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Mike Bloomberg's campaign is the best money can buy

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Bloomberg's video-centric strategy is not entirely without precedent. Former New York Mayor -- and now one of Trump's personal lawyers -- Rudy Giuliani tried a similar path in 2008. He skipped the earliest states to focus on Florida throughout the primary season, hoping a win there would propel him on to victory on Super Tuesday. But, no way. Lacking momentum, he finished third in Florida and ended his campaign the next day. Maybe a few hundred million more ad dollars would have helped.

In Bloomberg's case, I expect that exposure to voters won't be as much of a challenge as the content of his message. He ran as a Republican, then as an independent in Democratic New York. He alienated black and Latino voters by backing and eventually withdrawing a stop-and-frisk policing strategy for which he apologized profusely as he launched his presidential bid.

Now he's running for the Democratic nomination as a critic of the party's recent left-progressive drift.

He refuses to endorse the Democratic Party platform that he says goes too far in blaming the private sector for economic troubles and obstructing some policies of education reform and deficit reduction that he favors.

In other words, he's a supermarket Democrat who picks and chooses the issues he likes or doesn't like. No wonder he's popular with independents. So is Biden, whom I expect to be his biggest rival and who also has shown admirable resilience, despite the persistent rumblings among Twitter Democrats who think he's too old or too old-fashioned or too pragmatic to be as exciting as Sanders, who's even older.

 

The last time I saw the rather dour Bloomberg show real excitement was at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, when he said, "I'm from New York, and I know a con man when I see one."

The crowd went nuts. That's the spirit that gets to the heart of what has become the party's biggest unifying issue -- unseating Trump, regardless of whether that message is delivered through media or in person.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)


(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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