MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—It was 19 degrees here on Saturday night. In Antarctica—the continent, and not an icehouse outside of Hooksett—it was 65. This is something of an issue for the people contending for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to discuss. It should not be T-shirt-and-sandals weather in Antarctica in February. I'm no climatologist, but I know that much.

Inside the SNHU Arena, the state's Democrats were gathered for the annual McIntyre-Shaheen Dinner. This once was the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner until everybody got woke enough to understand that honoring a couple of slaveowners, one of whom doubled as a genocidal slaughterer of Native populations, was not something the finer people did in the 21st Century. So the dinner got renamed after a couple of local heroes—Senator Tom McIntyre, whose book, The Fear Brokers, was one of the first cautionary works on the rise of what was then called The New Right, and current Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

All the candidates showed up. Every one of them was charged up; Deval Patrick once again showed why, in his long-shot run to become governor of Massachusetts, he was Obama before Obama was. "We need the Woke," he told the crowd, "and we need those who are just waking up," a good line that copped Origen of Alexandria's aphorism that some people run toward redemption and some people crawl toward it. (Thanks to a pal on the electric Twitter machine for reminding me of old Origen, who eventually did himself great harm in his groinal regions.)

Buttigieg got quite a reception from the Bernie crowd. JOSEPH PREZIOSO Getty Images

The higher profile candidates were given 10 minutes each, and they all had their claques of supporters tucked into different corners of the arena. The Sanders and Warren folks were side by side, and the Buttigieg partisans were on the other side of the floor from the Sanders section. When Buttigieg's turn to speak came, the Sanders people chanted at him. "Wall Street Pete," they chanted, and, "CIA, CIA," the latter coming up from an online conspiracy rabbit hole by which Buttigieg is said to be a mole from Langley sent to disrupt the process. Buttigieg studiously ignored the chants. When the Sanders people started up with Amy Klobuchar, however, she turned around and waved at them. "Hi, Bernie people!" she said with a smile, completely disarming them. It was a fascinating contrast in political styles.



Among the speakers, there were few surprises but, unquestionably, the shine of desperation was on Joe Biden. He has the most to lose here and he seems to know it. He was his usual roaring self but, toward the end of his remarks, Biden seemed to take the possibility of the re-election of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago most personally.

I lost a lot in my lifetime like you have. I lost my wife and daughter in an automobile accident. I lost my son to a long battle with brain cancer. I won't stand by and lose this election to this man. We cannot let it happen. We cannot let it happen. The character of this country is on the ballot. We must defeat Donald Trump. There is no choice. The man does not have a shred of decency. We have to stand up against bigotry, hatred, the abuse of power. This man divides people. It's up to you, America. Only the Democratic Party can do it. We must do it now. Stand up, take it back. God bless you all. May god protect our troops. Let's go do it now. Now. Now.

For a week now, ever since the fiasco in Iowa—and the president*'s batshit State of the Union, and his acquittal in the Senate, and his doubleheader nutty that began when he profaned the National Prayer Breakfast like someone reading Mickey Spillane in St. Peter's Basilica—the Democrats have begun to get nervous again about the magical mind-bending power of presidential* invective. In addition, all the candidates speaking at the banquet know that there is the doomsday money-bomb waiting for all of them in the person of Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg is the doomsday money-bomb. Bill Pugliano Getty Images

Already, tales of Bloomberg's checkbook are scaring Democratic operatives almost as much as the president*'s dwindling vocabulary. There's the guy he hired for $50,000...a month. (That's 50 times what Andrew Yang is proposing to give me and you, if you're keeping score at home.) And the other guy he hired who lived in Washington, but Bloomberg's campaign wanted him so badly that they rented him an apartment in New York City and, because the guy had rushed there without packing anything, the campaign bought him a full wardrobe. There's the network of mayors and their staffers that Bloomberg has been cultivating for years; one aide to a rookie midwestern mayor was flown to New York twice a month for what was essentially mayor boot camp. And there is also the simple fact that, for years, Bloomberg has been plowing money into causes dear to the progressive Democratic heart—gun control, for example, and the climate crisis.

"He got a coal plant closed in my state," said one Democratic state official, somewhat ruefully. "Nobody else could have done it." Bloomberg is not coming for the other candidates. He's simply waiting, on ground that he's prepared, for them to come to him. And, certainly, the Sanders and Warren campaigns have no choice but to argue that having the Bloombergers descend on the campaign in a thousand golden parachutes is not exactly the way to break the stranglehold on our politics that the money power now enjoys. Two New York plutocrats duking it out for the presidency was not something anyone anticipated back in 2019.

In Friday night's debate, Senator Professor Warren took this head-on, probably because Bloomberg maintains that he got into the race to keep Sanders (and Warren) from yanking the wheel too far to port.

I don’t think anyone ought to be able to buy their way into a nomination of being President of the United States. I don’t think any billionaire ought to be able to do it, and I don’t think people who suck up to billionaires in order to fund their campaigns ought to be able to do it.

Low bridge there for Buttigieg, who also got swatted more directly by Sanders for his high-dollar donors. But the fact remains that Bloomberg is preparing to do something unprecedented in presidential politics. Other candidates have jumped in late, but never with the kind of wherewithal Bloomberg has at his disposal. Nobody knows what to expect. Nobody knows what's next. But it was 65 degrees in Antarctica on Saturday, so anything damn thing is possible.

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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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