WHY IS GLOOMBERG RUNNING?

Former New York City Mayor Nanny Bloomberg announced his candidacy for president Monday (11/25).

He pledged to spend at least $100 million of his $54.5 billion fortune on his campaign, mostly on ads attacking President Trump.

The president doesn’t seem worried.

“There’s nobody I’d rather run against than Little Michael (Bloomberg is 5’7”),” Trump said. “He’s got some big issues, some personal problems. He’ll spend a lot of money, but he’ll fail.”

He won’t accept campaign contributions, Bloomberg said, will skip the early primaries to focus on Super Tuesday March 3rd, when 15 states and territories – including California and Texas – will vote.

Because he’s self-financing his campaign, Bloomberg won’t be able to take part in debates. Campaign contributions are the yardstick the DNC uses to determine eligibility.

The debates don’t matter much, Little Michael said. The ratings for the Democrat debate Nov. 20 indicate he’s right. Only 6.6 million tuned in, the lowest audience yet, barely a third of that for the first debate last June.

In the past, every candidate who skipped the early contests crashed and burned. But because there is so Little enthusiasm for the current field Bloomberg’s strategy might work.

Little Michael likely will spend substantially more on the Super Tuesday primaries than all the others combined. Will that be enough to make him the frontrunner?

Bloomberg has just 3 percent support in a Quinnipiac national poll taken after his announcement. Biden leads with 24 percent, followed by Pete Buttigieg, 16 percent, Warren, 14 percent, and Sanders, 13 percent.

There’s a limit to what a big advertising budget can accomplish. Another left-wing billionaire, Tom Steyer, has spent lots on ads in Iowa and New Hampshire, doesn’t poll above 2 percent in either state.

Little Michael’s announcement generated only a few hundred retweets on Twitter Monday. . If the dogs won’t eat the dog food…

Bloomberg is an old white guy – he’s 77 – running for the nomination in a party that these days has only unkind things to say about old white guys.

Who besides other filthy rich liberal oligarchs is Bloomberg’s constituency? Who else is excited to have him in the race?

Bloomberg isn’t running because of popular demand. So why is he running?

Some think it’s because he thinks Quid Pro Joe Biden — the “moderate” in the race – is a dead man walking.

Others think Bloomberg is running because Bernie Sanders and Fauxcahontas Warren — frontrunners if Biden is out of the picture – plan to confiscate the wealth of billionaires.

President Trump hinted at a third reason: “He’s got some big issues, some personal problems.”

Some suspect Quid Pro Joe is running his half-assed campaign chiefly so that when more is revealed about his corruption, he can claim to be the victim of a partisan attack.

Could Bloomberg have a similar motive? Is he mentioned on Anthony Weiner’s laptop? Was he ever a guest of Jeffrey Epstein? We’ll find out in due course. But it’s apparent Trump has something on Little Michael.

Bloomberg’s entry may doom Biden. But Little Michael wouldn’t be helped much if Quid Pro Joe drops out.

Biden is still the national frontrunner because of strong support from blacks. In a Quinnipiac poll in August, he had the support of 47 percent of black Democrats, followed by Sanders with 16 percent, Warren with 8 percent.

Not much of Biden’s black support would transfer to Bloomberg. His big issues – gun control, climate change, banning soda pop – play well with wealthy white liberal women in the suburbs, not so much in black communities.

The lack of interest black voters have in the other candidates suggests that no matter how much of his corruption is revealed, Democrats should still nominate the senile old pervert SloJoe.

Two recent polls indicate 34 percent of blacks approve of President Trump. That’s probably high, and approval doesn’t transfer automatically to votes.

But it’s reasonable to expect somewhere between half and two thirds of blacks who approve of him to vote to re-elect the president.

Trump got 8 percent of the black vote in 2016. If he has an approval rating among them of 25 percent or more on election day, he’s a cinch to increase his share of the black vote by at least 50 percent.

If blacks are nyaah about the Dem nominee, the president could double his share of the black vote.

If Biden is running chiefly to claim he’s the victim of a partisan witch hunt, he’ll stay in the race long after it’s clear to all and sundry he has no chance.

Democrats insist upon proportional representation, which makes it difficult for the winners in multi-candidate races to get a majority of delegates.

Bloomberg’s entry makes it more likely that at the end of the primaries no candidate will have enough delegates to win the nomination.

A long primary fight that ends in a brokered convention will not be good for Democrats.

Especially if it’s as nasty as I think it will be – a knockdown drag out between the National Socialists (represented by Bloomberg and Biden, on the days when he knows where he is) and the Communists.

We know from their views on free speech, due process and equal application of the law that there are no democrats among the Democrats running.

The big difference between Nazis and Communists a century ago was under National Socialism, as long as they obeyed orders, rich people could stay rich, and get richer. (The means of production remained, nominally, in private hands.)

Under Communism, the State took everything.

If either Sanders or Warren drops out and endorses the other, he or she likely would be the nominee.

And an existential threat to billionaires like Bloomberg, the lords of Silicon Valley, Wall Street financiers who are used to calling the shots in the Democrat Party.

What’ll be most fun for us is to watch the candidates look nervously over their shoulders, wondering when the next shoe will drop, what it will be, and how they should respond to it.

During the Democrat primaries there’ll be one revelation after another – about FISA abuse; corruption in Ukraine, China, Iraq, Romania, Baltimore and Chicago; human trafficking, pedophile rings, Jeffrey Epstein’s playmates. And more.

Trump knows all Democrats want to hide, can reveal it when he wants to.

Another candidate could be parachuted in during the convention in Milwaukee. Jack Wheeler has been warning for many months that it will be Michelle Obama.  Now Tucker Carlson agrees.

That’s plausible. But in July, after months of revelations of wrongdoing, and some indictments, the Obama administration figures to be a lot less popular than it is now. And Dems will have to make sure to tape up Michelle’s penis tight so it doesn’t show.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.