She was thrilled. The Bloomberg ads ran on every station, night after night, with a vicious take down of Trump. Finally, someone was was feeding my wife’s need for catharsis. Now, someone was getting it. Trump is an existential threat to democracy and this nation, and here was the person with the strategy to take him down. Yes! Emails seeking help hit the inbox. Text messages from “David” sought her time and energy to help the campaign. Yes! A real street fighter, with a vast fortune to bring Trump and his paper persona to its knees.
My wife is a fighter...she canvassed for Obama, the Dem governors, all the way down to the school board. She is on the front lines of women’s marches. She works weekends at church to put together care bags for the homeless. She is also from NYC, so she was familiar with his good and bad. I’m biased, but she’s as good as they come.
So she texted back. “I’m in. What can I do to help?” Silence…
Ok, so the bots that sent the text weren’t quite prepared to have people seek to help.
So she went to the website and called the local campaign office. She got sent to vmail, so she left a message. Then another. One more. No response…
So she drove to the local headquarters. A nice sleek office in a mixed use building next to the juice bar and yoga studio that was locked and had no one in it. This was three weeks before Super Tuesday in a delegate rich state perfectly tailored to Bloomberg’s crossover appeal, so one would expect a bit of activity. Crickets.
This was unusual. Every campaign has crawled over broken glass to get canvassers, callers, people to drive vans to the polls. They were always eager, almost to the point of stalking her for time or treasure. My wife wanted to help, and couldn’t find anyone to bring her in. Who does this?
She called her friends that routinely worked together as volunteers on campaigns. They had the same story, but across the river in a different state. Lots of commercials, lots of texts, lots of mailers...and yet the Bloomberg campaign staff themselves were ghosts. A virtual canidacy with the latest everything, except there are no people. It’s in the ether. She’ll be supporting someone else on Super Tuesday.
I write this as someone who is agnostic on Bloomberg’s candidacy: Before pulling the lever for Bloomberg, call his local office. Find out if it really exists, and if people can get involved. I suspect his entire organization — to the extent it even exists — is a very expensive mirage, which would be absolutely deadly in November.
