Time's Up, Mike
The Democratic establishment, the media, and millions of voters never quite figured out Mike Bloomberg; whether to lift him up, knock him down, buy in, or brush him aside.
In the days since Bloomberg abandoned his campaign for the presidency those attitudes haven’t really changed, but a single refrain has been constant: “Mike Bloomberg is proof that you cannot buy a presidential nomination.”
Ridiculous. And a general misunderstanding of both Bloomberg’s motives and how campaign resources – especially money – are used to run successful campaigns at any level.
Of course you can buy a presidential nomination. Mike Bloomberg simply ran out of the most important, and most often forgotten, campaign resource: time.
Momentarily the savior, always the spender, and ultimately the suspender, Bloomberg didn’t exit the race this week because of stop-and-frisk, NDAs, George W. Bush, debate performance, or myriad other sins he shared with the various septuagenarians still standing on Wednesday (though, of course, none of this helped him).
What Bloomberg and his team got more wrong than anything else was the belief that 14 weeks (the time between Bloomberg’s announcement and Super Tuesday) was a sufficient amount of time to defeat other candidates with far-reaching identification and decades-old constituencies. More surprising was the assumption that Bloomberg could appeal overnight to the instincts of an extremely tense Democratic primary electorate and quickly win their trust.
Most upstart national campaigns kick off many months, or even years, before a single vote is cast because time is a great equalizer for candidates without a vast organization in place or dollar in the bank.
With time, critical campaign resources – such as identification with a group, developing a credible message and messenger, and driving home issues to support and to oppose – can be cultivated. Armies can be mobilized. Money can be raised.
Bloomberg turned this model upside down.
He showed up with more money than any candidate could ever hope to raise, built a national pop-up campaign, then raced to grow those human resources and personal connections that candidates spend years feeding and watering.
Political people love to say that there is plenty of time to get a campaign off the ground. Mike Bloomberg likely heard this line once or twice. But most of them are confusing the time they have to distribute the financial resources that buy media, billboards, collateral, staff, etc. with the substantive structural resources that must be constantly reinforced and expanded – especially when the goal is to win primary voters who are, arguably, more difficult to persuade with a barrage of television spots.
The late great political consultant Arthur Finkelstein (also my former boss) used to say to candidates, “One million dollars on the last day of a campaign is worth one million times zero equals zero.” If you haven’t done the work by the Monday before Election Day, no amount of money is going to save you.
In a race for the U.S. presidency, kicking off your campaign 14 weeks before Super Tuesday is equal to launching your campaign the Monday before Election Day. Money probably won’t save you.
But that doesn’t change the fact that a presidential nomination can most definitely be bought. It happens all the time, all around the world. And if Mike Bloomberg has his way, it will happen here too. Only the name on the ballot against President Trump, instead of Bloomberg, will be Biden. A candidate who has leveraged his political time on this earth to remarkable effect.
Ultimately the great failure of Mike Bloomberg’s campaign was not his attempt to buy the presidency, but rather his inability to recognize the importance of the one resource even his billions cannot buy.