The Wizard of Oz has finally arrived. How gracious of you to finally join us, Mr. Bloomberg. We will just put aside for a second that you weren’t even supposed to be here, and that the rules were specifically changed so you could come up here on this stage and make a massive embarrassment of yourself in front of the entire country.
You hid for months behind a massive curtain of advertisements. As far as I’m concerned, you should only hide impressive things behind curtains, things worth waiting for, something a little more special than Mitch McConnell but slightly taller and almost as racist.
Your moderate policy positions are nothing special, in fact, the only unique thing about your campaign beyond your money seems to be your history of racially discriminatory policies. Let’s dive into that for a moment. In the debate, you claimed that stop-and-frisk was a policy that you “inherited” and one that you had massively cut back once you left office, but that just doesn’t hold up. The usage of stop and frisk rose dramatically over the course of the first ten years of your twelve-year tenure as mayor, so you didn’t inherit the policy, you promoted it. Furthermore, pressure from lawsuits and the Obama administration may have forced you to cut back in your final years, but when you left office, there were still more stop-and-frisk stops than when you started.
Don’t think I haven’t noticed your lack of a proposal for campaign finance reform, either. I can’t think of any reason why the 9th richest person in the world wouldn’t want money taken out of politics. Besides, you have the ultimate hack for the $2,800 limit for direct donations to presidential campaigns. Instead of needing a fleet of shadowy Super-PACs to get around that limit, entities which democratic voters have wisely forced their politicians to reject, you are your own Super-PAC, which somehow the supporters you bought are okay with.
Your supporters realize that the $220.6 million you spent on this race in January outstrips normal spending by algebraic proportions, right? That all the normally-funded candidates still in the race, put together, spent a combined $82.4 million, less than half of what came out of your own pocket? Millions of people donated as part of grassroots movements to those campaigns, and you’ve dwarfed it all with just a couple pages from your checkbook.
But even with all your money, considering how poorly prepared you were for Las Vegas I can’t help but wonder what you possibly thought the point of you attending this debate was. At the very least, I’m sure Elizabeth Warren appreciated the $5 million fundraiser you threw for her on the Democratic stage. I must admit, I was entertained – power-hungry plutocrats don’t get their asses handed to them often enough.
Look, I get it. You’re rich. You’re used to everyone around you pretending to like you because you have money. It must be a rather rude awakening for you. But none of that changes the fact that you have waltzed into this race with the kind of egoism that can only come from possessing more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans put together. With that much wealth, there are very few things you can’t buy. We all just have to hold out hope that one of those things is this election.
