Mike’s Debate and Stacey 2020?

I can still hear the licks—pow, slap, smack, etc.–that Mike Bloomberg took from Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden last Wednesday night. Bloomberg was punished for his purported seven deadly sins symbolized in the Mexican piñata celebration: envy, sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, anger/wrath, and pride. And he stood there, calm and frozen, seemingly to pay his penance for the crime of being filthy rich.

It was a beat down of epic proportions, with St. Elizabeth leading the charge straight out of the box. I was surprised that Bloomberg’s staff of advisors did not prepare him for the onslaught that they had to know was coming over stop and frisk, non-disclosure agreements with women over harassment claims with his company (not him), and an assortment of in artful, sexist, and racist comments about women, minorities, and other controversial issues.

What is he paying these ladies and gentlemen for?

When under attack, he should have pushed back on Warren for her cultural appropriation of Native American identity from which she benefitted both occupationally and financially for most of her career. Amy Klobuchar bullied her staff and prosecuted Myon Burrell, a 16 year-old African American male, who was given a life sentence for a murder that new evidence indicates he did not commit. Moreover, she relied on witnesses allegedly paid by the authorities and from others in prison to make the arrest.

This was part of her pattern of disproportionately arresting blacks and other people of color and turning a blind eye to dubious police killings and their abuse of minority citizens. The Burrell case has become so provocative that Minnesota black activist groups and the NAACP have asked her to suspend her presidential campaign to get to the bottom of this issue. Klobuchar has admitted to mistakes being made.

Uncle Joe Biden needs to be outed for his brother Jim’s (his wife Sara’s), and his son, Hunter’s, decades long selling of political access to prospective clients and hitting up Biden’s major donors for numerous business loans, many of which went into default. This pattern of grifting has persisted until this day and came to a head in Hunter’s appointment to the Burisma Board in Ukraine while Joe was a sitting Vice President. Neither Hunter nor Jim and Sara Biden have ever been reined in, and they could pose a problem should Biden reach the White House.

Pete Buttigieg is challenged by his LGBTQIA colleagues who question whether he and his husband, Chasten, are simply putting a gay face on an essentially heterosexual lifestyle, and are not staunch advocates for their community. Meanwhile, Bernie’s rigid health care and socialist economic positions are a setup for Trump whose campaign is now crafting 30-second ads for all of the contestants above for whoever emerges as his opponent.

In addition, an assistant in the Bloomberg campaign has floated Hillary Clinton’s name as his possible Vice Presidential running mate should he win the nomination. This proposal is nonsensical. Hillary would add nothing to the ticket. She is reviled by many segments of the Democratic base, especially African American men. They were the key demographic of the seven million fewer black voters, most of whom stayed home, or voted for Trump in 2016.

Hillary’s labeling of African American males as “super predators” in 1994 is a term for which she never apologized or recanted. She lost the 2016 presidential election because of their low turnout in the following cities and states: Detroit, Flint, Highland Park, Pontiac, and Saginaw, MI; Chester, Erie, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, PA; and Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine, WI. Low black male turnout doomed her chances for victory. A small uptick in their votes for her would have made her President.

Thus, the statement that Hillary would attract black voters to a Bloomberg ticket is simply a fantasy. For Bloomberg and his advisors to even consider such a pairing is politically naïve. As noted in an earlier column, the only logical and value-added VP female choice is Stacey Abrams, the 2018 African American female Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate who would have won the race had she not been a victim of intense voter suppression.

Abrams is a great campaigner, has immense appeal across racial, ethnic, and class lines, and is acutely knowledgeable of the issues that Bloomberg faces. If he is able to convince her to join him, should he win the nomination, which currently appears to be an uphill climb. But first Bloomberg needs to be taken to the political woodshed and given an intense grilling about his mistakes in his first debate.

But Abram’s major contribution would be her thorough understanding of and past responses to the national voter suppression efforts of the Trump organization.

Next time out, Bloomberg needs to return incoming fire, aggressively, because his rivals’ only choice is to knock him out of the race because they will never, individually or collectively or with the help of the Democratic National Committee, match his financial resources. Bloomberg can still win the nomination but only if he reinvents himself. He has the time, but the question is whether he has the will!