1. Bloomsday

Mayor Mike takes the stage tonight in what will be an in-kind donation by the DNC to Bernie Sanders.

In a sane world, this would be the moment when the entire field pointed at Bernie Sanders and then turned to the camera and asked Democrats, “You really want to do this?” And then opened their oppo books on him.

Instead, we’re most likely going to get an evening of everyone fixating on the new guy, who has precisely zero delegates and has yet to collect a vote.

You can understand why it’s happening this way: Attacking Bernie carries the risk of making his people very angry. Bloomberg doesn’t really have people yet, so these are free shots. But it’s also kind of insane. It’s like fixating on the possibility of an earthquake three months from now while your house is on fire. You deal with problems as they present themselves.

Whatever.

I want to talk for a minute about my conflicted thoughts concerning money in politics.

On the one hand, I’m a commie and rich people make me nervous because they often seem to think that the only way people get very rich is by being very smart. Which may be true in some instances, but is not universally the case.

A story: Several years ago I met with a Very Rich Man. He was pleasant and kind and well-meaning. I liked him a lot. We were talking about the economic vulnerabilities of the American middle-class. Here is how he explained the problem to me:

Let’s say you’re an average person. Nothing special, you don’t go to Harvard. Just a normal, 50th percentile person with a normal job. By the time you’re 30 you’ve made, what, a million dollars? The problem is that people don’t know how to invest that money anymore.

I’m not making this up.

I smiled and nodded along because this wasn’t a discussion so much as a lecture. And I thought to myself, “How in the world did someone this foolish wind up this rich?”

And then I remembered: He inherited it.

When you get rich people in politics you get things like Donald Trump telling supporters that he’ll pay their legal bills if they want to punch a protestor, or Mike Bloomberg as mayor telling New Yorkers that if they can’t afford New York City real estate prices, then it just means they have to leave the city.

Money can create a reality-distortion field.

On the other hand, on this week’s Commentary podcast, John Podhoretz talked about the relative civil peace in Bloomberg’s New York, because Mayor Mike basically paid off every activist group that normally makes trouble. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, this seems almost ideal. Most activist groups exist as fundraising rackets. If the facts on the ground are reasonably good, they have to raise money somehow. Bloomberg just cut out the middle step where they raise hell and try to agitate voters by paying them himself.

You can see how this could go badly: If New York City had been a hellscape under Bloomberg, then buying the silence of well-meaning critics would be terrible. But times were good and all he was really doing was paying protection money to the kinds of groups that are not especially well-meaning.

That’s pretty efficient!

But also there’s this: Let’s not romanticize the beauty of small-dollar, people-powered campaigns.

Because while money in politics lets guys like Bloomberg happen, when you leave it up to The People, you get guys like Trump and Bernie Sanders.

You might not like Bloomberg. But it’s not obvious that what his money is buying is worse than what The People are choosing.

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2. This Time Is Different

I got an email from a buddy explaining why you can believe that the president has to have confidence in his NSC, but also that what Trump did to Vindman is different: