If the Democrats are to beat Trump, Michael Bloomberg is going to have to get a lot better
Trump is there for the taking by the right candidate. Mike isn’t there yet, but if he listens to his speechwriters he just might be.
Michael Bloomberg is notoriously impatient with speechwriters. He knows his own mind and he likes to speak it, unadorned by the fancy wordsmiths. Suspicion of the speechwriter has existed ever since Tacitus upbraided the emperor Nero for employing the philosopher Seneca to polish his words. After the other Democrat candidates ganged up on him during the debate on Wednesday evening in Las Vegas, Mr Bloomberg could do with the advice even if he does not like taking it.
Mr Bloomberg is, in spite of his wooden appearance in the debate, the best hope in the field. There is no victory to be won from the left in American presidential politics and, privately, the high command of the party know that. Even senior officials expect to lose if they ask the American people to make Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren their commander-in-chief. Joe Biden was supposed to be the man who could win back the heavy-industry heartlands but this has been one campaign too far for him. Mr Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, is by a distance the best bet. If the Democrats are to beat President Trump, Mr Bloomberg is going to have to get a lot better.
Mr Bloomberg’s central pitch, what Aristotle called the seat of his argument, is that he is a winner. That is why he keeps elevating his answers to questions about the contest with rival Democrats to his battle with the man in the White House. This sounds perfectly sensible but on a bad night in Las Vegas it didn’t work, and Mr Bloomberg needs to work out why.
The first trait of a persuasive speaker, said Aristotle, is character and Mr Bloomberg will have to think hard about this. Note the dual meaning of the word. Character is something we have, a set of traits that explain where we have been and predict where we will go. Yet a character is also something that we play. In a TV debate, the two types of character come together. A certain artifice, a little self-dramatisation, is in order. But if you look like a fake then you are sunk. The candidate needs to be a convincing character actor, portraying himself.
The best character actor in US politics is President Trump, who breaks all the rules of linear reasoning. He often encircles an argument, making his point by ragged repetition. He hits major words repeatedly, allowing the repetition to stand for the argument. Add in the distinctive hand gestures and you have a style. The fact that he is so easy to mimic shows that he has a manner of his own. He has a character, an ethos and it works at a level deeper than the rational.
A serious argument will not defeat this emotional appeal, unless it is voiced by a serious man with whom the American people identify. The best character for Mr Bloomberg to play is the man of weight and achievement, the serious manager. The script he is rather mechanically reading from has been drafted to cast its candidate as a man above politics, a man above the dire Democratic Party. The same character appears in his campaign ads - the man who can get things done. It is not wrong, it is just not yet enough.
The trouble is that it lacks any emotional connection. Mr Bloomberg’s is exactly the pitch that Hillary Clinton made against Mr Trump - competence against resonance. But politics has to fire the imagination and moderate common sense is always a hard thing to sell. The real master-craftsmen, Barack Obama being the most obvious example, sing their way to power lyrically and restrain themselves on assuming office. Mr Obama changed character when he became president but as a candidate he was the man of hope from Hawaii.
Mr Bloomberg has no emotional story yet and he will need one. The rest of the candidates, piqued by his $605 million campaign and late entry into the contest, ganged up on the man who they see as the main threat. He should have been prepared for this and it will happen again. Mr Bloomberg quickly needs to work out who he is when the assault begins. In Las Vegas, he struggled to throw off the charge of being a “billionaire”. In Democrat politics this is a metaphor for “out of touch” and a sly insinuation that such gains cannot have been gotten legally. As Pete Buttigieg said, in his over-crafted, over-rehearsed and not quite aphoristic way, Mr Bloomberg believes “money is the root to all power”.
Confronted with this predictable and rather lame attack, Mr Bloomberg floundered. The best rhetorical strategy is to diminish the slight by redefining it as a compliment. To say in effect that, yes, I am a billionaire but isn’t it an embodiment of the idea of America that a middle-class boy can do so well. He should say that, though it is a shame politics is so dominated by money, it is nevertheless a fact that it is. Americans will cherish a man who has made his money and proposes to spend some of it in their service. That allows a joke to the effect that if America has to be run by a billionaire from New York, let’s at least have the right billionaire from New York. Cicero, whose name crops up again and again in the Federalist Papers written by three of the Founding Fathers, gave this strategy a name: concession. It means to give a little ground to take back more. Mr Bloomberg instead got increasingly irritable and, after a while, simply ignored Ms Warren’s questions about the non-disclosure agreements that his company has used.
A lot of work is needed on what Mr Bloomberg is saying but even if those faults are eradicated he will need to work on how he says it. The three things that count, said the Greek statesman Demosthenes, exaggerating only a little, are “delivery, delivery, delivery”. For an experienced politician Mr Bloomberg is extremely wooden and compares unfavourably even to his rivals on the stage, none of whom is exactly Martin Luther King. Bernie Sanders does at least deliver his lines with so much gusto that he looks set to expire. Mr Bloomberg’s delivery is flat. He does not hit the pivotal word in the sentence. He does not do some of the basics, and he must.
He must because his central message - that he and only he can beat Mr Trump - may well be true and his rhetorical failings are obscuring the message. The president’s ratings have just started to move up and he has a good economic story to tell but it is hard to see where many new votes will come from. He is there for the taking by the right candidate. Michael Bloomberg is not yet that candidate but if he listens to his speechwriters he just might be.
The Times
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