Remember the palmy pre-coronavirus, pre-impeachment days of Democratic primaries and clown cars?  Where Michael Bloomberg ran dozens of ads a day on the airwaves touting his crisis management skills, while pundits spoke of his unstoppable power, based on his bottomless pit of money, that pretty well talked louder than anything else in the Democratic Party.  Some billed it as his hostile takeover of the party.

Well, now that voters have rejected him, it's poof.  Vanish.  Gone.

Bloomberg was last seen buying yet another mansion, this one outside Aspen for $44 million, to add to his collection in Manhattan, Bermuda, etc., this one a bad-taste tin-ear number out in rugged Colorado with Long Island–style grand green lawns, abstract modern art, French doors, high-ceilinged rooms, with gargantuan chandeliers — except that it was all done in a Kozy Kountry Kubbard mountain cabin veneer, with log walls, deer antlers, and Native American striped rug patterns.  Raaalf, or rather, Hey, Ralph! ... Ralph Lauren's (or maybe Robert Redford's Sundance) teams ought to be hired to hose out the revolting mixtures of styles.  But Bloomberg might be too cheap to do it.

His cheapness of the spotlight certainly has left the Democratic Party and all of his campaign workers in a bind.  Politico has a headline reporting that "Democrats fume over having to clean up Bloomberg's mess."

It's a mess for them all right, because rather than keep his promise to his campaign workers to keep them on payroll through November, Bloomberg dumped them unceremoniously and laid them off in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown, refusing to make any effort to keep his promise to them, even as it's a promise he could easily fulfill.

It's a mess for Democrats because now he's pressuring them to hire those laid off campaign operatives — with the $18 million he managed to funnel to the Democratic Party.  The Democrats say it's a mess for them because he's essentially saying his "gift" wasn't really a gift; it was him telling them to fix his laid-off worker problem for him with that money instead of spend it on what they needed.  The Democrats say that's a problem because they're being pressured to hire all kinds of failed campaigns' campaign workers and Bloomie is effectively saying they should put his workers at the front of the line without regard to talent or ability.  Worse still, previous reports had pegged Bloomberg campaign salaries at much higher levels than those of other Democratic campaigns, pay levels the Dems say they can't offer to the former Bloomberg workers, but they'll surely be pressured to do, just to keep Bloomberg (and the workers) happy.  If they do that, the rest of the Democrats will seethe in resentment over why the ex-Bloombergers from the failed campaign are drawing in six figures plus bennies, while they're still slaving over minimum wage or less.

Mess, indeed.  Instead of just pay his workers and be done with it, Bloomberg wants Democrats to do the job, the better to keep his finger in their political matters as the big whale with cash in the party.  According to the Guardian:

Even before Bloomberg dropped out of the presidential race in May the media mogul billionaire vowed he would work to defeat Donald Trump even if he didn't get the nomination.

That's precisely what he is doing.

"He was one of the biggest contributors to Democratic causes before he ran and he still is after," Abe Rakov, a veteran Democratic campaign manager, said of Bloomberg. "There are a lot of organizations and programs across the country that would be in really bad shape if he decided to disengage after he ran."

He's got them on his string, so what he says is going to go, a formula for chaos in the Democratic Party.  Politico has much more here.

Here's another missing-in-action item on Bloomberg.  While he adds to his collection of mansions, note how silent he has been on the coronavirus crisis as it's hit his hometown of New York.  Are we hearing of $18-million contributions to that?  Nope.

This is strange, because Bloomberg's actually the guy who touted himself as Mr. Crisis Manager, Mr. "He'll Get It Done" to voters in his campaign ads, claiming to be the guy who did the heavy lifting in the wake of 9/11, a credit that belongs to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.  What has Bloomie done on the coronavirus?  Nothing, apparently, at least as regards direct money, and certainly no bully pulpit encouraging statements.

The Guardian reports that he's "advising" the governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, and here is the April 22 statement from Cuomo's office:

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and Mike Bloomberg today announced a new nation-leading COVID-19 contact tracing program to control the infection rate of the disease. Mike Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies have committed organizational support and technical assistance to help build and execute this new program. The contact tracing program will be done in coordination with the downstate region as well as New Jersey and Connecticut and will serve as an important resource to gather best practices and as a model that can be replicated across the nation. There has never been a contact tracing program implemented at this scale either in New York or anywhere in the United States. The program will launch immediately.

Contact tracing? As in tracking voters' every move? This sounds like it might have dual applications, useful for political campaigns or Democratic-led administrations.

He's not donating money for economic relief or getting the homeless off the streets or anything that might involve human services - he's helping the government gain more control. And that's being billed as philanthopy.

All in all, he's AWOL. He's succoring himself with mansions. He's creating messes for the Democrats. And the kind of 'help' he's giving to New York might just not be help.

What a plague this guy is on his party, and the entire nation.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.