Bloomberg’s case for the presidency is that he can pay for it

Lauren Duca, The Independent

After the Iowa caucus resulted in a split decision between Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, few things seemed certain besides the need to question a process involving a lot more coin tosses than anyone wants to see in a country masquerading as a civilized democracy. Joe Biden placed fourth in Iowa, after Elizabeth Warren, but his precipitous fall from frontrunner status was buried beneath the story of how the Democratic Party came to launch the most consequential election in a generation by playing hot potato with a flip phone. Then Biden lost again. The startling shift left Democratic Party leaders searching for something to pretend to believe in, and, lo and behold, there was Mike Bloomberg’s bank account.

On Tuesday February 11th, New Hampshire voted in their primary, delivering first place to Sanders and fifth to Biden, revealing Biden’s tagline claim of electability to be yet another old story he insists on retelling. It’s still early in the race, but the surge for Sanders combined with Biden’s devastation has pundits and strategists declaring that centrist Democrats are increasingly looking to Bloomberg “as a potential saviour.”

In a world where the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs is tweeting unironically about Bernie Sanders being out to “wreck our economy” and disrespect our troops, the gatekeepers are pivoting to a billionaire media mogul with barely any political experience before 98 per cent of delegates have been decided. It really does beg the question: Do establishment Democrats stand for anything other than gaining power?

Bloomberg has made it clear that he would like to purchase the United States presidency. He has spent more than $350 million of his personal wealth on advertising for his campaign. He is paying to flood the political conversation with his image, inundating televisions, radios, phone and computer screens, as he shells out to purchase every form of attention-hooking that money can buy, including memes on Instagram. And that doesn’t even include payroll for a staff of thousands, which he is able to recruit by paying double what other campaigns offer. The spending of the Bloomberg campaign is a spectacle that includes regularly serving literal canapés, and that’s the point. Bloomberg’s entire case for the presidency is that he can pay for it.

It is ridiculous to assert that a caricature of the problem might be the best solution. It is because of moneyed interests that the voice of the American public has been reduced to wishes at 11:11. The Democratic and Republican parties would like us to believe that legislative compromise is impossible because the country is too polarised, but that’s bulls**t. The majority of the country would like to see solutions for the climate crisis, gun reform, and affordable healthcare — to name a few life-and-death issues — and yet we see nothing even remotely resembling effective policy.

Both Sanders and Warren have been labeled too “far left” in accordance with the binary crazy-making of extreme polarisation laundered through bothsidesism, although, to that label, I must ask: Far to the left of what, exactly? It should not be considered “radical” to campaign upon returning the wealth and power of this nation to the hands of the people.

The sickness ailing our political process is not only the racist criminal presiding over our nation, but a system that has effectively silenced the majority of the public, while money screams loud enough to bend national attention to its will. To run Bloomberg against Trump is, to my mind, to swap one demagogue for another. The only significant difference in their respective relationships to capitalism and racism seems to be more to be a matter about how open they are about using public resources to prioritise white citizens.