Wednesday night’s debate demonstrated that Mike Bloomberg truly was the Democratic presidential candidate who could bring everyone together: The near-unanimous verdict was that he got slaughtered. In one representative review, the New York Post described the debate as a “brutal Mike beatdown”; someone on Wikipedia, meanwhile, edited Bloomberg’s page to indicate Elizabeth Warren killed him onstage.

The business-information mogul, buoyed in the polls by his nine-figure advertising campaign, looked lost in his debut under unscripted and adversarial conditions. Bloomberg struggled to answer questions about sexual harassment allegations against him and his company (“They didn’t like a joke I told”), why he wouldn’t release his accusers from their nondisclosure agreements (“That’s up to them”), why he hasn’t released his taxes (“I can’t go to TurboTax”), the issue with his stop-and-frisk policy in New York (“One thing that I’m really worried about, embarrassed about”), and countless other moments that made him look like a disdainful and out-of-touch billionaire.

How would the professionals who’d been hired to sell Bloomberg’s record to the public portray the performance? Speaking to reporters in the post-debate spin room, Bloomberg campaign adviser Howard Wolfson did his best to argue that what was universally accepted as a Bloomberg loss had actually proved he was the best moderate candidate to beat Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump. Here’s how Wolfson interpreted Bloomberg’s evening, with questions paraphrased very roughly:

Didn’t he get owned out there, like a lot?



Howard Wolfson: The line of the night from my opinion was the line about America is indeed a great country where a socialist can be a millionaire with three homes.

OK, but that thing about “They didn’t like a joke I told,” that was pretty cringey, no?



I think what Democrats want is somebody who takes responsibility, someone who is honest and says that there are things that he has said in his life that he regrets. Nobody is perfect.

What about those nondisclosure agreements? Isn’t he not supposed to talk about those, and doesn’t saying “They didn’t like a joke I told” open him up to the legal jeopardy and potential NDA release?



I’m not a lawyer. I don’t think so.

But seriously, that was pretty bad, right?

I think he weathered the storm. I don’t think the debate changed anything in that regard. I think what the debate made clear was that this is a two-person race between Mike Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders about the future direction of this party and about whether or not we’re going to beat Donald Trump.

Isn’t having to weather a storm bad?

I said he weathered the attacks.

[Checks transcript. Raises eyebrow.] OK, moving on. Would he have done better if he had actually had to previously face voters and their questions instead of hiding behind his hundreds of millions of dollars in TV ads?

He’s out all the time on the campaign trail. He takes plenty of questions. He takes questions from the press and questions from voters.

Wait, but he actually doesn’t take questions from voters.



We will be out in Salt Lake City tomorrow. I’m sure he will.

Isn’t the whole premise of his candidacy that he will beat Donald Trump? He didn’t really seem to do much damage to Trump tonight?



Right now you have Bernie Sanders in first, Mike Bloomberg in second. … I think Mike made it very clear who was best able to take on Trump.

But is he really actually going to take questions from voters?



I’m sure that he will start taking questions from voters.

What about that terrible answer about being “embarrassed” by stop and frisk?



That was a very clear and consistent answer, consistent with the types of answers he’s been giving on the campaign trail when he’s been asked about this. Legitimate question and a strong answer.

Right, but he also made it sound like he ended stop and frisk on his own (“when we—I discovered that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95 percent of it out”) when it actually required federal intervention to bring the practice to an end?

In the last year of the mayoralty, we dropped stops by 95 percent. That was before the court order [against the practice], not after it.

Why is this a two-person race with him and Sanders when he hasn’t received a single vote and only one national poll has him in second place?



Just looking at the polls and the data.

OK, but what about those tax returns?

As he said, he will do it as soon as he can.

Why again is he telling other candidates to drop out?

The data that we have seen, both public and private, makes it clear that Mike is the best positioned candidate to take on Bernie Sanders for the future of this party and the future of this country. I think that we have a moderate lane that is very crowded right now. You saw tonight it was a bit of a battle royal to establish who was sort of first in that space. And I think that looking at polls, looking at projections, looking at resources, looking at record, Mike is the best positioned to sort of come from that lane and take on Sanders.

What about those NDAs, again?

He has said that there are things in his life that he regrets and that there are things that he said that he regrets. He is not alone in that; he is not alone in his regrets.

If Bernie’s winning after Super Tuesday, how is this not just a spoiler race to force a brokered convention?

If [Super Tuesday] were for today, you would have that kind of cannibalization, if you will, of the kind of moderate vote. … The goal has to be at this moment, with an existential threat in the White House, finding the Democratic nominee best positioned to defeat Trump. Increasingly, I think it will come down to a two-person race.

OK, one more time: Why won’t he release his accusers from their NDAs?



I don’t have anything to add to his comment about that from tonight.