I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a Peloton, Mike Bloomberg got elected mayor of New York. Twice. He even finagled the rules to get elected a third time. And, you know, being elected mayor of New York is a bigger deal than being elected mayor of, oh, I dunno, let’s pick a place. OK, South Bend, Indiana. So I have to ask people from New York this question: was he always this bad a candidate?

Mother Mary, the man looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than on that debate stage in Las Vegas, being eviscerated by these members of the peasant class. It began when Senator Professor Warren—who far and away had the best night up there, no matter how painful that is to certain members of the pundit class whose names rhyme with Fryin’ Billiams and Stare McLaskell—pounded him on the very first question of the debate by throwing back at Bloomberg some of his own intemperate remarks about women, at which point he looked, as Abraham Lincoln said of William Rosecrans after Chickamauga, like a duck that had been hit on the head.

That, however, was just the warmup. Later in the debate, SPW got him talking about the history of sexual harassment complaints at his firm, and the non-disclosure agreements that have allowed him to bury those stories down through the years. She gutted him like a fish. (Joe Biden helped, too, but it was SPW who wielded the knife.) Eventually, she got him cornered to the point where he essentially was arguing that the worst thing about having $68 billion was the paperwork. (What the hell was that answer about TurboTax? Outside of he and Bernie Sanders discussing each other’s stents, that was the weirdest moment of the night.)

Michael Bloomberg’s first debate as a Democrat did not go particularly well for him. Mario Tama Getty Images

For a month now, we have been reading stories about how African American and other minority voters had become Bloomberg-curious because they rightly felt he a) had enough money to beat the president*, and b) knew how to stand up to the president* on a debate stage. These, it was reported, were the reasons why folks were willing to look past stop-and-frisk, and his comments about policing, and his comments about redlining, and all the rest. On Wednesday night, he botched all of those items terribly. His answer on stop-and-frisk was shallow and perfunctory, and his description of his own past comments on the responsibility of anti-redlining laws for the 2008 financial collapse was profoundly dishonest.

I mean, he had to have been prepared for this, right? He had to know all of this was coming, and he had to know he was walking into a wolverine pit in a meat suit. He’s paying people $2,500 a month to post about him on Twitter. I assume his top aides are making much more than that. Did any of these high-priced geniuses stop and think whether or not he was ready for this? After all, he’s not even on the ballot in Nevada or South Carolina. He could have skipped this debate entirely and continued to run his saturation-bombing ad campaigns in those two states and the ones to come on Super Tuesday. Right now, if his people allow him on another debate stage with what we saw Tuesday night, they’re out of their minds.

Editor's Note: The Lincoln quote referred to William Rosecrans at Chickamauga. We regret the error.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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