If you love national politics and follow it closely, there’s always the debate you imagine in your head and the one that later happens on the screen. Before Wednesday’s Democratic debate I made a list of the bare, bottom-line message I thought each candidate had to deliver.
Mike Bloomberg: You can stomach me.
Bernie Sanders : You can stomach socialism.
I tried to imagine how each would deliver it. For Mr. Bloomberg: I’m a businessman. I was mayor of New York. I am a liberal in every way but I’m not insane. I’ve got the resources to meet and surpass Donald Trump’s fundraising powerhouse. I’m not fancy and I’m no poet, but I can lead and I can win. You’re right I can’t buy the nomination. That’s why I’m here on the trail every day, asking for your support. His affect: up for the battle, happy to be in the fight.
For Mr. Sanders: You know there’s something wrong with the economic system and has been a long time. The inequality is wild, the injustice all around us—you can feel it, and it’s cowardice to say there’s nothing we can do about it. In his affect: I’m the last lion. You know my roar and you know something else—I have the power of the man who means it.
This is how it unfolded:
It was hands down the best presidential primary debate of the cycle and maybe in decades. It was riveting. The veterans on stage were on fire and at the top of their game.
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It is being called a very bad night for Mike Bloomberg. It was not. It was a catastrophe. The only question is whether it is recoverable. Can he turn it around in the debate next week, and after? Is it possible to recover from a night so bad?
The mystery is the surprise of it. What were the mayor and his aides and advisers, professionals of high caliber, thinking? He was on mute and seemed not to anticipate what was coming. Maybe they were thinking: Play against type, don’t be the entitled billionaire, shrug it off, let the others exhaust themselves with their tiny fisticuffs. In the end you’ll be the last grownup standing. If that was the strategy they mistook the moment. The Democratic base was meeting him, either for the first time or in a new way, and he had to engage and win them over.
They also mistook the challengers, who were angry as hell. “Who is this guy to buy a party?” Bloomberg strategists think he has to kill Bernie now, before Super Tuesday. But all the other candidates think they have to kill Mike now, before he makes a good impression. So there was going to be blood. You have to wade in, in a human way, and throw and take punches. No one’s above it all.
There’s a bigger, more important mystery.
Surely the former mayor and his men and women understood this: Through Mr. Bloomberg’s longtime targeted philanthropy, through his relationships, quiet alliances, generosities and personal loyalties, he has a lot of leaders—mayors, other local politicians, people who run museums and civic organizations, who speak for ethnic, racial and professional groups—who support him. But those leaders don’t fully control their own followers and constituencies. Everyone who’s a leader of any kind now is in crisis: They don’t have a complete hold on their people, and wind up following them as often as leading them.
The followers and constituencies—they want to be won over; they want to back you as much as the boss does, but you have to give them the rationale of a solid performance. You have to give your leaders and influential friends cover with a good performance. Mr. Bloomberg didn’t do that.
Bad news/long-shot good news: It was the worst performance in recent debate history—but if he can turn it around it will be the biggest comeback in modern primary history.
What should he do now? From our Department of Unasked-For Advice: Show candor and humility. Admit he blew it and ask for another chance. His competitors were good and he was unprepared. “I tanked and I’m asking for another look, I’ll see you next week.”
To me, Elizabeth Warren won the night. She was good, hot and sharp right out of the box. Standing next to Mr. Bloomberg she tried to freak him out by constantly shooting up her arm to speak, almost waving it in his face and getting in his psychic space. It was as if she was saying, “You nap, buddy, while I show you who’s in charge. Go play possum and see how it works with Sugar Ray.”
Ms. Warren is a bit of a mystery too—a great political athlete whose candidacy the past six months lost steam. But she is a highly disciplined performer and she has thought it through. She took off the table the issue of what the female candidate wears by wearing the same uniform each day, like a guy. She took hairdos off the table by having one and never changing it. She took her age off the table by having more energy than a 40-year-old on Adderall. I always thought she’d slip into the space between Bernie the socialist and the moderates, hold on and rise. That she’d be a lefty but a less doctrinaire one. Then she fell into banning private health insurance and suddenly was doctrinaire. And if you want doctrinaire why not pick the real thing, the socialist?
But Wednesday night she was full of fight, tricky and full of mind games. At one point she dodged a question on banning health insurance by accusing her competitors of dodging specifics on their plans. She got away with it. That’s talent! She slammed Amy Klobuchar one minute and rescued her the next. She was playing everybody. It was kind of fabulous. Someone on Twitter caught her essence: “She shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
Mr. Sanders was alive, forceful, Bernie-esque. He did nothing to harm himself with his followers, if that is possible, and tried hard to make himself look inevitable.
Joe Biden came alive. Mr. Bloomberg got his Irish up. Or maybe columns like this one, saying he’s over. Anyway his Hibernian was heightened and his performance was “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” We nod with respect.
Pete Buttigieg made a mistake in patronizing Ms. Klobuchar for forgetting the name of Mexico’s president. “Are you trying to say I’m dumb? Are you mocking me here, Pete?” He lectured a senator who is a generation older than he, more accomplished and a woman. It revealed a certain Eddie Haskell smarm. Later, she said to him: “You’ve memorized a bunch of talking points.” It was like Chris Christie going at Marco Rubio.
The Democratic race is better with Mike Bloomberg in it. The party’s got to have that fight about socialism and start it now, however long it takes. But he and his people had better get serious. It’s not only a money game, politics, it is a human game.
But the debate was a reminder: You never know what’s going to happen. You make your guess but you never know.
The surprise of politics—it’s a thing that can still make you feel romantic about it.