After spending at least half a billion dollars of Mike Bloomberg's money, the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign is no more. It is an ex-campaign. Thank God.
Michael Bloomberg's campaign was predicated on one thing: stopping the progressives of the race. Bloomberg entered the campaign (after previously saying he would not) during the period when Elizabeth Warren was looking like the presumptive front-runner, and Warren and Bernie Sanders together were in danger of running away with the campaign. Joe Biden, in particular, was falling flat. This posed a very real, very measurable danger that Michael Bloomberg would, if a Democrat beat Donald Trump by even a single delegate on Election Day, be asked to pay more in taxes.
He was not shy about his motivations when launching his campaign. He said he was alarmed at Biden's fumbling campaign and needed to enter the race to save Democratic voters from having to vote for a non-Biden Trump opponent. One who was too liberal, and who would propose things that would require Mike Bloomberg to be taxed. Mike Bloomberg did not like Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax, or Bernie Sanders universal healthcare ambitions, and Mike Bloomberg entered the race to kill those ideas under a pile of money.
It's not a surprise that Bloomberg swiftly bowed out again after the other moderate major candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, suspended their financially struggling campaigns and threw their support to Biden, just in time for Super Tuesday voters to themselves consolidate behind Biden's once-teetering campaign. Bloomberg entered the race to be the Biden replacement, but running for president is a miserable, exhausting experience. People regularly insult you, and you have no financial power to stop them. The papers comb through your past, and all your past humiliations and scandals make the front pages of the national newspapers even if they never made it past the Business section when originally reported. It is terrible.
Once on the debate stage, Bloomberg carried himself with the unmistakable demeanor of a billionaire who has been years or decades removed from any interaction in which he was not being feted and who is more than a little confused at why it is happening now. It was unpleasant.
So yes, the moment Biden reemerged and the threat of major, massive overhauls to the nation's tax structure faded, it was time to call the driver, have the car brought around, and leave.
There we are, then. The threat of our democracy being so very weak that it can be bought, outright, by one single man is not so much defeated as put off for a while after the would-be bidder lost his motivation for the task. The votes of Super Tuesday show that this single effort was not successful—but it was far from unsuccessful, either. Bloomberg bought his way very close to the top of the pack based on media buys, direct mail, and no unscripted or uncontrolled appearances. If a more skilled political figure had not set him on fire with a recitation of his most loathsome past acts within ten minutes of him walking onstage in his first debate, he may have gotten even farther.
Here is your eulogy. Mike Bloomberg entered the race to make sure Democrats did not nominate someone who would aggressively tax him, because Mike Bloomberg does not like to be taxed. It was never that Mike Bloomberg had a long list of policy stances and believed he was the best, the only American who could achieve those policies as president. He just did not want to be taxed.
Bloomberg never gave any indication of wanting to be president, from that egomaniacal place that a Trump or indeed most political figures come from. But he would become president if he had to, to prevent people like Mike Bloomberg from being overly taxed.
Mike Bloomberg remains a billionaire and a philanthropist. He supports good causes, and will continue to be lauded for supporting them. Like most of the very wealthiest people of the world, Bloomberg prefers to dole out his money to solve society's ills on his own terms, and under his own name. Bloomberg has decided that gun violence is a problem he will spend his billions to address, and it is damn important that somebody with cash and power does. But Bloomberg is not so sure child poverty or the working uninsured are problems that need that same direct attention, so those things get less. Those things would require taxing people like Mike Bloomberg, and Mike Bloomberg does not want to be taxed.
We will put every other lesson on hold. We have neither vindicated our teetering, conspiracy-laced, fact-averse, narratives-for-sale democracy nor doomed it. We have shown that great wide swaths of the consultants, functionaries and hangers-on of politics are truly for sale, but we have no full measure of what ideologies can be buried for what prices.
Bloomberg, for his part, will now play the more decent and upstanding role that the wealthy are expected to play in our American democracy. He will hire a preferred candidate, as he intended to all along before things began to go askew. In exchange he will ask his candidate to remember only one thing. Advocate for what you believe in, say whatever you need to say, beat whoever you need to beat, but remember: Mike Bloomberg, and the many friends and allies of Mike Bloomberg, do not like being taxed.