Today, news broke that former New York City mayor and prominent billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg is considering tossing his hat into the dystopian ring that is the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary. The Wall Street Journal quotes a Bloomberg adviser named Howard Wolfson, who suggests that the main reason Bloomberg might jump in is his fear that none of the current 2020 Democrats can defeat President Donald Trump at the ballot box.
“Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation,” Mr. Wolfson said.
“Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to [defeat Trump],” Mr. Wolfson said. “If Mike runs he would offer a new choice to Democrats built on a unique record running America’s biggest city, building a business from scratch and taking on some of America’s toughest challenges as a high-impact philanthropist.”
By all means, Bloomberg should enter the fray if he feels called to do so. But we should not mince words here: There is no chance whatsoever that Bloomberg would successfully win the Democratic presidential nomination if he were to enter the field. And the chief reason for that is very simple. Bloomberg would have no shot because he is a somewhat sane person who would be seeking the presidential nomination of a fully insane political party.
Bloomberg, who has made a veritable fortune over the course of a lifetime working in the financial services industry, is an ex-Republican who openly identifies as a capitalist. But he would be seeking the presidential nomination of a political party whose grassroots increasingly identify as more socialistic than capitalistic. He would be seeking the presidential nomination of a political party in which the leading sources of disagreement over the course of the past few televised primary debates have been whether the harebrained “Medicare for All” nostrums has a bankrupting price tag best estimated at $40 trillion or $50 trillion, and whether it is appropriate to literally eliminate private health insurance for over a hundred million American citizens while implementing that quixotic socialized medicine scheme.
Bloomberg, furthermore, is nothing if not a lifelong friend of the Jewish state of Israel. In 2014, when anti-Israel President Barack Obama oversaw a temporary U.S. flight ban to Israel amidst the jihadist rocket fire that rained down on the Jewish state that summer from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Bloomberg personally flew to Israel solely to demonstrate to his fellow Americans that it was safe to do so. Bloomberg may not be a hardcore Caroline Glick-style Zionist, but he is, at minimum, an AIPAC-style pro-Israel advocate. But the modern Democratic Party is no longer an AIPAC-style pro-Israel political party. On the contrary, the 2020 Democrats now shirk AIPAC en masse in favor of obeisance at the sycophantically pro-Palestinian altar of the vehemently anti-Israel group J Street.
Additionally, it must be noted that Bloomberg, while hardly Orthodox in identification, is nonetheless proudly and publicly Jewish. This too is a problem for the modern Democratic Party, which extols the virtues of Holocaust deniers like Palestinian Authority chieftain Mahmoud Abbas, glorifies Jew-haters like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and is being rapidly Corbynized into an overtly anti-Semitic political vehicle. It is difficult to see how Bloomberg’s proud Jewishness counts, in the eyes of today’s Democratic Party, as anything other than a net negative.
Bloomberg would have no chance for the Democratic presidential nomination were he to formally enter the fray. He is a sane Jew who would be seeking the presidential nomination in a fully insane, socialist, increasingly Jew-hating political party.