"Mike Bloomberg? REALLY???????"
by Michael Tracy, YouTube Video Channel Transcript (February 15, 2020)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPSFTSPQWsg

[0:55] “Somehow, after the New Hampshire primary, the big story has become, not who won the New Hampshire primary, which is Bernie, although he got the same number of delegates as Pete, but still he still won the primary with a larger popular vote margin than Pete. The big story has been Mike Bloomberg. I don’t know about you, but it seems as though every other tweet on my timeline is about Mike Bloomberg. It seems as though, Mike Bloomberg the megalomaniacal billionaire who, frankly, was probably the one political figure that I have found most consistently appalling throughout my entire life, really escalating in 2011, 2012, 2013 or so, when I was a resident of New York City. Somehow Bloomberg has managed, through his devious plan to intrude on our collective psyche. He has brought us into his authoritarian megalomaniacal nightmare. And that’s what he wanted to do. So if you go and look at my videos on this channel when he first announced, I was saying: Do not underestimate Mike Bloomberg. Are you crazy? Do not laugh this off. This is the eighth richest person in the United States. Everything he has spent so far on this campaign -- which is essentially just a mind-bogglingly expansive ad blitz – everything he spent so far is chump change. And he has already spent much much more on his primary campaign which has only been going on for three months or less. He has already spent more than Hillary spent on the entire general election campaign in 2016. And this is on a primary. So we are in totally uncharted territory here. We’ve never seen an experiment run in US politics like the one that Bloomberg is currently running.”

[3:43] “Now you can say that money doesn’t buy you votes and the returns on your investment in terms of TV ads and such have diminished. And there might be some truth to that. But the magnitude at which Bloomberg is able to just saturate everybody, is not something that you can really relate to any pre-existing empirical conclusions about the efficacy of ads spending. There are polls that show that Bloomberg is not in the lead in the Florida primary. Now Florida is the one state where Bloomberg actually successfully purchasing a win makes pretty intuitive sense given the composition of the Democratic primary electorate there which is full of lots of people with connections to New York. But even still, for him to potentially win the Florida primary means that he could emerge a month from now as the delegate leader. Remember, the delegate leader as of right now is mayor Pete. I think he has got a one or two delegate lead on Bernie. And that’s due to the Iowa joke, farce, debacle, fiasco, whatever. So everything that has transpired so far in the primary race is pretty much a dream scenario for Bloomberg. You had a muddled, disputed result in Iowa. You had a significant but relatively small, modest win for Bernie in New Hampshire. I think he only ended up beating Pete by, what was it, 2%? … Less than 2%. 1.3%. And that was because you had this late manufactured “surge” for Klobuchar.

[6:19] And that surge was -- I mean I’m going on a tangent now -- but the surge for Klobuchar was 100% manufactured by the media. It was, they got together and claimed her the winner of the final debate. And when you have a volatile primary race where people don’t really have strong preferences between candidates for the most part, they wait until the last minute to make their decision. I was in new Hampshire on primary day and I would talk to people who said ‘I didn’t make my decision until I walked, literally, into the voting booth. So, if you have the media implanting in their minds that Klobuchar is really this formidable, keen, debater, it makes perfect sense that she would have had her late “surge” quote-unquote. And on top of that, Biden has gone way down. So the dream scenario for Bloomberg was that the first four states does not really produce a clear result with a universally agreed-upon front runner. Bernie is still the front-runner, but it’s not as though his lead is so massive that it entirely upends the dynamics of the race. None of the top candidates have dropped out since New Hampshire, unless you consider Yang a top candidate, which is arguable. And so now he [Bloomberg] has this opportunity to swoop in on Super Tuesday where he has already been saturating these huge, expensive states with millions upon millions of dollars in ads. And at least according to some people who these ads have actually penetrated, in terms of their consciousness, he seems like a reasonable alternative which is just bonkers to me.”

[8:40]: But this is why I said when he announced. You don’t get it . This is not a vanity campaign. Mike Bloomberg does not do things for vanity. He does things with a vast array of proprietary data, the best data analytics that money can buy. Remember, he made his fortune providing data analysis services to Wall Street. So imagine the data that he’s got available to him, that’s being furnished to him which shows that if you manipulate this, if you spend this amount of money here and there, then you can potentially get X number of Delegates. I guarantee you those discussions occurred. So it’s not vanity. There was a very strategic reason why he did what he did and that’s why, again, go look it up on this channel, I said Do not write him off or laugh him off. What he’s doing here is dangerous.”

[10:02] [opens chat and reads comment]: “… If you have so much money that you can constantly, multiple times a day impinge on the personal reality of millions of people across the country, you’re not controlling their minds but you’re shaping their behavior, you’re influencing their behavior. That’s where the advertising is so massive. That’s why you have such vast resources poured into behavioral science. How can we get people to buy products? How can we get people to vote for a particular candidate. You’re not robbing people of their free will by flooding them with ads on an unprecedented scale. But you are, again, sort of shaping their behavior in a way that has never even been attempted before in terms of scale.”

[11:38] [reads another question about taking Bloomberg and the potentiality of a brokered convention seriously]: “I think many more are taking it seriously now, but they didn’t take it seriously initially. It was laughed off. It was thought: “Oh, this is just Mike Bloomberg kind of playing around, spending some money, having fun. They didn’t wrap their minds around that there was a very devious, highly strategic, highly data-informed plan here. Again, we don’t know what resources he has access to. Think of what that guy’s data operation has to be. It has to be mind-blowing in terms of its reach. And there are people now admitting that he could have the most delegates after Super Tuesday. So you’re going to get a lot of people potentially getting some delegates. It’s not like 2008 where eventually it was just two people getting delegates. Now you have as many as five. Potentially even more, depending on the idiosyncrasies of different contests. They’re taking it seriously, but it’s a little late. He started in November. [He] should have been taken seriously then.”

[13:13] "Now, look at what Mike Bloomberg is doing. He’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m not beholden to special interests or donors because I’m self-funding.’ Trump, remember, said something similar when he was running. But this doesn’t mean that Bloomberg isn’t going around and courting big name donors. What he’s doing is courting big-name donors but saying, ‘Don’t give money to me -- and this isn’t a CNBC piece that I just read – He’s saying: ‘Don’t give money to me, I don’t need it. Just don’t give money to any other candidate. Give money instead to the DNC. So Bloomberg is meeting with these rich donors but saying ‘Give money to the DNC, because then the DNC is going to cater to Bloomberg’s demands in various procedural or procedural issues with how the primaries are run. And sure enough, they eliminated the donor requirement so Bloomberg is now entitled to go into the next debate. Because, I don’t care how ethically pure you are. If you are getting millions upon millions of dollars from somebody, even if you think internally that you want to stay neutral. Even if you don’t want to give an unfair advantage, I’m sorry, receiving millions of dollars has an effect in terms of how you approach issues. Does anybody deny that? And so, don’t underestimate how the DNC might be maneuvering to help Bloomberg along here. They already changed the rules to get him into the debates. Who knows what they might change going forward?"

[15:39] “I’m not saying give up. I’m not saying be cynical. I’m saying be clear-eyed about this unprecedented oligarchic intervention into U.S. electoral politics and what it signifies and the dangers it poses. We have never before witnessed anything on this magnitude. I’ll say it again. Eighth richest person in the entire country. He has only spent chump change so far. He makes more a year on interest than he has spent so far. And he has already spent the most ever.”

[16:22] “… He’s systematically buying off elected officials. In 2018 he had his data analytics people run – I don’t even know what you all it: an algorithm or a model? – OK. Here’s the people who would benefit the most from you giving a couple of million dollars. So he gives money to people like Mickey Sheryl in New Jersey – who represents the district I grew up in – who was the first Democrat elected in that district since 1984. She won in 2018. Bloomberg gave her a ton of money. She, along with the rest of the New Jersey delegation, had initially endorsed Booker. Booker drops out. Mickey Sheryl now is endorsing Mike Bloomberg. Nobody has gotten more endorsements over the past month than Bloomberg. He’s buying off mayors. He’s buying off members of Congress. He’s buying off state legislative caucuses. The state caucus, the Black Caucus in Alabama has endorsed Bloomberg. This is just “failed” to Biden. If Mike Bloomberg is peeling off Black voters in the South, then Biden is essentially done. Now, I still think that Biden will probably get delegates out of South Carolina, but his lead is nowhere near formidable enough that it’s going to make him the majority delegate winner. ...”

[18:12] “One thing that’s funny to me is that you have these establishment liberals who are embracing Bloomberg. They’re saying, ‘Oh, you know, maybe its a little bit gauche to have a guy whose net worth is fifty-five, sixty billion dollars entering the race and not subjecting himself to any real scrutiny, just buying an enormous, unfathomable amount of ads then therefore using his poll numbers to point out that he could potentially be the delegate leader after Super Tuesday. Yeah, we don’t really like that in theory but you know what? Mike Bloomberg is an OK guy. He’ll get it done. That’s his slogan: ‘Mike will get it done.’ He has smart people surrounding him. He wasn’t a Democrat until 2018 but he did a lifetime pledge in 2018 to be a Democratic party member in good standing. And he gave us a lot of money. So now we’re fine with Mike Bloomberg.

[19:09] Whereas Tulsi has been a Democrat her entire adult life since she was first elected to the state legislature at 21, and yet the establishment liberals hate her with a burning passion. And these are the same types of people who’ll say: ‘OH, loyalty to the party is really important. Now, it’s not loyalty to the party per se. It’s loyalty to their narrow myopic vision of what the party should represent. It’s loyalty to consensus. It’s loyalty to politics existing within a narrow set of confines that advance and entrench their own interests. And Bloomberg provides that. ...”

[20:06] “I found just a little bit, a tiny bit of research yesterday and I found a Fox News Sunday interview that Bloomberg gave in 2011 about the time when Trump was really at the apex of his birth certificate crusade – Obama’s certificate crusade – also known as birtherism. Trump started questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate … stuff about Trump and Birtherism because he was contemplating running for the 2012 Republican nomination… And he knew that if he could whip up a frenzy around the birth certificate issue, he’d get a bump among a certain segment of paranoid Republican voters. And so, eventually, Trump actually did successfully kind of goad Obama into releasing the birth certificate. This was in April of 2011. And at the same time that this is happening, Mike Bloomberg goes on Fox News Sunday and is asked about Trump. And Mike Bloomberg says: “Donald Trump is a friend of mine. He’s a New York icon.” Hmmmm. Maybe they’re all part of the same club. Does anybody ever think that and maybe now it’s just a lot Kabuki theater.”

[22:05] “I’m getting to my wit’s end with a lot of these independent media personalities who are saying: ‘Oh, Tulsi needs to drop out,’ as if you’re in a position to be giving advice or making demands of a candidate who you spent over a year maligning and lying about every single turn. I’m thinking of what’s his face, David Pakman, who’s saying: ‘Oh, Tulsi should drop out.’ Okay. So we’re supposed to believe that you’re operating from good faith when, in two seconds, I found about 20 videos where you are just parroting mainstream establishment smears about her, but we’re supposed to think that you just have a kind of very good-faith advice for her, for how she can, like, do the right thing. No. She’s not dropping out. She said that she’s not going to drop out. She’s going to continue competing. We’re only two states in. All she has to do is get some delegates. And in a contested convention, even having one delegate is significant. So she’s going to use the platform afforded to her through the presidential campaign to continue to spread the message which she believes in the importance of. And if you don’t like that, sorry. Then don’t vote for her. But I see no reason why voters in the remaining 55 states and territories should be deprived of the opportunity to vote for her.”