Bloomberg: a pure oligarchic play in 2020 elections

Then there’s Tom Steyer, a certified billionaire; over the last few years, he’s spent hundreds of millions on various causes, including saving the planet and impeaching Trump. And now, he’s found an even more important cause—electing himself. He’s been dwarfing all the other candidates in ad spending, yet even so, he’s still only at .9 percent in the polls. That must be frustrating to a man who’s used to having everything. And maybe that’s why Steyer’s campaign has allegedly been getting even more aggressive in applying the wiles of wealth. As the Associated Press scooped, the Steyerites stand accused of trying to buy endorsements for their man.

And now, here comes Michael Bloomberg, who truly puts the “pluto” in plutocrat—that is, wealth to the nth degree. He ranks eighth on the Forbes 400 list, with $53.4 billion

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Bernie Sanders, one of those soak-the-rich Democrats whom Bloomberg wants to keep from the nomination, had his snappy comeback to this attempted leveraged buyout of the party. Decrying what he called the “arrogance of billionaires,” Sanders jibed, “You see, when you’re worth $50 billion, I guess you don’t have to have town meetings, you don’t have to talk to ordinary people. What you do is you take out, I guess a couple of billion dollars, and you buy the state of California.”

We can pause over that last line, “Buy the state of California.” That’s straight out of the muckraking novel The Octopus, or the neo-noir movie Chinatown. In other words, maybe we’re about to see naked face of Capital, full frontal, as it takes to the hustings, eating hotdogs and working rope lines, or at least staging photo-ops and buying Facebook ads.

For her part, the other lefty in the race, Elizabeth Warren, tweeted right back at Bloomberg and his billions: “The wealthy and well-connected are scared that, under a Warren presidency, they would no longer have a government that caters to their every need. So they’re doing everything they can to try to stop our grassroots movement from winning.” Warren added, of course, “Chip in now to fight back.”

So there’s no need to worry: Warren, like Sanders, won’t be penniless. They are not self-funders, and they have mostly refused to have anything to do with big donors, yet they can raise money. They both have, in fact, substantially out-raised the notional frontrunner, the fat cat-friendly Joe Biden.

Poor Biden. He is typically described as the big loser in the wake of Bloomberg’s looming entry. That is, if rich Democrats aren’t confident that Biden can go the distance, then Middle Class Joe might have to be replaced by One Percent Mike.

Thus we come to the paradox of the Bloomberg campaign: if in fact the New York mogul has been enticed into the race because he fears and loathes Sanders and Warren and their wealth tax, he might be making a big mistake—a 2008 bubble-level blooper. That is, Bloomberg could well sink Biden, and submerge the other candidates in the gentle-on-the-rich “moderate lane,” such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. And it’s these middle (relative term) candidates who would presumably have the best chance of beating the Dreaded Trump.

Okay, so what if Bloomberg himself actually won the nomination? That is, after torpedoing Biden, what if he also gets past Sanders & Warren?

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For perspective on the power of Unleashed Capital, we might recall the 1980 gubernatorial election in West Virginia, in which a young Democratic carpetbagger by the name of John D. Rockefeller IV—but you could call him “Jay”—found himself running for re-election against a popular former governor, Republican Arch Moore.

Needless to say, Rockefeller was well-financed; to be precise about it, he outspent Moore by 20:1. Indeed, the disparity was so grotesque that Moore supporters printed a bumper-strip reading, “Make Him Spend It All, Arch.” It was a funny line, but Rockefeller won the race.

So we must recognize an eternal truth: When it really puts its mind to it, more often than not, Capital wins.

James P. Pinkerton is an author and contributing editor at The American Conservative. He served as a White House policy aide to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.