He’s paying people to pretend to like him. Seriously, how cartoonish is that? You can almost imagine the rich kid at recess handing out fivers so other kids will play with him. It’s a real life caricature. This is the most Bloomberg thing I’ve ever heard of. Begs the question: how much is he paying people to pretend to give a shit about gun control? I’m half tempted to switch my registration just to be able to Bern Bloomberg in the primaries. I’ve never in my life seen a more patently offensive campaign to every day people than his.
Before us is a great test of our republic: can someone actually flat out buy the Presidency?
FWIW, I don’t think there are any meaningful primaries on the GOP side for our area this year. Just sayin’…
As I mentioned in another thread elsewhere, the amount Bloomberg paid per vote in his last NYC mayoral run is now valued at a bit over $200 in today’s dollars. Bloomberg is only offering social media influencers $150 even though he’s buying a vote and posts. Any of them who accept his offer for anything less than $1,000 are just stupid.
its even worse than that. He’s paying private sector salaries to all his staff (yes, 6 figures and all) to try to buy their support for his effort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/us/politics/bloomberg-campaign-cash.html
“I’m half tempted to switch my registration just to be able to Bern Bloomberg in the primaries.”
Don’t do it. You’ll accomplish nothing except to make yourself feel dirty, eventually.
I know. A couple times I registered Republican just to vote for friends in a primary. I’d drop the registration card switching back to “No Party” into the mailbox no more than five minutes after voting. I still feel dirty, remembering those times. I’ll never register with a political party again.
Jerry Media is the same group that did promotions for the Fyre Festival. Hopefully Bloomberg’s campaign will be just as successful
As I understand it, their work was successful at building support for that festival. The people who hired them were the con artists. Jerry Media just got left holding the bag in a visible way because part of their contract with the organizers was to manage the responses to the festival’s social media accounts. When the organizers went no contact, they just didn’t have anything to answer.
If that is accurate, then that actually isn’t something to laugh off since they did take a non-event with very little actually sell and turn it into something that conned millions out of people.
“how much is he paying people to pretend to give a shit about gun control?”
Substitute “rights” for “control” and then ask the same question about any of our oligarchs on the right. Same issue, different side being manipulated.
If only the right’s oligarchs cared about gun rights as much as Bloomberg does about gun control.
“If only the right’s oligarchs cared about gun rights. . .”
They don’t have to pretend to care as much as Bloomberg has to. Gun owners have proven they’re an easy sell. A few nice words about rights and the constitution, and they’ll follow anyone anywhere. Not much has to be delivered.
After he left office Bloomberg wasn’t doing anything anyway. He spent the better part of a decade preparing to run for president while playing coy and denying it. He probably knew that if he focused on gun control, we’d do more than half his campaigning for him. The only question is whether gun control is a vote getter or vote loser. Lots of politicians have lost that bet in the past. But there is hardly a voter in the country who doesn’t know where he’s coming from.
Our problem isn’t being an easy sell so much as we get a choice between lip service posers and outright enemies, rarely to never a choice between the former and an actual friend. We have to avoid ebola by purposefully choosing chicken pox–nothing else on the menu actually crosses the finish line. This has made it easy for the R party to continually fail to deliver results without accountability and punishment.
To date no one has figured out a solution to this problem that actually gets put into practice and works.
“a choice between lip service posers and outright enemies”
I used to propose putting the same kind of pressure on the “lip service posers”, to actually produce something, as we put on our enemies, and even to propose it made me the enemy among RKBA activists. Usually I would later learn that the supposed “RKBA” activists, really liked the posers for their positions on “other issues.”
To condense one of my Old Stories, my group one time wrote a polite letter to 20 posing legislators who had written a pointless “letter of concern” about a gun issue to the state police, pointing out several practical things they could actually do above and beyond “expressing deep concern.” The wailing and gnashing of teeth over how insulted they were was deafening, and they ran crying to the other RKBA groups in the state that they damn well better rein us in, or they just might turn anti-gun.
The Real Gunnies in the state remained pissed at us, and not at the posers who threatened to turn anti-gun. That told me all I needed to know about both posers and my fellow RKBA advocates.
This. For the amount of independent advocacy for gun rights I’ve done online, I’d be rich right now.
Nope. Our side is individual contributions. Our side is being manipulated.
For $100/week I’ll think nice things about Bloomberg; for $200/week I’ll even say nice things about Bloomberg to go with the thoughts.
$5K buys space in my yard for a Bloomberg sign for 30 days, double it and I’ll add a bumper sticker for a month on one car. $100K and both will stay there until Bloomberg fails out of the race.
Cash only, small unmarked bills. Meet me at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk at 1 AM.
I agree I would love to get a 100k to put on a sticker and yard sign. That is no big deal. My vote is still private . Because i live in a blue state my vote does not even count
“He’s paying people to pretend to like him.”
I couldn’t help wondering: What does it cost to have the Russians like you?
I guess nothing, if you don’t have to pay the bill yourself, and your country does. Not to mention other countries.
Now that’s cartoonish — not!
That’s a good question. If I recall correctly, Hillary accepted millions from the Russians, so we can assume that’s a baseline. Obama and the Russians seemed to get along fine without donations — all he needed was a promise that “once he wins re-election, he’ll have more flexibility.”
Although, as someone pointed out, the fact that Bloomberg was unable to secure a Democratic nomination with $500 million should indicate how ridiculous it is to suppose Russia’s $100,000 campaign was so influential in 2016.
“how ridiculous it is to suppose Russia’s $100,000 campaign was so influential in 2016.”
It depends on how it was spent. Bloomberg spent most (?) of his on TV ads, which would have been the most effective spending 25 years ago, before the internet. (I have an Old Story about that, from when I managed a county-level campaign that optimized the use of cable TV, and we got the most votes for $10K a minor party candidate in the county ever had/has; but I’ll stop there, except to say we closely followed a similar campaign that had used $50K to achieve a phone-book-thick collection of newspaper coverage and got less than 1/10 the votes. Technology changes all the time and whoever is behind the curve of history, loses.)
You could argue that Bloomberg used the MSM to get more than his $500M of TV coverage, but IMO the CNNs and MSNBCs usually damned him with faint praise and emphasis on his faults.
Whatever, the Russians got no TV air time at all in 2016, unless you count their Fake News that the MSM reported with straight faces.
It’s common practice to pay “influences” in social media to promote products. This is no different. Bloomberg is just using standard business practices. That said if there is no real enthusiasm – his campaign won’t go anywhere.
The Wikipedia article about Bloomberg’s 2001 NYC mayoral election paints a picture of a guy who is the consummate political opportunist.
From my viewpoint he fit equally well in either major party, being enough of an authoritarian dog-whistler and oligarch to please the Party of Trump (formerly the Republican Party), while sharing enough issues with the Dems to possibly work there. So, since the top seat was obviously already taken in the PoT, he headed over to the Dems to try his luck there.
Make no mistake though – he has always had his sights set on occupying the Awful Orifice. My guess is he’s counting on there being enough backlash and fatigue coming out of the Trump years, for any plausible challenger to win. I think the “social democrat†candidates are also counting on that, betting that America’s tastes could still swing toward any reasonably consistent bomb-thrower. My guess is that the first bomb-thrower who will also promise to beat some people up, will be the one who will catch voters’ imaginations. It worked for DonJon.
Now he’s saying farmers are all retards. It would be funny to see him trying to farm.
“Now he’s saying farmers are all retards”
Maybe someone told him that in 2016 67 percent of farmers voted for Trump, even though every word out of his mouth suggested trade policies that would be disastrous for them. Maybe someone told him farmers are still supporting Trump.
See my comment above about “beat some people up.â€
I forget who I’m quoting, but someone once said (approximately) “people will vote to hurt themselves, as long as they think someone else will be hurt worse.â€
Farmers weren’t “retards.†They just had different motivations than what are attributed to them. I’m not sure even they knew that.
In my various political forays over several decades, most of my disappointments were traceable to not recognizing people’s true motivations until it was too late. Sometimes, years too late.
Ah, the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” argument.
The claim that politicians know what’s better for Kansans than what Kansans know themselves. After all, if Kansans knew what was good for them, they’d be voting for the correct politicians, after all!
All this argument does is assuage the “better” politicians that they are right, and anger the Kansans against these “better” politicians, who are so condescending.
And there’s nothing voters like more than condescending politicians, right?
“Vote for me because you’re an idiot, and I’m smart, so I can run your life better than you!” which, now that I think of it, is the perfect summary of all of Mike Bloomberg’s political efforts.
Is it actually possible to buy the presidency? I’d say if he actually picks HRC as his running mate, I am positive that we will find out – They might have enough money and influence between them to buy enough poll volunteers to make sure the “right” ballots are counted and ensure that anyone likely to talk about it gets Very Depressed.
The following are only tactical observations:
I’m getting the impression this morning that while nobody “won” the debate, Bloomberg lost. Whether any “fix” was in, I have no idea.
I just conceived the thought that if there is an overall Dem strategy, it may be to test which candidate stands up to attacks best, i.e., by remaining popular or gaining popularity in the polls, despite the worst that can be thrown at them. Because, that is what Trump will do. If Trump’s best can be blunted by what the Dems throw at their candidates themselves — the analogy to “inoculation” is obvious.
Right now I see the test being for the highest-rated attackees, with Bloomberg representing “the right” and Sanders representing “the left” — if you’ll forgive my use of those terms in a “relative” sense.