Bloomberg trying to buy the nomination of party that hates billionaires

Thomas Lifson:

Right before our eyes, a mega-billionaire is buying the presidential nomination of a political party, and oddly enough, it is the party that decries inequality of wealth and whose leading lights debate taxing billionaires out of existence.  

This will not end well for the Democrats.  Bloomberg is luring the party’s elites into visibly betraying the principles most of its rank-and-file hold dear and identifying themselves as sellouts who can be bought by sheer force of lucre. A bitter split will be hard to avoid.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point in his headline” “Bloomberg buys the Democratic elite.” It is not the rank and file getting rich off of Bloomberg, but rather the ostensible leadership class, and therein lie the seeds of destruction for the party that purports to be about the common man, woman, and nonbinary individual.  

He’s distorting the incentives of activists, officials and campaign fixers who suddenly are thinking less about a presidential victory and more about the Bloomberg gravy train.

Jenkins cites these examples of leaders betraying their people and their principles:

When a recording leaked of Mr. Bloomberg defending stop-and-frisk in New York, Andre Fields of the liberal voting-rights group Fair Fight Action rushed out a tweet hitting him as a “true terrorist” but promptly deleted it. Fair Fight Action had received $5 million in funding from Mr. Bloomberg.

At a historic moment when “quid pro quo” is a talking point on the left, this looks awfully bad. It is far from unique, though.  Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policies as New York mayor, and his surprisingly frank discussion of criminality and race in Aspen, including his callous reference to throwing young African Americans “against the wall,” directly speak to trigger issues hyped by the Democrats for the last several years.  Yet, some prominent black political leaders are endorsing him....

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Will Bernie Sanders voters turnout for Bloomberg?  It seems unlikely.  They felt like they got screwed in 2016 and they are likely to see it happening again.

Bloomberg handled the stop and frisk issue badly.  He would have been better off talking about all the lives in the black community that were saved because of it. He also should be challenging Sanders on his anti-capitalist policies.  He made his fortune by developing a tool that facilitates the buying and selling of capital assets.