Opinion: Michael Bloomberg had a story to tell and a few apologies to make in tonight's Democratic debate. He managed to do neither.
You’re about to go on a treacherous journey. You’ve hired an army of knowledgeable experts who know the dangerous twists and turns in the road, who know where the brigands lurk, who have been told for weeks exactly what perils await.
Do you really respond to Bernie Sanders’s embrace of socialism—a clear vulnerability for Sanders, but a growing enthusiasm for the younger wing of the party—by saying that “they tried [abandoning capitalism] in their countries; they called it communism”? And do you spend the entire evening with barely a flash of engagement, not to mention passion?
Fundamentally, the challenge for Bloomberg was to seize the terrain of the debate; not just to acknowledge an error on stop and frisk, but to acknowledge that he was all too comfortable with talking abut women that was unacceptable—not just now and then. He had to know that lame assertions that he put women in positions of influence would not come close to answering the years of insults and crude jokes—but that was exactly the defense he offered.
In the years I spent in debate prep, there were times when a candidate fiercely resisted a frank acknowledgement of error; it is part of the DNA of people with the hunger for power.
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