Mike Bloomberg appears at his best in TV commercials

This we know: $300 million worth of TV and digital media ads, gushing into our homes and across our news screens, can rocket even a late-starting presidential candidate into the top tier of the White House wannabes.

As New York City’s ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg has just shown us.

But this we also know: Ultimately, even a billiondollar blizzard of TV and digital ads can only work wonders when their creative messages and images of presidential decisiveness and leadership are reinforcing positive presidential messages and images we voters are also viewing each day on our free media TV and digital news screens.

This is a rock-solid reality about video ads that I discovered, proved and reported about years ago, in a book titled, “The Great American Video Game: Presidential Politics in the Television Age.” Wednesday night, its validity was verified for us yet again by Bloomberg’s surprisingly underwhelming and even inept performance in the first hour of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, a prelude to Saturday’s Nevada caucus.

Bloomberg started off Wednesday night with a definite video head start. In the run-up to the debate we all saw a rerun of his now-familiar TV ad featuring a very presidential-looking Bloomberg being warmly praised by President Obama.

It sure looked and sounded like Obama was endorsing Bloomberg for 2020, but it was just a snippet from a day when then-President Obama was praising Bloomberg’s support of a gun control initiative. Still, it seemed like a bigtime bonding of Obama and Bloomberg, who desperately needs to increase his support among black and Hispanic voters.

For weeks, Bloomberg had been prepping and rehearsing for the debate with his top staff. Surely they had to have anticipated Bloomberg would be asked about two major recent reports of controversies from his days as mayor: Bloomberg’s huge expansion of a stop-andfrisk program in which he had been recorded saying police should concentrate on high crime areas, stop young minority youths, throw them up against a wall and frisk them to see if they were carrying weapons. And Bloomberg’s reported settlements of workplace complaints with women who complained of sexual comments and workplace discrimination (and signed nondisclosure agreements as part of their settlements).

Sure enough, in the debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly challenged Bloomberg on the latter — the secrecy surrounding his harassment and discrimination case settlements with complaining women.

Stunningly, Bloomberg just stared blankly, stammered, rambled and appeared to have no idea what he should say or how he should say it. “Maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” he said at one point. He said there were “some” women who had complained; later he said it was “a few;” and he wouldn’t be pinned down on how many women were involved.

When Warren pressed him to release the women from their nondisclosure agreements, he said, unclearly, that since the woman had signed the agreements, “it’s up to them.” Whatever that means. Joe Biden added his support for Warren’s point. And then she pressed once more: “You’re releasing them tonight, is that right?”

But Bloomberg seemed to be tap-dancing on quicksand: “I’m not going to end the agreements because they were made consensually.” Unfortunately, the NBC moderators moved to a different topic. An hour later, Bloomberg indeed had a presidential moment — as he showed impressive command of the issues and details about the urgent need to solve the mega-crisis of global climate change.

But by then, the presidential debate had degenerated into an unpresidential night of the mondo bizarro. The Democrats began mindlessly attacking each other — and everyone seemed to forget about attacking the incumbent they all have insisted must be prevented from being elected to serve four more years.