Pick yer poisonA friend of mine-- a generally reliable DC political operative-- told me Sunday evening to watch for the power within Democratic Party politics that Obama still wields on Monday. He didn't tell me how but, sure enough, early Monday morning-- after Steyer had already bailed on Sunday-- we all saw first Mayo Pete and then Amy Klobuchar close down their campaigns and endorse Biden-- and just as establishment-connected centrists-- primarily hack politicians-- began endorsing Biden from coast to coast. Writing yesterday for Newsweek, Alexandra Hutzler reported that there is intense pressure on Bloomberg to pull out too. "But the wild card in the 2020 Democratic field," she wrote, "is Michael Bloomberg... with virtually unlimited resources, the 78-year-old billionaire has more options than his rivals to stay in the race-- despite calls for him to drop out-- even if he doesn't start to collect primary victories. 'If the reason for Bloomberg getting into the race was that everyone else seemed anemic as opposed to Sanders and someone needed to take him on, well that's not the case anymore. Not after South Carolina,' Democratic strategist Scott Ferson told Newsweek."I doubt it will be meaningful but yesterday already saw EMILY's List endorse Warren, perhaps giving her some false hope that there's a pathway to victory for her.
And as Biden emerges as the only viable moderate alternative to Sanders, calls for Bloomberg to exit are likely to increase. Both Kofinis and Ferson said the longer Bloomberg stays in the race, the more likely it is that either Sanders wins or that there is a brokered convention.That's not likely to bode well with moderate Democrats, who are already concerned that Sanders could run away with the party's nomination. Buttigieg alluded to such a possibility as he abruptly suspended his campaign Sunday night."He didn't want to be the person who hung on too long and could be blamed for an eventual Sanders nomination," Ferson said.Buttigieg's exit came less than 24 hours after Steyer bowed out after his unexpectedly poor performance in South Carolina. The editorial board at USA Today suggested that other Democrats follow Buttigieg and Steyer's lead and drop out of the race.Klobuchar quickly followed suit, effectively ending her campaign Monday. According to NBC News, she will announce her departure Monday night and throw her support behind Biden ahead of Super Tuesday.If Bloomberg doesn't perform well on Super Tuesday, he has no chance to capture the number of delegates needed to secure the party's nomination. But thanks to his $1 billion war chest, he can afford to remain in the race, though many experts say his prolonged appearance would be a detriment to the Democratic Party. Staying on the ticket would likely siphon votes from other candidates and lead to a contested convention or to a landslide Sanders victory."The Democratic Party is not going to nominate Michael Bloomberg. It's just not going to happen," Kofinis said. FiveThirtyEight forecasters currently predict there is less than one one-hundredth of a chance Bloomberg wins the Democratic primary.Bloomberg has said he'd continue to pour millions into the race to fund whoever wins the nomination, even if it's not him. But during a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, Bloomberg signaled he'd continue as a candidate even if he doesn't finish in the top three on Super Tuesday.On Monday, Bloomberg told supporters in northern Virginia that he had just spoken to Buttigieg and Klobuchar (who are both expected to back Biden) and that he wished them well."I thought both of them behaved themselves," he said. "I felt sorry for them but I'm in it to win it."
This came just as Politico put into print what much of the Democratic establishment had already been whispering about Bloomberg for a month now: that his lies are worse than Biden's lies and closer to Trump's lies. (DISCLAIMER: Neither Biden nor Bloomberg is worthy of public office because, like Trump, they feel entitled to lie at will.) Laura Barrón-López reported that Bloomberg's lies risk putting the Democratic Party in jeopardy. "First," she wrote, "came the heavily edited video of Democratic candidates looking speechless at a debate when Mike Bloomberg points out he’s the only one of them who’s started a business. That was followed by tweets of fake quotes last week attributed to Bernie Sanders praising dictators. And shortly before that came news that the Bloomberg campaign was paying social media influencers to hype the billionaire, a novel move by a presidential candidate that was never contemplated by election law."
“This is absolutely dangerous for the fair functioning of our political process,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of digital platforms and the Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said of the video and tweets posted by Bloomberg. “And it could very well send the Democrats down the slippery slope of disinformation.”That would further erode discourse online and contribute to an already distrustful electorate, he added.Republicans including President Donald Trump have increasingly used disinformation online. One glaring example was a doctored video of a stammering Speaker Nancy Pelosi that President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guliani circulated in May on his Twitter account and then deleted. The Atlantic ran a lengthy magazine piece under the headline: "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President."In response, Democrats have debated whether to engage in similar tactics. With his virtually unlimited budget Bloomberg has amassed an enormous digital operation: He is the only Democratic hopeful with the financial wherewithal to even begin to challenge the sophisticated digital machine Trump has built. And the former New York City mayor-- eager to distill what will resonate with voters-- is testing tactics and messages more aggressively than any of his Democratic rivals.But the campaign’s flirtation with disinformation and its use of paid-for social media to spread his message have also raised questions about the lack of regulation applied to politicians and their campaigns on platforms like Twitter and Instagram....Only two candidates-- Joe Biden [who lies every time he opens his mouth] and Elizabeth Warren-- have issued official pledges to not use illicit tactics. In June, Biden promised no bots, deep fakes or disinformation. Warren has openly feuded with Facebook over its standards for allowing false statements in political advertising, and she released a policy proposal to crack down on disinformation.Combating the expansive and fast infection of the seep of disinformation into American elections isn’t being “pollyannaish about blood sport in politics,” said Graham Brookie, head of digital forensic research for the Atlantic Council. It’s about being “extremely vigilant about anything that would be potentially misleading.”Brookie didn’t consider the edited debate video disinformation, but said it walked up to the line. He did, however, call the Bloomberg tweets quoting fake Sanders’ comments “outright disinformation.”“While a number of consumers might identify it appropriately as satire, you can't depend on an audience to clearly and coherently consume information,” Brookie said.
Over the weekend, Chris Hedges noted that "Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us. The interests of the rich are not our interests. The truths of the rich are not our truths. The lives of the rich are not our lives. Great wealth not only breeds contempt for those who do not have it but it empowers oligarchs to pay armies of lawyers, publicists, politicians, judges, academics and journalists to censure and control public debate and stifle dissent. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the destruction of labor unions, slashing and even eliminating the taxes of the rich and corporations, free trade, globalization, the surveillance state, endless war and austerity-- the ideologies or tools used by the oligarchs to further their own interests-- are presented to the public as natural law, the mechanisms for social and economic progress, even as the oligarchs dynamite the foundations of a liberal democracy and exacerbate a climate crisis that threatens to extinguish human life. The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class. Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage. There are few substantial differences between the two ruling political parties in the United States. This is why oligarchs like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg can switch effortlessly from one party to the other. Once oligarchs seize power, Aristotle wrote, a society must either accept tyranny or choose revolution."That's why, as Hedges went on to explain, "the New Deal was the bête noire of the oligarchs" and why "[t]hey began to undo Roosevelt’s New Deal even before World War II broke out at the end of 1941. They gradually dismantled the regulations and programs that had not only saved capitalism but arguably democracy itself. We now live in an oligarchic state. The oligarchs control politics, the economy, culture, education and the press. Donald Trump may be a narcissist and a con artist, but he savages the oligarchic elite in his long-winded speeches to the delight of his crowds. He, like Bernie Sanders, speaks about the forbidden topic-- class. But Trump, though an embarrassment to the oligarchs, does not, like Sanders, pose a genuine threat to them. Trump will, like all demagogues, incite violence against the vulnerable, widen the cultural and social divides and consolidate tyranny, but he will leave the rich alone. It is Sanders whom the oligarchs fear and hate."
The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the defense contractors. The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. The Democrats, along with the Republicans, authorized $738 billion for our bloated military in fiscal 2020. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not oppose the endless wars in the Middle East. The Democrats, like the Republicans, took from us our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from wholesale government surveillance, and due process. The Democrats, like the Republicans, legalized unlimited funding from the rich and corporations to transform our electoral process into a system of legalized bribery. The Democrats, like the Republicans, militarized our police and built a system of mass incarceration that has 25% of the world’s prisoners, although the United States has only 5% of the world’s population. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are the political face of the oligarchy.The leaders of the Democratic Party-- the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez-- would rather implode the party and the democratic state than surrender their positions of privilege. The Democratic Party is not a bulwark against despotism. It is the guarantor of despotism. It is a full partner in the class project. Its lies, deceit, betrayal of working men and women and empowering of corporate pillage made a demagogue like Trump possible. Any threat to the class project, even the tepid one that would be offered by Sanders as the party’s nominee, will see the Democratic elites unite with the Republicans to keep Trump in power.
Natasha Korecki for Politico: According to Advertising Analytics, Bloomberg has yet to book TV ads after Super Tuesday. A source with knowledge of the conversations said talks were occurring at the staff level between the Biden and Bloomberg campaigns since last week. A separate source said high-level donors who had been persuaded to hold back on Biden following devastating losses in Iowa and New Hampshire had started pushing back, telling Bloomberg team members they were likely to shift back to Biden."Want more on the oligarch who bought his way into contention? Historic.ly is running an excellent series on him. Part 2 is here.