IF I HAD MONEY, TELL YOU WHAT I'D DO

Won’t someone think of the billionaires?  These are difficult days for the Billionairx community.  Most Democratic presidential candidates want to raise their taxes.  Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders scare the poop out of them.  Not since the Holocaust has there been persecution on this scale. 

In 1835, Honore de Balzac wrote, "The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed."   It’s usually bumper-stickered as “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.”

We know that’s true of Donald Trump.  His grandfather started the family fortune as a brothel keeper in Seattle and later in the Klondike.  His father was a racist slumlord in New York.  Trump himself blew threw a vast fortune, even losing money on casinos, of all things.  Then he decided that dishonesty was the best policy, and became a money launderer for Russian mobsters.   Of course, the fact that we know all that, and more, about Donald Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors, suggests that the execution has left something to be desired.

I don’t know enough about Tom Steyer or Michael Bloomberg to know whether there’s anything shady about how they made their money, but I have a theory, which I will share with you here.  No billionaire will win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. 

On the surface, Bloomberg’s credentials look impressive – three terms as Mayor of New York City, and a net worth of over $50 billion.  Of course, he ran as a Republican in his mayoral races.  Bloomberg seems to have commitment issues.  In the past 20 years, he’s shuttled back and forth between Democrat, Republican, Independent, and back to Democrat.

Purely in terms of his position on current issues, Bloomberg is better than Donald Trump, which is admittedly the lowest possible bar.  He’s had more experience than most Democratic presidential candidates in running an actual government.  New York City is a big stage, and while I don’t follow NYC politics, the fact that the residents of the five boroughs gave him three terms as mayor suggests that he did at least an adequate job.

At this point, I’ll repeat my customary pledge to vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever she or he may be.  But I’d rather not vote for Michael Bloomberg, even though he may be the least offensive of the candidates I don’t much like.  Here’s why.

First, I’m on record as wanting to vote for someone younger than I am.  Bloomberg was born in 1942.  He’s five months younger than Bernie (1941), and seven months older than Biden (1942).  Were he to become president, he’d turn 79 a few weeks after he took office. 

As a side note, I’ve seen people doing the “OK Boomer” thing with Bloomberg.  I’m on record as believing that the whole named generation thing is silly, but if you’re going to label people by their artificial birth cohort, at least get the terminology right.  Bloomberg – as well as Bernie and Biden – are not Boomers.  They’re members of the so-called “Silent Generation.”  “OK Silent” doesn’t have the same punch, though.  Maybe they’ll have to go to “Shut up, Silent.”

Being president isn’t easy.  Take a look at before and after pictures of Barack Obama (an actual Boomer, born in 1961, three years before the end of that particular granfalloon).  For that matter, take a look at before and after pictures of Donald Trump after three years in the White House. 

Being old isn’t easy, either.  I was born in 1947 (so it’s accurate to OK Boomer me – stupid, but accurate).  I haven’t had a heart attack like Bernie, and I’m not a walking gaffe machine like Biden.  But if I’m being honest, I have to acknowledge that I’m slowing down, both physically and mentally.  Bloomberg’s father died at 63, while his mother lived to be 102.  It’s hard to extrapolate Bloomberg’s life expectancy from those two data points.

But the important issue isn’t how long Bloomberg will live, but how he views the world.  Here’s a summary of his comments to a group of wealthy businessmen last year, as reported by Federica Pelzel on Twitter.  Bloomberg opposes legalizing marijuana because he buys into the gateway drug argument.  He’s suspicious of computers in schools, arguing that kids use them to look at porn and plagiarize homework assignments.  He doesn’t like the idea of early retirement.  He’s not entirely comfortable with women in the workplace.  He wants to return the presidency to the Bill Clinton era of powerful men (they’re all men) schmoozing, golfing, smoking cigars, and making deals behind closed doors.

In other words, when he’s speaking off the cuff to his peers, Mike Bloomberg is an old geezer.  He’s a better old geezer than Donald Trump, but – it says here – worse than either Bernie or Biden. 

I would prefer to vote for someone who could complete two terms as president and not have to move from the White House directly into an assisted living facility. 

Beyond the age issue, Democrats will need the enthusiastic support of African-Americans in 2020.  Bloomberg’s support among that demographic does not suggest enthusiasm.  One of his mayoral legacies is “stop and frisk” policing, which probably stopped some bad guys, but which also apparently gave NYPD license to harass people for the crime of Walking While Black. 

Maybe that’s why Bloomberg is contemplating entering the 2020 Alabama primary.  Either that, or Bloomberg’s polling discovered that Alabama voters are secretly sympathetic to Jewish billionaires from the Big Apple.

Here’s what I think.  Mike Bloomberg’s natural constituency consists mainly of pundits and TV talking heads in NYC and D.C.  They’re the ones who fantasize about a mythical consensus candidate who’ll ride in on a white horse and save them from the reality of politics c. 2020.  There are certainly hundreds of these folks – maybe even a thousand or two.  But not millions, which is what Bloomberg would need to win a national election.

People like MEET THE PRESS’s Chuck Todd fantasize about a unicorn candidate who is both fiscally conservative and socially liberal.  That sounds great, but it turns out that only about 4% of voters nationally fit that profile.  And most of them vote Republican. 

That pretty much sums up the Beltway pundit world view.  Not only do they want Democrats to be more like Republicans, but they want Democrats to be like a vanishingly small subset of the electorate. 

If Bloomberg wants to spend a few uncountabillion dollars on politics over the next twelve months, these kinds of projects make way more sense than trying to buy a presidential nomination.  Several people have suggested that Bloomberg (or Steyer) buy Fox News and either shut it down, or transform it into a real news organization.  Or round up a bunch of other obscenely rich plutocrats and talk them into pooling their fortunes to do something meaningful about climate change.  Or pay off all the outstanding college debt in one fell swoop.  Or subsidize free opioid rehab centers around the country.  Or help lower the abortion rate by making birth control freely available everywhere.  There are so many ways to make an impact with that much money. 

Running for president is the least useful thing a billionaire can do. 

Oh, and Bloomberg has terrible taste in golfing partners.