人们开玩笑说Bloomberg 用5个亿买了一个服服帖帖的失败。
连Trump 也开始鼓吹选上总统是需要的是才，不是“财”。
原标题：Bloomberg’s Contribution
原作者：Wall Street Journal
Michael Bloomberg is being widely mocked for spending more than $500 million to run for President and winning . . . American Samoa. We think he deserves credit for trying when he could have sat on the sidelines and carped about how the Democrats were blowing their chance to defeat Donald Trump with a socialist nominee.
The former New York mayor’s chances were always low given the leftward march of the Democratic Party, as Mr. Bloomberg himself often noted before he chose to run. He’s a billionaire capitalist in a party that is increasingly detached from the private economy. He was a crime-fighting mayor in a party that thinks focusing police resources on high-crime neighborhoods is racist. He ran a financial business before the #MeToo movement made sexist jokes unacceptable in the workplace.
In the end his former sins against identity politics were too much to overcome no matter how much he apologized. Joe Biden could survive this onslaught because he was better known and had been Barack Obama’s Vice President. Mr. Bloomberg had no such political insulation beyond his ad spending, and that couldn’t protect him in debates.
Mr. Bloomberg nonetheless chose to enter the fray, and his strategy might have worked if Mr. Biden hadn’t staged a miraculous recovery. Someone had to take on Bernie Sanders when the others would not. Mr. Bloomberg showed it was possible to do it, and though the former mayor didn’t succeed, Mr. Biden has picked up some of Mr. Bloomberg’s themes of practical progressivism and getting things done as opposed to promoting a revolution.
The billionaire’s biggest contribution may be in exposing in spectacular fashion the canard that money can buy the Presidency. No candidate ever spent more money more quickly, and he was able to make himself a contender. But the money and ads were no substitute for a message that better motivated followers and resonated with voters.
He and Tom Steyer, the other billionaire candidate, have done more to show the folly and hypocrisy of campaign-finance regulation than anything we could ever write. They are walking refutations of entire journalistic careers devoted to the Koch brothers. The lesson may continue if Mr. Bloomberg now deploys his billions toward an independent expenditure campaign to support Mr. Biden and defeat Mr. Trump. His Bloomberg News operation is already something of a de facto campaign contribution for Democrats.
All of which is fine with us. That’s democracy. You pays your money and you takes your chances, as they say. And as Donald Trump likes to tweet about his failed competitors, running for President is harder than it looks.
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