Bloomberg definitely didn’t cash in at debate
The guessing here is that the best shots Mike Bloomberg could have landed in Wednesday night’s presidential debate landed instead on a cutting room floor, discarded by this Johnny-come-lately who clearly doesn’t subscribe to Detective Harry Callahan’s warning that “a man’s got to know his limitations.” Maybe he’ll wise up now. Surely his writers, anticipating the withering attacks awaiting him, had equipped him with an arsenal of devastating responses, so it’s easy to imagine their horror when he came across as a helpless wildebeest surrounded by ravenous lions.
How could that have happened?
The guessing here is that when you’re sitting atop an unfathomable fortune it’s tempting to feel you need no one’s advice.
Bill Russell, the greatest winner the NBA has ever seen, could have enlightened him. When asked how he, so fiercely independent, submitted to the coaching of Red Auerbach, so notoriously autocratic, Russell replied, “In order to lead you must know how to follow.”
The debate’s nasty tone was quickly established when Elizabeth Warren, standing alongside the New York magnate, unloaded well-delivered lines with well-rehearsed righteous indignation:
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against — a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and, no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump; I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg!”
OK, he could have thought, if that’s the way she wanted to play, he could have played that way, too, asking if she still claims to be Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color,” a fraudulent assertion that advanced her career by exploiting the indignities and deprivations suffered by Native Americans.
Like Rachel Dolezal, the Caucasian whose deceit was so effective she became president of the NAACP in Spokane, Warren was plainly guilty of cultural appropriation, as if her forebears ever set foot on the Trail of Tears.
Yet somehow that unconscionable masquerade has been swept under the rug. Why?
One likely explanation is that Warren could be as vicious as she wanted in trying to eviscerate Bloomberg, but if he fought back with similar malice and condemnation it would be at the risk of appearing to verbally batter a woman.
Picking the right words can be like walking through a minefield these days.
Later, when he was excoriated for having amassed such staggering wealth, he should have welcomed the topic, rhetorically asking whether that wasn’t the essence of the American Dream?
Why should he or anyone apologize for success, despite Barack Obama’s infamous suggestion: “If you have a business you didn’t build it! Somebody else made that happen.”
Truth be told, Bloomberg’s wounds were self-inflicted.
Billy Bulger’s great line — “To a battle of wits he came unarmed!” — does not apply here because Bloomberg was simply too arrogant to use the weapons at his disposal, bringing to mind another memorable line:
“A fool and his money are soon parted.”