The primary season is barely underway, but the Democratic Party’s “Anybody but Trump” strategy has already given way to “Anybody but Bernie.” Not surprisingly, the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) long-standing plan for former Vice President Joe Biden to assume the mantle of party nominee backfired badly in the first two primaries. Biden previously ran for president in 1988 and 2008. Both attempts ended disastrously. In 1988, Biden won two delegates, or 0.05 percent of the vote, at the Democratic convention; in 2008, he won zero delegate votes. Biden’s 2008 loss is perhaps partly due to his uncanny ability to insert his foot squarely into his mouth, when he described candidate Barack Obama as “the first sort of mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
Democratic Party leaders seemingly expected Biden to sail to victory on the coattails of the still popular Obama administration. But the entire scheme unraveled rapidly in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, demonstrating just how out of touch Democratic Party leaders are with actual voters. It appears that the DNC learned nothing from its 2016 anointed candidate Hillary Clinton’s failed candidacy, as it again pursues candidates committed to preserving the status quo when so many voters seek to change it.
Sanders, not Biden, won the popular vote in the Iowa caucuses on February 3, although that fact was obscured by the chaos of a mis-performing smartphone app that delayed complete voting results for nearly a week. A cloud of suspicion still hangs over the results, and the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party was forced to resign even though the DNC’s fingerprints are all over that debacle. Sanders went on to win the New Hampshire primary the following week, while the party apparatus scrambled to find am “electable” (i.e. centrist) candidate, aided in its efforts by the compliant corporate media.
Impeachment charade
It is obvious that the Democratic Party’s strategy to defeat Trump in 2020 is currently in a tailspin, leaving Trump free to gloat over his own recent successes—including the Democrats’ failed impeachment trial. (Did Democrats actually believe that Trump would not be acquitted in the Republican-dominated Senate when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated his opposition to even calling witnesses back in December, before the House even voted to impeach Trump?)
If anything, the Democrats have wasted recent months demonstrating their spurious opposition to Trump: big on theatrics while transparently lacking in substance. Perhaps the most memorable moment of Trump’s State of the Union Address on February 4th was the image of House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of his speech with exaggerated disgust, after smirking and snorting her way through the speech. (If you missed Pelosi’s melodramatic moment, don’t worry. It will undoubtedly be featured in Trump’s and other Republicans’ campaign ads in the coming months.)
After Trump nearly sparked a war with Iran in January with a drone attack that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, House Democrats passed a loophole-ridden war powers resolution ostensibly limiting Trump’s ability to launch military attacks on Iran without authorization from Congress. Pelosi claimed that the resolution had “real teeth” because it is a would not go to Trump’s desk for a signature. “This is a statement of the Congress of the United States. I will not have that statement diminished by having the president veto it or not,” she declared. She neglected to mention that the statement is therefore legally nonbinding, leading one Republican to quip, “This resolution has as much force of law as a New Year’s resolution.”
Congressional Democrats might rail against some of Trump’s reckless behavior, but in reality they support most of his foreign policy–including the bloated Pentagon budget, his enthusiastic support for Israeli apartheid, his U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which is even more beneficial to U.S. interests than the Clinton-era North American Free Agreement (NAFTA) that has led to massive impoverishment for Mexican workers and small farmers.
The impeachment hearings and subsequent trial also exposed Democratic Party powerbrokers’ hypocrisy in promoting Biden as their chosen candidate. By targeting Trump for impeachment over withholding aid to Ukraine unless its president agreed to investigate Biden’s son Hunter’s corrupt business deals there, the Democrats inadvertently focused a spotlight on the senior Biden’s own quid pro quo with Ukraine while he was vice president. In a viral video of Biden addressing the Council on Foreign Relations, he bragged that he withheld one billion dollars in aid to the Ukraine unless its president fired the prosecutor investigating the Burisma corporation, where his son Hunter sat on the board. Biden recounted, “They said, ‘You have no authority… I said, ‘Call [Obama]. I’m telling you you’re not getting a billion dollars… Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
Ganging up on Bernie
Once support for Biden plummeted, party leaders (assisted by their media sycophants) sounded the alarm, on the grounds that Sanders’ agenda is just too “radical” to win the general election. In truth, as Sanders readily admits, his idea of “Democratic Socialism” is more akin to the New Deal of the 1930s than the Russian Revolution. As Sanders said in a June 2019 speech, “We rejected the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler. We instead embraced the bold and visionary leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Together with organized labor, leaders in the African American community, and progressives inside and outside the party, Roosevelt led a transformation of the American government and the American economy.”
Nevertheless, Fox News contributor Liz Peek argued in The Hill,
[Sanders] will come out of New Hampshire guns a-blazing, arguing that he won both in Iowa (or at least the popular vote) and also his neighboring state. He can also point to a new Quinnipiac poll that shows him leading nationally for the first time – ahead of Biden – as evidence that he is the favorite and can beat Donald Trump.
He can’t and he won’t because in coming weeks Democrats will make sure that Socialist Bernie does not get the nomination. More will realize that he will lead the party to a calamitous loss, and they will look for an alternative.
David Axelrod, chief strategist for former president Barack Obama’s campaigns, disparaged Sanders’ chances of winning on his February 12th podcast, saying, “It’s hard to 25% your way to the nomination of the Democratic Party.” MSNBC host Chuck Todd went so far as to liken Jewish candidate Sanders’ supporters to Nazi paramilitaries by describing them as “a digital brownshirt brigade.”
The Democratic Party leadership has ignored Sanders’ enormous base of grassroots support at its own peril. His campaign’s donors number more than 5 million with an average donation of $18.53, bringing in $34.5 million in the last quarter of 2019. That is more than any other presidential candidate so far.
The field of Democratic candidates remains crowded, at six contestants. Although former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, both considered moderate and electable, emerged from obscurity after their second and third place showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, neither has yet drawn significant support in national opinion polls. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren, once a leading liberal candidate, has faced fading support after relentless attacks from the powers that be for her purportedly “unrealistic” plan for Medicare for All.
More recently, Sanders has pulled ahead of the pack in national opinion polls. A February 12th Morning Consult national poll showed Sanders with a 10 point lead at 29 percent support, followed by Biden at 19 percent and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at 18 percent. The same poll showed Biden’s support among Black voters in free fall—dropping by ten points to 21 percent from just one week earlier, while 32 percent supported Sanders as most likely to be able to defeat Trump.
“Bloomberg to the rescue!”
Now Bloomberg (whose fortune Forbes has estimated at $62 billion, making him the ninth richest person in the world) has entered the fray. The former New York City mayor and onetime Republican (after he had been a Democrat and then an Independent), will not participate in a primary until Super Tuesday on March 3. But Democratic leaders have already wheeled him out as the new “electable” candidate—even deciding to allow Bloomberg to take part in the February 19th Democratic debate in Las Vegas, even though he is not running in the Nevada primary.
Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin stated plainly, “And that is where Bloomberg’s chance, if he has one, remains: a scrambled race with no clear front-runner going into Super Tuesday — especially if there is a real risk that Sanders might actually win the nomination. This is the ‘Bloomberg to the rescue!’ plan for rational Democrats who understand that nominating Sanders would be political suicide for the party.”
Bloomberg has some very large skeletons in his closet, however. Perhaps most importantly, as New York City mayor elected in 2002 and serving three terms, he expanded the racist “stop and frisk” police policy initiated by his right-wing predecessor Rudolph Giuliani. That policy explicitly targeted young Black and Brown men, and at the program’s peak in 2011, 90 percent of the stops were African American and Latino, yet nearly 90 percent of those stopped were never charged for any crime. In 2013, a federal court ruled against this racial profiling policy as unconstitutional. In response, Bloomberg made this racist claim: “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
In 2015, Bloomberg went even further, in a speech to the Aspen Institute, saying,
Ninety-five percent of murders—murderers and murder victims—fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16–25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city [inaudible]. And that’s where the real crime is…
So one of the unintended consequences is people say, “Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.” Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them … and then they start … “Oh, I don’t want to get caught.” So they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.
When Bloomberg prepared to announce his run for president in November, he issued a blanket apology for his “stop and frisk” policies, acknowledging, “Now hindsight is 20/20. But as crime continued to come down as we reduced stops and as it continued to come down during the next administration to its credit, I now see that we could and should have acted sooner. And acted faster to cut the stops. I wish we had. And I’m sorry that we didn’t.”
Bloomberg also oversaw an anti-Muslim surveillance state in New York City when he took office in 2002, using the 9-11 attacks to justify it. As Muslim Advocates stated,
While Mayor Bloomberg was discriminating against Black and Latino communities with “stop and frisk,” he was also spying on thousands of innocent Muslims. As the landmark decision in our lawsuit Hassan v. City of New York demonstrated, innocent people were filmed, had their communities mapped and had undercover officers infiltrate their mosques, schools, businesses and restaurants under Bloomberg’s leadership. To this day, he has not disavowed this program.
Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg L.P., which caters to Wall Street clients, has recently been exposed in major news outlets as having been steeped in in a locker room climate and a culture of sexual harassment that lasted through the 1980s and 1990s—which led to a series of lawsuits from women alleging sex discrimination. When approached by the New York Times in November, Bloomberg’s spokesman issued the following lukewarm statement: “Mike has come to see that some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong. He believes his words have not always aligned with his values and the way he has led his life.”
As mayor of New York City, Bloomberg prioritized investments in commercial and residential development for the wealthy, intensifying gentrification while skyrocketing rents displaced working class tenants. At the same time, he neglected and punished the homeless, forcing single adults to prove their lack of housing before they would be admitted into the city’s homeless shelters at a time when occupancy at homeless shelters had risen from less than 30,000 per night in 2002 to 50,000 per night in 2011. (The City Council filed a lawsuit against Bloomberg’s homeless shelter policy in 2013.)
How to buy the presidency
The spectacle of two billionaires facing off in this presidential election seems to concern the Democratic Party establishment far less than a potential Sanders victory. Trump’s campaign has raised roughly $525 million since the start of 2019 and spent almost $20 million on Facebook ads alone last year. But Bloomberg, whose self-funded campaign is a bottomless pit, is already putting Trump’s campaign spending to shame.
It seems that Bloomberg plans to buy his way to victory—and not only by direct spending on his campaign. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently named Bloomberg the top charitable donor for 2019, with $3.3 billion in donations. This was Bloomberg’s highest ever annual amount, taking place in the same year her announced his intention to run for president. His pet projects include reproductive rights, climate change, homelessness and other social justice causes. Bloomberg’s “generosity” to these liberal projects has allowed him to disguise his right-wing record as mayor of New York in a cloak of liberalism while also generating endorsements from these organizations for his campaign.
The New York Times recently reported, for example, that Emily’s List and the Center for American Progress, recipients of millions in Bloomberg donations, have covered up his reactionary past in order to stay on his good side. Soon after Bloomberg publicly expressed skepticism about the #MeToo movement in 2018, the liberal feminist organization Emily’s List headlined him as a speaker at a major event. The Center for American Progress issued a preliminary report on anti-Muslim bias that included an entire chapter on Bloomberg’s surveillance of New York City’s Muslim population; by the time it was published, the chapter had been deleted. Yasmine Taeb, one of the authors, told the Times “she found it ‘disconcerting’ to be asked to remove the chapter ‘because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg’.”
Likewise, Bloomberg has been channeling his seemingly endless supply of money to election campaigns of down ballot and congressional candidates. As Good Morning America reported on February 14th,
Bloomberg has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into political donations and philanthropic urban grants that benefited progressive candidates and mayors, records reviewed by ABC News show… Dozens of politicians who benefited from his early support have surfaced to endorse his campaign, and his unprecedented spending habits are changing the way political analysts and operatives view the viability of self-funded candidates.
In addition, Bloomberg has already spent more than $350 million of his own money directly on his campaign, allowing him to flood 29 states with television ads (portraying him as an anti-racist and pro-woman’s rights liberal) with the slogan “Mike will get it done!” He already has 150 campaign offices and more than 2,400 staffers and has been poaching staffers from other campaigns because he offers salaries almost double those of other candidates.
What can we expect?
Early in a Democratic Party primary season already marred by chaos and vicious infighting, the party is in complete disarray. The party establishment currently appears ready to repeat its disastrous 2016 course because it fears “Democratic Socialism” more than it fears Trump remaining in office. But Democratic leaders are so out of touch with the electorate that they continue to pursue the same failed course.
Any outcome is possible, including a Sanders win or a brokered Democratic Party convention in July in which backroom wheeling and dealing decide the candidate. Trump will be the beneficiary in November if nothing changes, especially with the tilt of the Electoral College in his favor that puts the decisive votes to a handful of so called “swing states.”
The abject failure of the Democrats’ months-long impeachment exercise only helped to embolden Trump, as the U.S. inches further toward autocracy. He immediately purged those within his administration who testified in the trial. When asked by reporters what he had learned from his impeachment trial, Trump responded that “the Democrats are crooked. … That they’re vicious. That they shouldn’t have brought impeachment.” He also tweeted that he has the “legal right” to intervene in criminal cases after he publicly criticized the judge, prosecutors and a juror via a series of tweets to (successfully) pressure the Department of Justice to give his pal and former adviser Roger Stone a lighter sentence—after Stone was convicted of lying to Congress and witness tampering.
If the Democrats thought an impeachment trial would erode support for Trump, they were sorely mistaken. Trump’s polling numbers have steadily improved since October when the investigation started, and an early February Gallup poll showed Trump reaching his highest approval rating yet, at 49 percent. In the same poll, more than six in ten said their own personal finances were better than they were three years ago, as the effects of full employment finally kicked in, while 63 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the economy (a key measure of Trump’s “electability” in November).
There is no reason to rule out Trump’s reelection in November, given the current state of our dysfunctional electoral system.
Sharon Smith is the author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States (Haymarket, 2006) and Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital (revised and updated, Haymarket, 2015).
