This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. From Reuters via U.S. News:

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will reassess his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday, NBC News reported. The Bloomberg campaign did not immediately respond on Tuesday to a request for comment.

The billionaire media mogul adopted a novel strategy for his White House bid, opting out of the first four nominating contests and hoping a $500 million-plus ad blitz would generate a momentum-building series of wins in the 14-state Super Tuesday primaries. Early results on Tuesday showed him gaining little traction with voters.

"No matter how many delegates we win tonight, we have done something no one else thought was possible. In just three months, we've gone from just 1% in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination," his campaign said in a statement. "Our number one priority remains defeating Donald Trump in November.”



I will grant you that he didn’t exactly get his money’s worth. (Then again, he couldn’t have gotten his money’s worth unless he’d been named Sapa Inca in Peru.) But, as of 10:33 p.m., he was picking up delegates all over the country, and he was the primary roadblock in Elizabeth Warren’s attempts at viability in several states, if he wanted to revenge himself after she pantsed him onstage. Unless he’s got internal polling numbers like death that are ahead of those available to the networks—and, considering the dough he's sunk into his data operation, he should—he’s got a glass jaw like few I’ve ever seen. Maybe he’s just bored.



Maybe he’s just bored. Joe Raedle Getty Images

Both Biden and Sanders spoke to the crowd before 10:30. Sanders took some familiar shots at Biden without mentioning his name.



We’re not only taking on the corporate establishment. We’re taking on the political establishment...One of the candidates in this race led the opposition to the war in Iraq. You’re looking at him. Another candidate voted for the war in Iraq.”



The litany went on to hang around Biden’s neck his support for various Social Security “reform” schemes, and international trade deals, and for the notorious bankruptcy bill that also got Biden crossways with a certain Harvard bankruptcy professor. For his part, Biden, after briefly being interrupted by an anti-dairy protestor who got too damn close to the candidate, went freeform, bellowing his thanks, chaffing Sanders about how Americans don’t want a revolution, and quoting Robert Browning and Seamus Heaney back to back. On Saturday, his victory address was restrained and disciplined, at least by his standards. This was the great scrambled Biden YAWP to which we’ve all become accustomed.

Biden’s bounce-back may have hastened Bloomberg’s departure. Mario Tama Getty Images

He set a new American rhetorical record for Sentences Beginning With “Look.” When he started rattling off the states he’d won Tuesday night at top volume, I remembered that this kind of thing killed Howard Dean’s campaign in its cradle. And then he came right to the edge of whacking Sanders over immigration.



We’re going to provide a path for 11 million citizens. If the other guy had voted for the...well, I won’t get into that. I won’t get going. Look, the ironworkers, the steelworkers, the boilermakers...



And he was off again.

That’s the universe of which Michael Bloomberg no longer wants to be a part. He wanted to be the Democratic Party’s bailout choice if Biden’s campaign dissolved, and he wanted to make sure that neither President Sanders nor President Warren could make the lives of his regular dinner partners too miserable. He didn’t reckon on Jim Clyburn’s rolling away the stone. Nobody did.

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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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