A ton of these mayors went through the Harvard City Leadership Academy, a kind of mayor boot camp sponsored by Bloomberg. He also gives out a ton of grant money (I mean, a ton for the cities - not a ton for him) to these cities through the American Cities Initiative.

Being an American mayor seems like a really frustrating job. Your citizens are subject to constraints that are often well outside of your sphere of political influence but your election depends on being understood as somebody interested in and capable of mitigating the effects of those constraints in ways that are unique to your town. That means making friends with money, and in this case becoming a vassal to Bloomberg's cash - and now his aspirations to higher office.

Even if Bloomberg were doing unqualified good with all of this money and influence, he should still be chased from this election and American political influence altogether. Giving into this now isn't just giving into a rich guy who we think might beat a worse rich guy. It's permitting every rich guy to just buy their way into office as long as they're willing to pay even the slightest lip service to needs of normal people. I've been periodically making the case that things could get worse than Trump if an administratively effect fascist could present a similar challenge to 21st century liberalism but my stupid mistake was thinking that would come from current office holders like Cotton or Hawley (who are, to be clear, horrifying ghouls) when there's no longer any need for that. So we don't even need to use our imaginations and go down the Republican bench to see if there's somebody worse than Trump. We just need to wonder if there's a worse rich guy than Trump and ... fucking obviously there are. Lots of them.