‘A gusher of cash’

Mr. Bloomberg is using his fortune, estimated at over $60 billion, to hack voters’ attention, as Charlie Warzel has explained in The Times. Since November, he has spent over $400 million to blanket TV and social media with advertisements, according to one estimate. This is more than three times the combined spending of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg over a far longer time period, and only about two-thirds of a percent of Mr. Bloomberg’s total wealth.

“It is not quite, as admirers present it, that Mr. Bloomberg is a chess master whose opponents play checkers,” as The Times’s Matt Flegenheimer reported. “He is more accurately working to bury the board with a gusher of cash so overpowering that everyone forgets how the game was always played in the first place.”

[Related: “What Bloomberg’s $11 Million Super Bowl Ad Would Cost You on Your Budget”]

The Democrats are in no position to refuse this kind of money, says Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. “Whether by fund-raising (where Buttigieg has shown success) or by spending his own money as Bloomberg has done (promising to ‘spend whatever it takes’), Democrats will need someone who fully appreciates what they are up against,” she writes. “Democratic voters who want to win more than anything else would be well advised to find a candidate who does as well.”

But David Dayen argues in The American Prospect that Mr. Bloomberg’s nomination would actually be an unnecessary disaster for the Democratic Party, since he has already said he is open to putting his campaign operation and up to $1 billion in service of whichever candidate wins. “The ‘any blue will do’ fallacy ignores that parties must stand for something to succeed,” Mr. Dayen writes. “Shacking up with a billionaire,” he says, “reinforces the concept that everyone and everything associated with the Democratic Party can be bought.”