Democratic delegates — I don’t think they will do anything like that,” said former Vice President Walter Mondale, who is a superdelegate. “They will each do what they want to do, and somehow they will work it out. God knows how.”

Mondale! I was just thinking about Mondale the other day. The context was: Who is the most boring major-party nominee for President I've seen in my life?

In recent weeks, Democrats have placed a steady stream of calls to Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who opted against running for president nearly a year ago, suggesting that he can emerge as a white knight nominee at a brokered convention....

“If you could get to a convention and pick Sherrod Brown, that would be wonderful, but that’s more like a novel,” Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee said. “Donald Trump’s presidency is like a horror story, so if you can have a horror story you might as well have a novel.”

That's exactly what gets my "if Trump could do it" tag.

ADDED: I'm not saying boring like it's a bad thing. As I've said many times — and I have a tag for it — "I'm for Boring." And I voted for Mondale.



Sock it to 'em, Walter.

"I’m panicked. I’m absolutely panicked."

Donny Deutsch: “I’m panicked. I’m absolutely panicked.” [about Bernie]

Joe: “Well, Donny... Get a paper bag, breathe into it deeply...”pic.twitter.com/U2Os4sRGzA

— Samuel D. Finkelstein II (@CANCEL_SAM) February 20, 2020

That's Donny Deutsch, and his name is trending on Twitter right now, because of this clip.

But keep listening and you'll hear Morning Joe, and he's doing the same kind of if-Trump-could-do-it reasoning that I was telling you about 3 days ago, here:

I like listening to "Morning Joe" on my car radio as I drive back home after my sunrise run. This is a 5 minute drive and about all I can tolerate, but it's good for giving me a sense of what Democrats are freaking out about at the moment. Today, they were tormenting themselves over Mike Bloomberg. He's got race-and-gender problems, but so did Trump. He's a billionaire, but so is Trump. If Trump did it, shouldn't that mean Bloomberg can do it?

I don't think they've faced up to why Trump was able to do what he did. Without first giving Trump credit, they're in no position to say so then Mike can do it too. It sounded to me as though they think of Trump as evidence that weird magic things happen. So, why not Mike? At the very least, they should recognize that Trump had a powerful skill in knocking down rivals on the debate stage, and Bloomberg has yet to set foot on the stage....

Well, now we've seen Bloomberg on the debate stage, and today, Morning Joe is using the same form of defective reasoning to try to bolster hopes about Bernie Sanders.

"How Much Political Experience Does It Take to Be Elected President?"

A nice graphic presentation in the NYT:



What can we infer about who Democrats should want as their candidate? Trump's winning with no political experience might seem to say anything could happen, so go ahead and try, mayors, even though it's never worked yet. The last thing that worked was something that hadn't happened yet, so maybe the most likely thing is the least like thing. In Crazyworld.

Ah! I do have a tag for this: "if Trump could do it."

IN THE COMMENTS: Gilbar observes that the VP most recently elected — George H.W. Bush in 1988 — was elected when he was the sitting VP. He wasn't a former VP. The NYT says:

While the vice presidency might seem the most obvious launching pad for the presidency, only five people have done what Joseph R. Biden Jr. is trying to do now: get elected after completing his vice presidency.

Boldface added. That looks like the NYT is acknowledging the difficulty of running as a former VP, but I think the NYT is including candidates who were VP when they ran and began serving after they completed their term. I believe there is only one person who ran as a former VP and won — Richard Nixon. The Times was trying to exclude the VPs who became President when the President died and then won an election. Obviously, those men didn't win as VP. They won as President.

AND: When Nixon won, in 1968, he was opposed by another VP, Hubert Humphrey. So 1968 is more of a testimony to the ability of VPs to get nominated, not elected. When Nixon ran as VP in 1960 and was not opposed by another VP, he lost. The George H.W. Bush win (against a governor) is really an outlier. The other recent VP nominees all lost — Al Gore in 2000, Mondale in 1984.

Why not Oprah for President?

It should at least make sense to those of you who've supported Donald Trump from the beginning.

When Trump got started as a candidate, I thought he was playing a publicity game and undermining the efforts of other candidates to get their candidacy rolling. It didn't seem fair: He had so much name recognition to start. He had his own money and needed to cater to no one. He was tremendously entertaining in rallies and interviews, and generated publicity around himself easily. He disarmed his rivals by just running on instinct. When he had gaps in his knowledge or comically simplistic proposals, he powered through. What looked ridiculous to me ended up working.

So how is Oprah any different? She's incredibly well-known and rich. She's been a successful businessperson and TV star. Her TV work is more impressive than Trump's was, because she she was communicating on a wide array of real-world issues, not just appearing within the structure of a reality-show competition with made-up challenges. People love to listen to her, even more than to Trump. She's been upstanding and hardworking for decades. She's no more left-wing than Trump is right-wing. The only lawsuit against her that I remember is that imbroglio with cowboys from which she emerged victorious and singing the praises of the First Amendment. The idea of her suddenly running for the top political office seems ridiculous, but that's just another point of comparison with Trump.

The main knock against her is that to say her background is sufficient is to admit Trump's background was sufficient. Maybe Trump's antagonists shouldn't want to say that. Wouldn't it give up the best argument against him? And yet if that argument against Trump was going to work, it would have worked in 2016. Once we get to 2020, Trump will have had years of experience as President, and he'll have more relevant experience than anyone. So why not give up that argument and say if Trump could do it, Oprah can do it? In fact, if Trump could do it, how dare you say Oprah cannot do it? You'll be racist and sexist if you demand more experience from Oprah than Trump had.

"With Trump in White House, Some Executives Ask, Why Not Me?"

In the NYT:

“There is this sense that if Trump got it, why shouldn’t they?” said David Gergen, co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and an adviser to four presidents. “They’ve been more successful, they have more experience, and they’ve run a public company, which is more equivalent to what a president does than a private company” like the Trump Organization.

Stu Loeser, once the press secretary for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who considered a presidential run last year, concurred. “If you run a company that has employed tens of thousands of people, and generated lots of profit and been undeniably successful, and you look at a sitting president who, to be honest, a lot of business people don’t have much respect for, you think, why not me?” he said.