David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, expresses his concern about billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is a plutocrat and an autocrat.
In many ways, Dayen writes, Bloomberg is like Trump, only richer. How strange would it be for the Democrats to nominate a Republican to run against Trump.
He writes:
I have been on the record as saying that Michael Bloomberg will never become the president of the United States. The line I wrotein 2016 holds up: “An anti-teachers’-union, anti-gun, pro-nanny state, pro-Wall Street, pro-stop-and- frisk, pro-inequality, pro-immigration, pro-surveillance, pro-Iraq War neoconservative is almost surgically designed to repel practically every American voter on some level.” For that reason alone, the flirtation with making this guy the Democratic nominee should cause serious alarm to anyone who wants to defeat Donald Trump. Plus, Bloomberg has vowed to spend his money until November no matter who is the nominee, instantly undercutting the only real value of his candidacy.
But in the few months since Bloomberg announced, we have all gotten hard lessons in the power of money and advertising, the lack of principle within the professional political class, and the way in which the Trump ascendancy has broken the brains of so many Americans. There’s now a path for a general election campaign between dueling plutocrats, which would make a mockery of our politics and obliterate the Democratic Party as a tribune of the people.
And I’m going to say something controversial. There has been plenty of conjecture over whether a Trump-like figure could take over the Democratic Party. And I would say with Bloomberg that we’re about to find out. The cries of “Bloomberg is not Trump!” will rain down on me now, and, of course, he’s not. But there are a disturbing number of similarities. We have a figure without connections or the same value system as the party he seeks to represent, with racial and sexist skeletons in his closet, and a penchant for subverting democracy and showing contempt toward the rule of law. Democrats who are acting as pundits and thinking that Bloomberg offers the most certain close to the Trump era are playing with a stick of dynamite.
Let’s take these points in turn. Michael Bloomberg won his first term as New York City mayor as a Republican. He was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004, endorsing George W. Bush and the war on terrorism. He has supported numerous Republican candidates for office with tens of millions of dollars, including Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren. He supported the state Republican Party in New York to keep them from attacking him over his party switch to independent while mayor.
Bloomberg opposed union contracts and public spending repeatedly in office, while favoring welfare for the rich to attract them to the city. Today he claims to be a liberal Democrat in favor of gun safety and climate preservation. He opposed minimum wage increases before and supports them now. The pattern is of someone choosing sides and deploying money to win favor, purely for political expediency. There’s no core there—just like Trump.
Under Bloomberg, the New York Police Department locked up thousands of people during that 2004 Republican National Convention for the crime of preparing to exercise their free-speech rights; the city later had to pay the protesters $18 million for violating their civil rights. This was part of a trend that continued with the mass arrests and paramilitary-style crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protesters, which included violence against reporters and photographers; the city had to settle a lawsuit with protesters again for using pepper spray on them. The NYPD under Bloomberg also spied on Muslims who had committed no crime, a program Trump has praised. Trump doesn’t control a municipal police force, but if he did, what Bloomberg carried out approaches what Trump’s response would look like. (Perhaps how ICE is run can offer an analogue.)
Bloomberg’s continually expressed ardor for the Chinese government—due in part to heavy Bloomberg investments in China—recalls the Trump Organization’s extension abroad and how it plays into foreign policy. Bloomberg has yet to divest from the giant news organization he has sidelined in the Democratic primary, or explain how he’d untangle from these many foreign relationships as president.
Bloomberg’s record of turning neighborhoods of color into stop-and-frisk surveillance zones is well known, though he has tried to lie about it anyway, claiming he reduced stop-and-frisk by 95 percent when he actually expanded it. Pressed on comments he made about how you have to put cops in minority neighborhoods to address crime, he said he made that statement “five years ago,” when he was a young and immature 73-year-old, I guess. These comments would not be out of place in a thread about Trump’s outrageous statements. In 2009. he successfully got city law changed to run for a third term, something Rudy Giuliani suggested after 9/11 but couldn’t himself pull off. Trump has mused about a third term as well; to paraphrase his ubiquitous campaign slogan, Mike got it done.
He got this done in part by seeding nonprofit charities that then supported the term-limit change with $60 million through his philanthropic fund. This is a persistent pattern in Bloomberg’s political life: buying off anyone who can be bought for their support or their silence. As journalist Blake Zeff documents, Bloomberg paid off pastors helpful to his mayoral candidacies, paid off members of Congress who are now backing him with millions in donations, and paid off mayors who have endorsed him with $350 million in city grant programs that filled budget holes. He has doubled the rate for campaign organizers and guaranteed them job security until November, catering their meals and giving them free swag. One by one, he’s buying off the political class ; Nathan Robinson quips, “I sometimes feel like being in the Ionesco play Rhinoceros, in which people unexpectedly become rhinoceroses overnight.”
This transactional, corrupt favor-trading is as unacceptable as anything we see in Trump’s Washington. It’s abetted by an orgy of spending unseen in modern political history, a corporate-run, corporate-marketedPotemkin village of a campaign (where the talking points are so road-tested they’re plagiarized). Bloomberg has perfected an unrebutted, unsoiled image outside the primary fray (“I’m not running against the other Democratic candidates,” he has said at his canned, catered events, “I’m running to beat Donald Trump”). It calls to mind television networks’ unfiltered broadcasts of Trump’s speeches in 2016, only Bloomberg, unlike Trump, is paying for the time. And unsurprisingly it works; corporations use advertising for a reason. At the same time that he’s deluging the airwaves with his own dollars, he’s also leaning on his pals in the plutocracy to starve competitors seeking big-money dollars. He’s paying Instagram influencers to say nice things about him, and paying meme-makers to boost his image. Fake social-media content to cultivate support? Mike will get it done.
A plutocrat-on-plutocrat election will just further subvert our already fragile democracy.
Norms or rules don’t matter much to Michael Bloomberg. The Associated Press reported this week that Bloomberg blamed the end of redlining—a policy made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968—for the housing bubble and 2008 collapse. To believe Bloomberg’s analysis, you would have to believe that housing discrimination ended in 1968, and then everyone waited for 35 years or so until government forced lenders to write loans to poor people. Sometimes this gets attributed to the Community Reinvestment Act, which was signed in 1977 and has the same inexplicable decades-long gap. Plus, countries around the world with far different policies on lending to the poor than those in the U.S. all coincidentally had housing bubbles and collapses at the same time. The “government caused the crisis” trope ignores the mountain of global hot money and global fraud from the banking sector that triggered the meltdown. Bloomberg’s ideological blinkers and his immersion in and support for his Wall Street milieu—given that his fortune comes directly from industry sales, you can say that he’s funded by Wall Street more than any candidate in American history—rendered him incapable of understanding the causes of the most fundamental economic event of the last 90 years. Not an encouraging harbinger of economic policy should Bloomberg become president.
Worse yet, Bloomberg didn’t think anyone should have been held accountable for the 2008 collapse and the Great Recession that followed. As mayor, he vetoed a measure to prevent predatory lending in New York and went to court to stop it after the city council overrode him. Then, he wanted post-crisis reforms to be written by the bankers themselves. And he found the Obama administration’s weak use of fines against bank misconduct (rather than criminal charges or real accountability) beyond the pale, saying they were “outrageous and shouldn’t be allowed to take place.” Believing that there’s a group of friends (and clients; leasing Bloomberg terminals is what made the man rich) who should be above the law—that’s as Trumpian as it gets.
The more parallels you can draw, the more disturbing it becomes. And while Bloomberg’s surge in national polling has enabled a little of his record to come to the surface, mostly he’s been allowed to run his campaign in a bubble, manufacturing his image as just a guy who wants to beat Trump. The preponderance of advertising itself plays another role: It demonstrates that Bloomberg will counteract Trump’s message with money, more than anyone else can muster. To some Democrats eager to grasp at any straw to see Trump’s reign ended, that notion is compelling.
I think it’s a tragic mistake. A plutocrat-on-plutocrat election will just further subvert our already fragile democracy. It will show that nothing matters in a democracy if you have enough money. It will take every comment that Democrats said about the GOP being seduced by Trump and boomerang it back in their faces. It is an act of pure desperation that will alienate giant swathes of the country and put a For Sale sign on democracy, perhaps permanently.
The “any blue will do” fallacy ignores that parties must stand for something to succeed. Over the years, losing touch with fundamental Democratic concerns has always weakened the party. Shacking up with a billionaire who undermines so many Democratic values because he might win in November? It reinforces the concept that everyone and everything associated with the Democratic Party can be bought.
Too many Democrats have spent the Trump era looking for a Republican“daddy” to rein in the toddler-in-chief and restore both Republican and American decency. From John Bolton and James Mattis to Jeff Flake and Mitt Romney, surely some conservative with courage and self-respect would step up and straighten things out. I think it would be a disaster to extend this delusion by actually nominating a Republican to lead the Democratic Party.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Democrats who are acting as pundits and thinking that Bloomberg offers the most certain close to the Trump era are playing with a stick of dynamite.”
Yes. This is a chillingly accurate summary of reasons NOT to support Bloomberg in addition to the fact that he wants A-F report cards for schools, private management of public schools, vouchers or comparables, same old failed policies of the last two decades.
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Cornel West has a few things to say about Bloomberg. I agree.
https://www.truthdig.com/videos/cornel-west-mike-bloomberg-is-a-neoliberal-gangster/
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“Any Blue will do”
Any blue will do
And Michael Bloomberg too
The Democratic screw
Is coming into view
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Warren is a masterful debater. Watching her in the debate was like watching a star athlete. She knows her chances to winning the primary are slim so she played a defensive game. Most of all she went after Bloomberg who seemed totally unprepared for this encounter. Then, she attacked or responded to any assaults on progressive proposals. She was “bad cop” so Bernie could stay out of most of the fray. Bernie defended himself against attacks by Buttigieg. Bernie wanted to talk about issues, not engage personal attacks.
Warren also came to Klobuchar’s defense when Buttigieg criticized her for not knowing the name of Mexico’s president. She became the teacher defending her former law student. Yet, Warren was able to criticize Klobuchar’s two paragraph health care platform. Warren was at the top of her game. and she seemed to be playing a skillful, strategic, one. .
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I would love to see a Sanders/Warren ticket. I think they would have good chemistry together.
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I would love that ticket too. If Bernie wins, his policies would continue if something happens with his health. Bernie has said he would welcome a female running mate.
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I would love to see a Sherod Brown/ Warren ticket as that would be the winning ticket out of a brokered convention. The differences between the three populist left Democrats are minimal. I love Sanders but in an economy that on the surface appears good; fueled by record low interest rates and deficits both of which I have no problem with, Sanders will get painted as a Socialist radical who is going to crash the economy.
The truth is Sanders & Warren and Brown are merely FDR Democrats. A species that was mortally wounded when Johnson freed the slave. Then it was buried after losses by McGovern and Mondale . NO matter who is nominated the Republicans will brand them as Socialist. But Brown brings in several Mid West States and Warren the woman’s vote.
Wake me I am dreaming again.
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I’d like to see a Sanders/Gabbard ticket.
Tulsi Gabbard would garner a lot of votes from Veterans and active duty military and also many other moderate Republicans (if such a beast still exists ( in some cave somewhere, separated from the aboveground world for decades) She understands better than most the cost of war to our troops and also understands that far too much money is spent on regime change wars that not only do no good, but do a great deal of lasting harm.
But of course, if Gabbard is on the ticket, the “liberal” media (CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NY Times) will just double and redouble their attacks, since they despise Gabbard even more than Sanders (painting her as a friend to Assad — simply because she believes you have to meet even with people you despise. They used to call it diplomacy but now they (“liberal” pundits and former Secretaries of State, mainly) call it ” sleeping with the enemy.”)
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I thought Sherrod Brown was very popular with the ed reform groups and was a big friend of charter schools.
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Gabbard??
You really think Sanders needs a pro-charter candidate like Tulsi Gabbard to help him win the vote of Betsy DeVos fans?
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You think Gabbard would be setting education policy in a Sanders administration as VP?
I don’t.
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I don’t know why you’d want a favorite of the ed reformers when you could have someone who cared even a little about public education. Even Amy Klobuchar’s position on public education is 100x better than Gabbard!
If Tulsi Gabbard was the VP nominee, that would make Bernie Sanders look like his recent change from supporting “public charters” to actually standing up for public education was just an election year sham. And it would certainly make me distrust his position on public schools when there are so many good candidates for VP who SUPPORT public schools that he threw under the bus.
I’m not really worried since I don’t think Bernie Sanders is corrupt enough to ask someone like Tulsi Gabbard – a favorite of ed reformers and some of the most reprehensible alt right white Trump supporters.
It is far more likely that Tulsi would run 3rd party if Bernie was the nominee to try to defeat him. The woman loves Trump a lot more than public schools.
And her cowardly vote on impeachment? PRESENT!!! Because she just wasn’t sure that anything Trump did was really worth criticizing? This is what Bernie Sanders said when – thankfully – the House members who weren’t Trump apologists voted to impeach Trump:
“Today, the House of Representatives rightly carried out its constitutional responsibility by voting to impeach Donald Trump, the most corrupt president in our history. No one, including the president, is above the law.”
And when Bernie voted firmly that Trump was guilty on both impeachment counts (and made it clear that Trump was guilty of other impeachable offenses, too), Bernie said that anyone who believed in rule of law would vote to impeach Trump.
Even her own constituents in Hawaii know that Tulsi is not on anyone’s side but her own. And you want Bernie to pick her? It would guarantee he goes down to defeat because progressives would stop trusting Bernie.
Again, if you think Bernie would even consider choosing Tulsi Gabbard, then that makes me believe that Bernie is not the man I want to be President.
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…”also many other moderate Republicans”
It isn’t moderate Republicans who love Tulsi. Her support is among the alt right white fan boys. And no, she has never disowned them.
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But I thought you were the one lecturing people about not being a single issue voter??!
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Oops
I forgot that Tulsi called Hillary Clinton a warmonger and sued her for defamation of character after Clinton had implied Gabbard was a “Russian asset”
My bad.
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“But I thought you were the one lecturing people about not being a single issue voter??!”
Where in the world did you come up with that? I am a single issue voter in the primary — I will only vote for someone who is pro-public education and not pro-charter. That’s why I supported Ralph Northam over a DFER democrat who happened to be progressive on other issues. But I didn’t claim that made my candidate more moral than the pro-charter DFER Democrat running against him. And I certainly would not claim that the DFER Democrat who sold out public education should be defeated if he won the primary because even a right wing Republican was better than the DFER Democrat whose progressive views were all a lie because his position on charters proved that he was a tool of the .01% and would do their bidding so even a right wing republican was better. I didn’t mischaracterize the DFER progressive as corrupt and evil because of his pro-charter positions. I merely pointed out that the candidate that was pro-public school was the other candidate and that’s why I supported that candidate. Of course I would have supported the DFER Dem over the right wing Republican in the general election. That’s where you and I seem to differ.
What I don’t like is hypocrisy.
How soon people forget Tulsi attacking Barack Obama because he wasn’t using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”!
Of ALL the things to criticize Obama about — and there were many – Tusi decides to go after him something Obama did that was GOOD??!
“Present” on Trump’s impeachment. Enough said.
So many superior progressives in this country and you think a candidate who can’t even vote for Trump’s impeachment and criticized Obama’s language on terrorism is going to stand up for what is right?
Look to Bernie for what is right. Why hasn’t Tulsi dropped out to endorse him?
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If you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
How many times did Tulsi Gabbard say that HRC was an asset of the .01% who called the shots that she dutifully followed? Did HRC sue? HRC was also incredibly critical of Jill Stein? Did she sue?
By the way, the alt right fan boys are suggesting that Trump should choose Tulsi Gabbard as VP. Let’s face it — would any of us be surprised if Tulsi Gabbard said yes if offered that?
Just think about it. No one would really be shocked if Tulsi accepted a position in Trump’s White House. But they WOULD be shocked if Bernie Sanders did. And what does that say that no one thinks it is laughable that Tulsi could get a position in Trump’s cabinet?
It would certainly be laughable to imagine Bernie having a position in Trump’s cabinet. Or Elizabeth Warren. Or Amy Klobuchar. Or Pete Buttigieg. Or Biden or even Bloomberg.
Tulsi voted “present” for one reason – to keep her options open. I don’t know how anyone trust her. And I doubt that Bernie Sanders does, either.
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I agree. She’s so articulate. When she speaks, I feel like she is authentic. I feel like she will fight for us and not just those with money. I feel like I can trust her. Nobody is perfect. She’s humble and I think she really cares about doing right. I don’t feel like there’s an overinflated ego there. There’s passion and a belief that she can help make some important changes. Yes, I know that’s a lot of “feeling” but I think that’s just as important as “the plan.”
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Warren would be an outstanding president. She’s brilliant and careful and has a good heart. And she’s been around the block, politically. She knows how things work.
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I donate to Warren but can she win.
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Warren’s wonkiness thrills us A students, but it falls flat with the C students, who are the norm. It’s Hillary redux: wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. In debates Trump will be the cool bully blasting the prolix schoolmarm off the stage. Of all the Dems, Sanders has the best chance with the simple masses. He speaks simply and intelligibly and he repeats himself enough to make a dent in rock-hard brains. Bloomberg turned me off –he’s an a** –though his crass bluntness has an upside: it marks him as a non-politician, and many people like that. By the same token, Bernie’s bluntness and impolitic embrace of controversial policies is a virtue with the unaligned proletariat, though not so much with the centrist suburbanites. Like Hillary, Pete, Amy and Elizabeth are valedictorian types –impressive to us teachers, but disliked by the masses. Showing off mastery of policy details is a losing strategy. Eyes glaze over.
Bernie or Mike have the best chance to connect with the masses.
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Mike really doesn’t connect with the masses!
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Bernie’s deep voice is a big plus too (sad to say, but this is what registers with the low-information voter).
Buttigieg impresses me, but I suspect he just comes across as an irritating robot to the masses. His finely polished, nuanced, hit-all-the-right notes responses are lost on the masses, and he doesn’t get it. He needs to dumb it down –a lot.
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I have to admit I find Buttigieg annoying with his “game show voice” and know-it-all attitude. He tries too hard to get everyone to see how smart he is. He really has a minimal record to stand on so he snipes at everyone else.
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That condescending attitude, Ponderosa, is what’s going to get you another four years of Trump if you’re not careful. Hard working Americans are tired of being talked down to like we’re too darn stupid to understand the forces of inequality that neoliberalism has unleashed upon us. Which neoliberalism, incidentally, Hillary was a big fan of, as is Warren, she’s just smart enough to pretend otherwise.
People don’t like Bernie because of his voice. In fact, most of his supporters will be the first to admit his voice is grating. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the policies, stupid.
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“Game show voice” –yes!
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People on-line feel Bernie is “angry” because of his voice. In the debates he is louder perhaps due to stress or the large venue. In personal interviews he is calmer and thoughtful, and he does have a sense of humor.
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One bit of punditry I haven’t seen relates to a fundamental lesson I hope I taught: when you vote for president, you vote for tens of thousands of people who implement policy that affects your daily lives. We know what an Orange Catastrophe cabinet looks like. The worst of the Democrats would be light years ahead of the current one and, regardless, might be the last chance we have to salvage this country.
In a Sanders administration, I could envision a Treasury Secretary Warren or Brown, a Labor Secretary who understands what it means to work, a Veterans Secretary who understood Chairman Sanders’ committee leadership. In short, it would be a transformative, diverse group of people committed to their departments, not undermining them. In a Warren administration, I also feel confident. In any other one, I’d expect a McKinsey-an playground with a few familiar bones thrown in to fool people about its real patrons.
But if elected and allowed to take office, a Sanders administration would likely be a precursor to fundamental change for another to complete. Its primary role would be to engage in political education, recruitment, and electing majorities at the federal, state, and local levels. The reaction against them, or Warren, for that matter will be something, and ultimately that why I believe the worst is still far away. Americans are a fearful people and Ignorance, greed, and mendacity will continue to rule the day. We get what we deserve, especially when we squander every possible advantage and resource we have been given. Anyone reading this needs to get used to the idea of “inner emigration.” Or I need to read Diane’s new book sooner rather than later.
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OK, for the sake of argument (not to mention projectile vomiting), let’s assume that the general election comes down to Bloomberg v Trump, what do you do?
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Easy: vote for the CEO, not the mob boss.
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And who can forget all that money that Bloomberg donated to oust Steve Zimmer from the LAUSD school board and put the district under the control of the charter industry. Bloomberg is everything I don’t want in a Democrat.
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According to Forbes, yesterday, his wealth is now at 63.7 billion. I read a year ago that it was 58 billion. So, a 5.7 billion increase, give or take a few hundred million. The ninth richest man in the world, but with so much hubris that he didn’t even bother to prepare for the debates, or perhaps he did and froze. There seemed to be some of that. Public speaking is an art that many, even very successful people, have not mastered. The debate yesterday was devastating for him. Can he survive it as a candidate? I doubt it. Too much irresistible fodder for news stories in that. Even the DINOS who own the media on the left will have a hard time trying to figure out how to steer their people away from that stuff.
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Diane, you could give Mike some lessons in on the public speaking. LOL.
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in, on? Either, I suppose
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Bloomberg’s expression was priceless. He looked at Warren with stunned arrogance.
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Arrogance needs some stunning from time to time. Warren quite likely destroyed his candidacy in about a minute.
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Bloomberg oozed “jerk”. The debate definitely hurt him in my eyes.
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Everyone’s. I doubt he can recover from this. But then, we live in a country in which Jabba the Trump, IQ45, can become president. It’s an idiocracy.
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Counterpoint for those who think Warren is “authentic”: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/the-credibility-gap Especially look at the end of the article with the bullet point listing of Warren’s not-quite-truths and credibility issues.
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Coupled with her slander of Bernie a few weeks ago in which she accused him of saying that a woman can’t be president, something diametrically opposed to everything he’s said throughout his life. In fact, Bernie wouldn’t even have run in 2016 if Warren herself had run.
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I think Warren is terrific and would not look for reasons to question her credibility
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“not-quite-truths” “credibility issues” “slander”
I see a repeat of 2016 with those words. I don’t see how those character-attacking words are any different than the words used in the hit job against Bernie that Megan McArdle wrote in the Washington Post.
Using words to deceive and leave the impression there is something very, very wrong with a candidate is wrong. It’s wrong when it is directed at Bernie Sanders and it is wrong when it is directed at Elizabeth Warren. The description of what happened between Bernie and Warren is also incorrect since the issue was whether a woman could win against Trump, and neither of them ever said it had anything to do with “whether a woman can be president”, which implies something very different.
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Read the article and refute it, please. And you can complain about the word “slander” if you want, but saying that someone said something that’s diametrically opposed to everything they’ve said their whole life is pretty slanderous.
BTW, what do you make of Warren opening her 2020 campaign with the “proof” that she’s Native American? Except that she proved that she isn’t. And then she tried to delete the evidence that she had started her campaign that way. If that’s not a “credibility” issue, then your credibility is rather lacking too. There’s a distinct difference between smearing someone and calling a spade a spade based on the evidence. The evidence of Warren’s credibility issues is well documented – for starters, in the articles I linked, which apparently you haven’t bothered to read.
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“ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Let’s now turn to — let’s now turn to an issue that’s come up in the last 48 hours. Senator Sanders, CNN reported yesterday that — and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D-VT): Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it. And I don’t want to waste a whole lot of time on this, because this is what Donald Trump and maybe some of the media want. Anybody knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States.
Go to YouTube today. There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States. In 2015, I deferred, in fact, to Senator Warren. There was a movement to draft Senator Warren to run for president. And you know what, I said — stayed back. Senator Warren decided not to run, and I then — I did run afterwards.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. How could anybody in a million years not believe that a woman could become president of the United States? And let me be very clear. If any of the women on this stage or any of the men on this stage win the nomination, I hope that’s not the case, I hope it’s me.
(LAUGHTER)
But if they do, I will do everything in my power to make sure that they are elected in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country.
(APPLAUSE)
PHILLIP: So Senator Sanders — Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?
SANDERS: That is correct. ”
Note how Abby Phillips asked Sanders “why” he said it, rather than “if” he said it. Note Sanders’ response. It’s clear who’s lying. Lying is, by definition, a credibility problem.
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You left out the followup question to Warren, which just blew my mind:
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I
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I am not posting any direct responses from you to Dienne. Enough.
The election won’t be decided by arguments on this blog.
Make general comments not directed to one person.
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