Is It Too Soon to Write Off Michael Bloomberg?

NEW YORK — The conventional wisdom around Wednesday night’s presidential debate gelled almost immediately, adhering as if Gorilla Glue to the various deficiencies of Michael Bloomberg’s performance: He made a terrible case for himself; Elizabeth Warren was pulverizing him. That he did not appear to expect this level of combat from a former Harvard Law School professor so ideologically opposed to his worldview was perhaps the clearest indicator of his arrogance.

Even allowing for the understanding that rich men, rarely subject to challenge, will not necessarily hold up ably under interrogation, Bloomberg still succeeded in surprising us with his lack of preparation, his unchecked peevishness and a hesitancy that must have embarrassed him most of all, given how thoroughly it put the viewer in the mind of middle management.

For someone who built his political image on his unsurpassed authority, this was a particularly bad outcome. Three of the four times Bloomberg has run for political office, he has cast himself as a gifted agent of crisis control.

In 2002, he offered himself as the only mayoral candidate who could revive the economic fortunes of New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. Seven years later, when he ran for mayor a third time, a move that required a bit of dodgy legislative bullying, he sold himself as the only viable option for settling the soil after the eruptions caused by the financial crash the previous year.

Now Bloomberg (a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican to run for mayor of New York, then became an independent and recently switched back to the Democratic Party) is putting himself forward to the American public as the best possible vehicle for releasing the country from the chaos of the Trump era. But if you believe that the current crisis has its deepest roots in grave deficits of compassion, then his debate showing gave you little reason to be persuaded that he is the shepherd poised to take the country to a different place.

Several hours before Wednesday night’s spectacle, I found myself on a street corner with a friend who said he would secretly be thrilled for a Bloomberg presidency. He was speaking in the spirit of confession because this is not the sort of thing liberals say in Brooklyn.

In truth, among New Yorkers of a certain kind — left leaning, materially comfortable in progressive enclaves, near or at middle age — there has been an uneasy nostalgia for Bloomberg long before he entered the presidential contest.

His fraught mayoral tenure is now regarded (notably by those who couldn’t abide it in the moment) with a wistfulness for its efficiency and surface shine. Even his insistence on a third and final act — what seemed like such an egregious gesture of entitlement at the time — has come to look like a noble brand of civic fealty when held up against his successor’s halfhearted, absentee approach to the day-to-day operation of the city.

The former mayor has become, in a sense, the boyfriend you failed to appreciate when he was around — the guy who could be gruff, insensitive and colossally self-regarding but who also tidied up and kept house rather nicely. In his own way, he took care of you for all those years — 12 of them. You could not accuse him of having a problem with commitment. And he bought you things — didn’t he? — at least when you weren’t needy or begging.

How this local shift in perception could affect his current political prospects is unclear; New York is hardly known for swaying presidential elections. But it suggests that opinions of Bloomberg are mutable — in some part because he is many things at once but also because his presentation lacks either the emotion or the phoniness to inspire visceral feelings one way or the other.

As it happened, on the day of the debate The New York Times published an opinion piece by Shira Scheindlin, the former federal judge who presided over the 2013 lawsuit that effectively ended the city’s stop-and-frisk program, ruling that the tactics violated the constitutional rights of people of color. As mayor, Bloomberg fought the suit after aggressively expanding the protocols. He apologized for the racist policy only in advance of his entry in the presidential race.

But Sheindlin was not writing to excoriate him; to the contrary, she wanted the world to know that she did not think that he was racist. She then cited the many opportunities Bloomberg created for minorities with a clarity the candidate himself was unable to summon at the debate.

In retrospect, it is easy to imagine that Bloomberg and his police captains were the only ones slow to recognize the indignity of halting the free movement of young black and brown men — first on the premise that they might be carrying guns, and then on the basis that they were walking around with weed, inexplicably viewed as equally threatening to the social order.

In an August 2012 New York Times poll, though, at a point when close to 330,000 stops had already been recorded that year, a higher percentage of respondents said they found the practice of stop-and-frisk “acceptable” than those who found it “excessive.” Even after racially dubious video clips of Bloomberg emerged last week, he somehow polled significantly higher with African Americans — and women — than Elizabeth Warren did.

The same poll, of Democrats and independents inclined toward Democratic candidates, suggests that the Trump presidency has not expunged a taste for billionaires among working people. Of those making less than $50,000 and of those without college educations, more favored Bloomberg than any other candidate in the Democratic field, save for Bernie Sanders.

The great intrigue of a general election race between the self-made billionaire and a self-proclaimed one is the promise of a matchup between two competing strains of vanity: one born of extreme confidence and the other of enduring insecurity. It’s still possible we’ll get to witness it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .