Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast. Today is Monday, February 18th,

2020. I am John Puthhord's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always.

Senior Editor Abe Greadwald Hi-Aid. Hi John. Associate Editor-No-Rothman Hi-Noah. Hi John. And in

Washington, senior writer Christine Rosen-Heikrstein. Hi John. So, tomorrow night, Wednesday night,

there will be a debate in Nevada and Michael Bloomberg will be in the debate having qualified due to

various polls that show him one poll shows him at 19 percent in the Democratic field.

And this candidacy is an interesting test of all kinds of different theories about American politics

that have been percolating for the last 20, 30 years. One of them being that money has now come to

play such an outsized role that we need to control it. That was the Campaign Finance Act

that was largely ruled much of it was ruled unconstitutional in the Citizens United decision of

2010, I think. But the ongoing theory has been that rich people play a disproportionate role

and that money plays to a large role. We need public financing, we need less spending, not more

spending. And so, we now have a real test case of this in the unlimited resources that Michael

Bloomberg is throwing at the democratic nominating process. So, that's one interesting thing and then

the other interesting question is the Democratic Party is his argument that he's the best person

to be Donald Trump because he is arguably the most right leaning of everybody who is running.

Is that going to be an interesting test case of the proposition that the Democratic Party has not

moved so decisively to the left that the idea of a candidacy that comes at the right from the

center rather than from the liberal or liberal left is the way to go. Those of us who live in New

York and live through the Bloomberg mayoralty and everything about it have a bunch of other views.

I think about what Bloomberg was like as mayor and as a public figure we can get to in a minute.

But Abe, when you look at these numbers and you think about this surge in the polls that Bloomberg

...