Bloomberg got wrecked last night, no question. Warren and Sanders destroyed him and exposed him for exactly what he is. I can't imagine anyone watching that thinking he could ever be viable.
Very few watched, but almost nobody in super Tuesday states have escaped his advertising deluge. For those whose single issue is defeating Trump, he's doing a good job of selling himself as the anti-Trump candidate.
I'm sorry but the "socialist" "communist" argument falls flat for most people. Many Boomers saw how that label was used in the past to try and discredit people rightfully protesting against a corrupt government. What other "downside" do you think exists for Sanders? Again, he's the most liked and most trusted Senator in the country.
The fairly far left in this country and those who are aware of the larger world the socialist=communist meme was never as strong as it was among those who wave the flag and don't really think much about the whys of life. Among those who really don't think about the memes believe the strong US military has kept the US free despite the fact the last time the US was under any serious threat from a foreign power was the War of 1812, believe the USSR was the Evil Empire, and believe socialism/communism are the most evil forms for government.
Listen to Rick Wilson, he knows the Republican playbook by heart and he's said he could come up with a dozen ads ripping apart Bernie with no effort. He won't do it because he's focused on getting a Democrat, any Democrat elected in 2020, but he knows his counterparts still working for the Republicans are crafting the same sorts of ads he can make against Bernie.
When Obama was elected many thought we had turned a corner on racism in this country. I watched the GOP slime machine throw ideas against the wall trying to find a meme that would undermine Obama's presidency and they hit on racism and they spent 8 years fanning that fire.
Personally I don't grok racism. I never got the memes instilled because even though I am white, I grew up a minority in a majority non-white part of Los Angeles. I never went to a school that was more than 15% white before college. Most of the white people I've known who grew up around non-whites in urban or suburban areas also don't grok racism. Memes about "Mexicans coming to take our jobs" are countered easily with thoughts of "the Gonzalezes next door were just like us, just a bit darker skinned."
When I was at Boeing I worked with a woman who had moved to Seattle from North Dakota. Her personal politics were far left and she fit into Seattle's culture well, but she told me she never saw a black person until she went off to college and her hometown was 100% white. Even though she worked with underprivileged kids, who were often non-white, I sometimes saw some global attitudes about non-white people creep in that were alien concepts to me.
My father grew up in the 1920s and 30s in a small town in western Michigan. The town had a large European immigrant population and he said all the ethnic groups hated one another. In a town of about 15,000 there were three Lutheran and three or four Catholic churches because the different ethnic groups of the same religion couldn't go to church together. He thought it was ridiculous and moved to Los Angeles for college. He had many non-white friends when I was a kid, but he could make remarks about other ethnic groups that made me cringe sometimes.
I watched the racism memes settle in with Obama from the outside. I watched racism come back. In any large population there is always a core of some people who believe in one thing or another that's unsavory. Some of those people are overt about it, while there is a contingent who are in the closet about it. Then there is another population who are in the fringe about it. They don't have strong views one way or the other, but are influenced by the greater culture. If the people around them are talking one way or the other about something, they will join in to get along with the crowd. In school these were the people who sometimes followed in the wake of the school bully, but disappeared when the bully got their clock cleaned by the geeky kid who fought back.
When people are given permission to be open about some unsavory idea. Those who were open about it all along are happy to have a wider audience, and those who always believed, but were quiet chime in, and finally those who are just trying to get along with the crowd join them. It's much easier for the last group to do so if they already carry the meme.
People who think through things, or never picked up the memes don't tend to join the herd with the newly approved meme because they either think too much about the world and deactivated those memes or the new memes fall on deaf ears.
In parts of the country that once had slavery, a fair number of whites fall into the first two categories: either overtly racist, or closet racist with most of the rest of the population being the go along with the crowd types. In parts of the country that are predominantly white, but were non-slavery, there are more of the go along to get along types about racism, but they are still vulnerable to the memes. For whites who have lived around a lot of non-white people, they are much more immune to the memes.
These days almost all intellectuals who think about these things are on the left end of the political spectrum, or at least allied with it. GOP circles actively discourage people thinking about these things because if they do, they realize how ridiculous they really are.
Bill Maher a few weeks back made the case that Democrats need to convince anyone who is thinking about voting their way that there is no other place to go. If they don't like the nominee, they need to hold their nose and vote for them because the alternative is worse. Trump is already playing that meme at his rallies. And all he needs to do to cash in is make the Democratic nominee look a tiny bit worse than him. That's what they will do with the socialist meme with Bernie playing in the whitest parts of the country. It will fall on deaf ears in the cities, but they have already ceded the cities to the Democrats. It will play well in white rural areas and seep into the suburbs.
On top of that Bernie is something of a one trick pony. Back in 2016 when the black kid in St Louis was shot and killed by police, he talked about racism in economic terms. While non-white, non-Asian people in the US are more likely to be under the poverty line, there is more to racism than just economics. Quite a few non-white people who are middle class or even wealthy have stories about being harassed by police that are alien to most white folk.
Bernie tends to see everything through an economic lens. A fair number of problems could be solved or helped by throwing money at them, but there are quite a few that require other solutions. Bernie has had to deal with some international and national security issues while in Congress, but I don't believe he's ever been on an international relations or security oriented committee in his time in Congress.
I think Bernie could serve quite well as a cabinet member focused on something that involves human welfare like the VA, Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Labor, and a few others. I think he would struggle to deal with the international situation and the problems this country has that are not economic in nature.
I think Biden is done as a candidate and he never was a great candidate, but he does have a much broader base of experience than Bernie. Though as others have pointed out, he's also beholden to financial interests that need to change and he would be resistant to making changes there because of those ties.
