The worst part about Michael Bloomberg’s exit from the Democratic presidential primary is that it leaves the field with no serious managerial competency.
Yes, he was awful on the debate stage, unready to answer criticisms about comments he made about women in the workplace. Yes, he caved to the social justice mob on stop and frisk, a policing policy he had previously defended nearly to the death when he was mayor of New York for a decade.
But despite his failure to gain enough support to see him through to the convention (where he said he might be able to wheel-and-deal his way to the nomination), Bloomberg’s campaign did show signs of life, much more than he was credited for by the national media.
That’s because Democrats who know his record, including minorities (maybe even especially minorities), knew that he was a competent manager of our largest city, to say nothing of overseeing a multibillion-dollar private enterprise.
Bloomberg apologized for stop and frisk because he, like every other Democrat who was or is in the race, knows that the social justice mob now running the party demands it. He didn’t believe his own apology, and I can’t fathom that any black Democrats did either.
And yet, support among black Democratic voters actually grew by 4 percentage points when Bloomberg was attacked over the policy by his rivals.
Some liberals thought it was smart to say that Bloomberg’s support, which was greater than Pete Buttigieg’s, was because Democrats were simply looking for someone who they believed could beat President Trump.
Well, how do you beat a sitting president? What was Bloomberg’s quality that made him stand out among the rest?
He exuded competence.
