Feb. 19, 2020. It is a night that still replays almost frame by frame in my mind. My former longtime boss, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, was going onstage for his first presidential debate to face off with other leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. But I was nervous.
Days earlier, I had warned in an opinion piece for CNN that Bloomberg needed to avoid the debate stage at all costs. As someone who had been by his side since the very birth of his foray into politics — his run for mayor in 2001 — I knew that no matter how much debate prep he had under his belt, Bloomberg was going to get his clock cleaned by the longtime professional politicians he was going up against on that stage.
The current model of American presidential debates effectively favors a certain personality type — sharp rhetorical and verbal skills or a knack for delivering punchy one-liners.
And that is precisely what happened. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was relentless in her verbal assault on Bloomberg that night, frequently leaving the former mayor flat-footed and struggling to defend himself.
It was a brutal pummeling. And it ultimately marked the beginning of the end for a campaign that at that point had been rising swiftly in the polls, buoyed by nearly a billion dollars in spending and a platform offering an impressive track record of public- and private-sector leadership and an even-keeled, centrist and no-nonsense approach to the presidency — something...
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