Is the presidency for sale?

Over last weekend, I gave myself a breather -- I watched four delicious NFL Divisional Round playoff games. And consequently, I saw an awful lot of former New York mayor and finance world billionaire Micheal Bloomberg. Well, I can't say I actually absorbed his blizzard of 30 second ads; like perhaps most TV consumers, mute and fast-forward are my friends. But I sure know he's running for president.

Right on cue, on Monday morning, his people had successfully placed articles explaining and boosting his strategy to win the Democratic nomination. Basically, he's skipping the usual first four primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada) where voters expect aspirants to show up and demonstrate their chops. Instead, he's pouring unlimited sums of his own money into big states which hold their primaries later, like California, where many candidates who contest the early states don't have the cash to make an impact. And he's building out organization in places, like Arizona and North Carolina, where Democrats will need to contest to have a chance in November. And he's promised that organization will be there for the nominee, even it isn't him.

It's a darned attractive picture to an anxious, ideologically and temperamentally divided Party. John Ellis, a former political columnist for the Boston Globe, lays out Bloomberg's beguiling offer:

Bloomberg is going to spend an astronomical amount of money on this race. Probably at least $1 billion. Maybe twice that. Possibly even more. Numbers like that upend every model of every presidential race in history. He can buy every news adjacency on cable and local television stations from now until November and not make a dent in his net worth. U.S. politics has never seen such financial throw weight in a presidential campaign.

Look at it from the point of view of the “down ballot” Democratic candidates. If you’re running for the U.S. Senate, or in one of the 100 “competitive” House races, or for governor or state senate, it’s likely that one of Bloomberg’s many super PACs is going to put vast amounts of money behind your campaign with “issues” TV advertising, digital advertising, voter-registration drives and organizational support. Buttressing that will be his national campaign infrastructure, staffed and financed at a level never before seen in presidential politics.

By Election Day, every anti-Trump voter in every precinct will have been contacted repeatedly, and then driven to the polls, if need be. Which will increase Mr. or Ms. Down-Ballot Democratic Candidate’s vote by, what? Two percent? Five percent? Ten percent? It doesn’t matter. It will add untold votes to the D side of the ledger.

I need to say right off that, as a person who works campaigns, this is a very attractive picture. Bloomberg can certainly find people to work for him. Campaigning is a business. He may not get the best in the business from the outset because those firms and individuals are probably currently working for one of the more conventional candidates. But there are plenty of second tier figures who are going to want into a campaign with an unlimited budget. And there will be novices to do the grunt work. (I confess I did this early in my exploration of how campaigns function, working for someone I didn't particularly like who had the funding to show how the job could be done with enough money.) If Bloomberg can push into the top stratum of candidates, he will eventually attract top talent.

Meanwhile, the effort is audacious.

“Either it is going to be the best primary campaign in American history, or the greatest IE that has ever been created,” said campaign manager Kevin Sheekey, using the political lingo for an independent expenditure campaign, the super PAC-type efforts that wealthy interests use to influence elections.

All parts of any campaign that have been run before — an aggressive constituency operation, a surrogate team, a Spanish-language effort, local media teams in dozens of states so far — have been built out. ...

I do question one part of the apparent Bloomberg plan: yes, data whizzes, and communications gurus, and even phone banks are available for sale in the campaign world. But the promise that "every anti-Trump voter" can be "contacted repeatedly and driven to the polls" will likely be far harder to fulfill. That kind of off-the-shelf campaign apparatus is mostly non-existent within the politics industry: it doesn't pay well enough. Placing TV ads and designing "message" delivery is where consultants make their money, not in the untidy process of genuine voter contact.

More important than the technical details of the Bloomberg project is whether it is what Democratic voters want from a candidate. Bloomberg has a decent record working against gun violence and against climate change indifference -- but also an engineer's approach to problems which leads to his running over the people and passions for justice which make democracy hard. This was the guy whose approach to reducing crime was stopping and frisking all young black and brown men in his city over and over and over again. (Crime reductions in New York were no more or less than in cities which had more respect for their citizens' dignity.)

Bloomberg is included in my pledge for 2020 -- I'll work to elect anyone who emerges out of the Democratic Party scrum. But we can do better. And democracy will do better if Trump-anxiety doesn't enable Mr. Got Rocks to buy the job.

As Elizabeth Warren tweeted:

If the only way to run for president of the United States is either to be a billionaire or to suck up to billionaires, then we're going to have a country that works better for billionaires—and worse for everyone else.