Mike Bloomberg’s Monumental Failure to Prepare
You’re about to go on a treacherous journey. You’ve hired an army of knowledgeable experts who know the dangerous twists and turns in the road, who know where the brigands lurk, who have been told for weeks exactly what perils await.
What do you do? In all likelihood, you do not venture out on this journey by tossing out the map of the terrain and wrapping a blindfold around your head.
But that’s what Mike Bloomberg did Wednesday night.
If you know you’re going to be called on the carpet for your dismissive comments about women, and charges of mistreatment of women in your company, do you really argue that the women signed nondiscrimination agreements “consensually,” and then brush aside Elizabeth Warren’s demand that he release women from those agreements? Do you dismiss years of offensive comments by referring to “a joke I told”? Do you offer an anodyne apology for stop-and-frisk policing, then let your opponents detail the suffering that policy inflicted on countless black and brown young men, and let your foes remind you of how persistently you embraced that policy?
Do you really respond to Bernie Sanders’ embrace of socialism—a clear vulnerability for Sanders, but a growing enthusiasm for the younger wing of the party—by saying that “they tried [abandoning capitalism] in their countries; they called it communism”? And do you spend the entire evening with barely a flash of engagement, not to mention passion?
It’s not as if there was no approach available for a candidate like Bloomberg to take. He might not have the charisma or practiced on-camera moves of a longtime politician, but he certainly had options, and even strengths. I suspect that anyone who watched that debate with experience as a political operative—myself included—had a sense of what Bloomberg had to bring to this first debate.
Fundamentally, the challenge for Bloomberg was to seize the terrain of the debate; not just to acknowledge an error on stop and frisk, but to acknowledge that he (like many men of his generation) was all too comfortable with talking about women that was unacceptable—not just now and then. He had to know that lame assertions that he put women in positions of influence would not come close to answering the years of insults and crude jokes—but that was exactly the defense he offered. He had to know that simply asserting that he was the only one to build a business—true as that is—may not exactly be a line to set hearts beating faster in the Democratic primary. He had to know that every answer had to be shaped by a common theme: I’ve said and done things I am not proud of; I share with everyone on this stage a record of things I’m proud of and things I wish I’d done differently—but if you judge me by what I have done, and by how much Trump fears me, I am the right person to run.
In the years I spent in debate prep, there were times when a candidate fiercely resisted a frank acknowledgment of error; it is part of the DNA of people with the hunger for power. (I can remember my boss, the legendary Dave Garth, and I literally locking a client in our office until he was able to say flatly about a controversy: “it happened; it shouldn’t have happened; it will never happen again.” The controversy died, and the client got elected.)
It is also reasonable to assume that if you have accumulated $60 billion, you may think that you are a lot smarter than those giving you advice. But in politics, the old saw about lawyers defending themselves is true: A candidate who is his own political consultant has a fool for a client.
I find it hard to believe that Bloomberg’s team let him walk on to the debate stage with no apparent clue about how to deal with the kind of assaults that a candidate for high school treasurer would have seen coming a mile away. It’s impossible to know if Wednesday’s disaster is fatal to his candidacy. What I do know is that it is an inexplicable performance that another few hundred million dollars of ads will not repair.
