Bloomberg's Campaign Is About One Thing: An Offer To Sell Your Soul

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a progressive member of a listserv I'm a member of. I'm not sure if he's a Bernie supporter or an Elizabeth supporter but I'd guess he's backing one of them. He wrote that "some grassroots organizers have compiled a social media toolkit and are planning a twitter storm from 12-2 pm CST to highlight Bloomberg's terrible record. The hashtag is #AskBloomberg-- please send this to your networks and get your posting fingers stretched out to contribute this afternoon!!

My own social media accounts are filled with pro-Bernie posts-- and have been for decades. Why? Easy: I agree with his policy agenda and I admire his leadership traits. No one is paying me to post about him.

Bloomberg is paying everyone without a soul to work for him, to endorse him, to post well lit pictures of him. And yesterday Wall Street Journal reporters Jeff Horowitz and Georgia Wells wrote that Bloomberg is bankrolling a social-media army to push his propaganda. Yep, Mini-Mike is paying social media mini-influencers $2,500 per month to promote him to all their contacts-- "hundreds of workers in California to post regularly on their personal social-media accounts in support of the candidate and send text messages to their friends about him."

The effort, which could cost millions of dollars, is launching ahead of California’s March 3 primary and could later be deployed nationwide, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. It is one of the most unorthodox yet by the heavy-spending billionaire and blurs the lines between traditional campaign organizing and the distribution of sponsored content.

Most campaigns encourage their supporters to post on social media about their candidates, but paying them at this scale to express support on their personal accounts is unusual, experts say.





A California staffer and the documents reviewed by The Journal describe a multimillion-dollar-a-month effort aimed at helping Mr. Bloomberg attract support after having entered the race long after other candidates had built their ground campaigns. The documents also say the campaign is adopting a strategy, which it credits the Trump campaign with using to great effect, to try to influence potential voters through people they know and trust rather than strangers.

To staff the effort, the campaign is hiring more than 500 “deputy digital organizers” to work 20 to 30 hours a week and receive $2,500 a month, the documents show. In exchange, those workers are expected to promote Mr. Bloomberg to everyone in their phones’ contacts by text each week and make social-media posts supporting him daily, the documents show.

“The Fight for Equal Rights Has Been One of the Great Fights of Mike’s Life,” reads one such suggested prompt regarding Mr. Bloomberg’s early support for same-sex marriage.

Publicly available job applications for those positions require applicants to provide their social-media handles for review and state that staffers may be asked to undertake more traditional field-organizing work like phone banking.

Helping organize the effort is Outvote, an app that enables users to send pre-written texts, post campaign materials to social media and send data back to campaigns. The app, funded by Higher Ground Labs, a Democratic political technology incubator, generally focuses on pushing volunteers to send content. Outvote also allows users to look up whether their friends have voted in past elections by matching their contact lists against public data.

A spokeswoman for the campaign characterized the workers being paid to promote Mr. Bloomberg as the future of political organizing. “We are meeting voters everywhere on any platform that they consume their news,” a spokeswoman for the Bloomberg campaign said. “One of the most effective ways of reaching voters is by activating their friends and network to encourage them to support Mike for president.”

Facebook Inc.’s policies historically have addressed the worlds of political advertising and influencer marketing as separate. The company has only recently begun to grapple with the intersection of the two.

It is not clear if messages like those the Bloomberg campaign is suggesting would need to be labeled as sponsored content under Facebook’s disclosure rules. A Facebook spokeswoman said posts by outside “content creators” would require labels if a campaign paid for them, but that posts by campaign employees wouldn’t need to be labeled as ads. The company didn’t address how it would categorize posts by employees paid to promote content to their personal social networks.

A review of social-media posts by some people being paid by the campaign found they aren’t labeled as sponsored content.

Officials at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have said that merely tagging a brand or business on social media is a form of endorsement that falls under its purview--and should be disclosed if an audience would view an endorsement differently knowing that an influencer had financially benefited from the brand.

The Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman said that the campaign doesn’t believe posts from its deputy field organizers need to be labeled, describing them as a new form of political organizing rather than paid influencer content.

Political campaigns have long used a combination of volunteers and paid workers to do things like run phone banks and knock on doors to support a candidate. But experts said the Bloomberg campaign’s willingness to pay to leverage supporters’ existing social connections is novel.

James Thurber, professor of government at American University, said groups promoting political issues sometimes use similar strategies of paying people to express support online, but it is unusual from a candidate. “It’s classic AstroTurf tactics,” he said. “When you have unlimited resources the way Bloomberg seems to, you can do that.”

The Trump campaign includes staff dedicated to digital and social media, but it doesn’t compensate people to post on their personal social media accounts, a spokeswoman said.

At least until recently, the Bloomberg campaign also planned to recruit another 2,500 campaign “digital organizing fellows” who would be paid $500 a month in exchange for posting daily on social media and putting every person in their contact list into the Bloomberg campaign’s database, according to documents reviewed by the Journal and a deputy organizer who had been told to expect to oversee five of the fellows.

The campaign spokeswoman said that it had decided not to proceed with the “fellows.” She also said the campaign had changed the title of the $2,500-a-month deputy digital roles to “deputy field organizer” to reflect that the role may also include more traditional campaign activities.

Bloomberg’s spending has helped spark a rise in the polls, enabling him to qualify for Wednesday’s Democratic debate.

Though he only declared his candidacy late last year, Mr. Bloomberg has exceeded the advertising spending of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar combined.

The Bloomberg campaign also recently worked with an offshoot of media and marketing company Jerry Media to contract with large meme accounts to push the campaign, the New York Times has reported, leading Facebook last week to clarify its rules around such posts.

The Bloomberg campaign will suggest content for sharing and exert some control over the social-media outreach efforts, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal. Though the Bloomberg campaign won’t have direct access or authority over its organizers’ social-media feeds, a team of quality-control staff will verify that the organizers are posting appropriately.

“Ha! Even Republicans think Mike is our best bet to defeat Trump! Let’s prove them right,” said one suggested message for text or social media, linking to a news article citing conservative political operatives bullish about Mr. Bloomberg’s chances.

The campaign’s approach is fine with at least some unpaid Bloomberg supporters, like Jason Miller.

A rabbi in Michigan who runs a social-media marketing company, Mr. Miller said he believes the former New York mayor is “a mensch” and that his willingness to spend a vast amount on his campaign makes him uniquely suited to beating Donald Trump.

He said he believes it is important to be transparent about paid commercial promotions, but he views the ethics of political activism as less clear.

“With a campaign, there is a gray area,” he said, noting the standard campaign practice of assigning both volunteers and paid staff to phone bank and knock on doors. While it is possible there should be clearer lines drawn in social media, he said, “it took decades for TV and radio to figure out what disclosure for ads should be.”

Meanwhile, I've never seen a campaign before where so many people hate the candidate's guts and want him to loose. I have leakers in the Bloomberg campaign calling me at least 2-3 times a week complaining about him or giving me harmful tips to checkout about the candidate they're working for!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

It figures that Señor Trumpanzee would name John Bolton as his National Security Advisor. It's all part of the madman's plan to destroy not just America and every aspect of our lives, but, possibly, the entire world. In a reality where a Manchurian president appoints a foreclosure king as Secretary of The Treasury, a total racist as the Head of the Department of Justice, a Secretary of Education hell bent on destroying the very idea of education, and an Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency hell bent on destroying even the water that we drink and the air that we breath, let alone leading a corporate strategy of providing cancer for every American. So, of course, it follows that Trumpanzee would want a National Security Advisor that sees dropping the big one as the answer to all of humanity's problems. No only that, but John Bolton comes direct form FOX "News!" Who I ask you, who, could be a better choice? Welcome to the Bizarro World of Doom!

Than again, maybe its that weirdo gray porno mustache. That's it. That's why Trumpanzee wants him. Probably even calls him Johnny Womb Broom. That's the ticket. They probably even watch Stormy Daniels flicks together. I bet they also listen to the great Randy Newman's "Political Science," taking it seriously, of course. Ah, those Repugs. No sense of irony, ever.

Beto O'Rourke-- What Leadership Sounds Like

While the whole blogosphere was exploding Tuesday over the major NY Times editorial, Mitt Romney, Class Warrior, Blue America was showcasing the antidote to the kind of bigoted self-interest displayed in the Romney Campaign-- the next generation of American political leadership. Our guest was Beto O'Rourke, the 39 year old City Councilman from El Paso who came out of the blue-- deep blue-- and defeated longtime incumbent Silvestre Reyes in the Democratic primary and is now poised to bring his reform agenda to a place that needs it even more than El Paso ever did: Washington, DC.

A fourth generation El Pasoan, a major motivation of Beto's for running for Congress was to cut through the crap holding up comprehensive immigration reform. "So much of our national public policy regarding the border, Mexico, immigration, etc is based on fear and misinformation," he told us. "There’s a great story to tell about the border and our positive impact on the country, and I’d like to help tell it." He'll be an articulate and persuasive advocate for a 21st Century look at an aspect of national policy that needs to be completely revamped. And that isn't all Beto would like to see revamped. Another of his priority issues in education policy-- and he didn't hold back when asked about No Child Left Behind and the Chicago strike.

NCLB in concept is a well intentioned effort to improve outcomes in public education, hold districts, principals and teachers accountable, and use federal oversight and incentives to get some positive movement in our mediocre global educational rankings.

In practice it is a disaster. High-stakes testing has caused us to prioritize test taking and test prep to the exclusion of those things education should be about. I knocked on 16,000 doors in the primary campaign-- met hundreds of teachers-- most all of whom told me that “this is not why I got into teaching.” It’s destroyed motivation, demoralized teachers, students and parents and made it harder for us to foster a life-long love of learning in the children we’re bringing up. It’s also invited fraud by administrators (our superintendent recently pled guilty to manipulating test scores so he could earn higher bonuses), cynicism from the public and disappointment when it comes to improving outcomes.

I spoke to a high school sophomore the other day who told me she’s reading the abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s one of the great, foundational works of western culture and literature, personally one of my favorite stories of all time (we named our son Ulysses). Abridged? Why?

Her answer was that because the teacher needs to devote extra days to standardized test preparation, there isn’t time to read and discuss the full book. What are our priorities?
So I’m not a big fan of NCLB-- I think we need to recognize its failure, scrap it and move on. I’d like to see federal education resources focused on early childhood education, on recruiting math and science teachers and on making college affordable.

Chicago? It’s a great conversation about accountability and what we expect out of the classroom and from our teachers. I’d like to think the union and the city administration are both trying to get to the same place-- better outcomes for the kids who live there. I favor allowing for more creativity and flexibility from teachers, helping them with resources to work on character, long-term values like discipline, and encouraging them to develop a life-long love of learning in the kids in their classes. Those things matter more to me than accountability through tests. There was a great program on this weekend’s This American Life on the subject.

He was similarly outspoken on Afghanistan and on the Military Industrial Complex. There's no need to guess where he stands; he's not that kind of political leader:

I recently saw Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, which does an excellent job of putting this in perspective-- starting with Eisenhower’s valedictory speech which includes his famous warning about the military industrial complex. We’ve unfortunately ignored his advice and allowed an armaments industry to dominate much of our thinking when it comes to foreign policy.

Right now we spend nearly half of the world’s military budget-- this is just unsustainable. We cannot continue to be a great world power by meeting nearly every problem with a military solution. Example: crime and instability in Mexico (due in large part to our consumption of illegal drugs in the U.S.)? Answer: the $1.4 billion Plan Merida, which takes U.S. taxpayer dollars to buy Bell and Black Hawk helicopters for Mexico, among other things. Is that really going to help?

Let’s prioritize our objectives and our spending. Let’s do a better job supporting our soldiers and our veterans instead of funding arms makers for projects and systems for which even the Department of Defense has no need. We're quick to make military commitments, to find the resources to fight and fund conflicts all over the world, but incompetent when it comes to taking care of our soldiers when they return. I’d like to be part of a Congress that will set out priorities in order.

And when it comes to Afghanistan, it’s time for our soldiers to come home, now.

El Paso is a very blue city and his district votes very Democratic. But many of the people are Catholic and socially conservative. That doesn't stop him from advocating pro-Choice and pro-equality stands. In response to questions on both topics, he was, to put it mildly, unapologetic. On marriage equality:

This is an example of an issue that might not be politically convenient (at least in my district), but one on which it's important to lay out my values and make a case for why civil rights are worth fighting for.

I think people in El Paso appreciate the honesty and the fact that I've got the courage of my convictions-- even if they don't always agree with my conclusions.

I think this is a federal issue, one that we must move forward on, and one that we'll look back on in 10 years and wonder why it took us so long.

One last thing-- I'm proud of EP's commitment to civil rights and our progress on issues like this one-- 50 years ago we were the first city in the former Confederacy to desegregate public places.

...[Women's health and equality were] was a big issue during the primary campaign. Our current congressman had voted to de-fund Title X and opposed a woman's right to choose.

Of course now I'm running against a Tea Party Republican who is even more regressive when it comes to women's issues.

Digby and John double-teamed him on the economy and the whole idea of an Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain.

It’s impossible to cut our way out of the economic doldrums that we’re in. The immediate priority is creating jobs. We need to invest in our country and in our communities, like El Paso, if we’re going to make that happen. Infrastructure, schools, teachers, public works projects and investment in R&D for the technologies that will allow us to continue to be the world’s leading economy. I understand that over the long term we have to pay down our debt-- but we can’t hobble the economy now through tax cuts and austerity and hope to have the resources in the future to pay it.

Having said that, I realize that there will have to be some level of compromise to move forward, to avoid having our credit rating downgraded (again) and to allow this country to move past the edge of recession and back into full growth and job creation.

Let’s scrutinize every department, program and budget-- I’m confident we’ll find places to trim, programs that can be delivered more efficiently. Let’s put every tax break, incentive, loophole on the table-- I know that we can rethink how we subsidize and incentivize industry and special interests in this country.

But a solution of tax cuts and austerity is a non starter.

...Digby: We're running short of time, but I'm interested at some point in hearing how you think progressives should approach "pragmatism" in a Congress that's largely made up of screaming right wing lunatics. In other words, how does one negotiate with crazy people and avoid moving ever further to their side?

Beto: That's the hardest question asked today.

I think we learned from the President, that if you start your negotiations in the middle, you can only move farther to the right. You must start at your highest, most principled position and negotiate from there. For ex: on immigration-- why do we start with the false choice that you can have security or mobility? Why did the President feel that he needed to make record-level deportations before he could work on reform? Why not first articulate the values behind reform, make the case to your party, to the Congress and to the American people, and negotiate from a position of moral and political strength?

But again, it's easy for me to say that from the outside. The tough thing is to go in with a principled position and come out with a policy that matches it.

This is our future... if not Beto, it's going to be more of the same crap, whether Eric Cantor and Louie Gohmert and Allen West or Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel and Joseph Crowley. Please consider making a contribution to Beto's grassroots campaign here. And while you're donating to Beto's campaign, here's Randy Newman's new song. He's dreaming of a white President:

All The News That Fits The Agenda-- The A.P. Scrapes The Bottom Of The Barrel, Again

-by Noah


I’m watching you, AP. I’m watching you. And I’ve been watching you for a very long time.

With everything else going on in the world these days, the Associated Press recently decided to pick up a 3 day old Daily Beast report from former Hollywood film-scene commentator, and, apparently, the righty moron at the Daily Beast, named Nicole LaPorte who just scraped up a critical report on what shoes President Obama wore on the beach during his second visit to the Gulf of Mexico, which happened another 5 days before she even managed to dredge it up! The AP article is headlined “Obama Commits Fashion Mistake.” This is news? What was the President’s big FAIL this time? Oh my God, he wore ordinary “drab, brown, mountain boots” instead of what the locals call Shrimp Boots! Impeach him!!!!! Impeach him!!!!! Shoegate!! In an article that borders on an April Fools Day parody, LaPorte, in her Palin-esq 8th grade writing style, begins (!) by pointing out what one of her obvious idols wore to the World Trade Center site:

“After the attacks of 9/11, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was shown at Ground Zero decked out in FDNY apparel. His leadership during that time is still remembered as exceptional; Oprah Winfrey called him ‘America’s Mayor’.”

I know, in the world superficiality capitol of LA, fashion and appearance is the most important thing in the world, other than what restaurant you are seen at and what “image car” you drive up to the curb before handing over the keys to the valet parking guy, but, “exceptional” is not a word we New Yorkers have ever used to describe “Mr. Noun, a Verb, and 9/11” and, unfortunately, we know him best. In fact, up until 9/11, the majority of us viewed Rudy Julieandrews as a miserably failed mayor who, in a moment of his special genius, placed the city’s security center right in The World Trade Center, after it had already been attacked once! Perhaps, his hand picked, and now convicted felon, police commissioner, Bernie Kerik recommended it. After 9/11, Rudy was a shameless huckster who managed to exploit the events of 9/11 while making millions doing it and then spending $50 million for one lonely delegate in one of the most farcical presidential primary campaigns of all time. Today, his megalomaniacal freak flag still flies high as he ponders another run for something every few months, only to be greeted by boos from both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Obviously, to righty baboons like LaPorte, President Obama’s leadership lies solely in what he wears! Of course, if Obama actually wore what the AP and the Daily Beast would like to see, he would have been accused of pandering. Sigh, we have a Repug Party that’s got nothin’ to offer, so this is what the come up with. It gets better (worse).

“Perhaps Rudy could have helped President Obama with disaster accessorizing, considering how flat the president’s speech fell during his second visit to Louisiana last week. For a photo-op among the tar balls that have washed ashore at Grand Isle and to address a very scared and furious state and nation-- he failed to wear what have become the symbolic accoutrement of the Gulf disaster: white shrimp boots. Instead, on Obama’s feet was a pair of drab, brown mountain boots.”

Hey, I didn’t notice a pair of “Shrimp Boots” on Louisiana REPUBLICAN Governor “Bobby” Jindal! Where’s the bitching? Where’s the outrage!!! For Obama, LaPorte ticks off the Repug talking points “photo-op” and “flat speech,” but, alas, no hate for Jindal. I mean, where’s the fair and balanced?

“The people down here-it’s probably 90 percent of their attire,” said Venice native Chris Dahl the other afternoon, standing near the waterfront at the Cypress Cove Marina, where Gov. Bobby Jindal was about to hold a press conference after a tour of the water [Note: In Jindal’s case, it’s “tour” not a “photo-op.] “For some people, it’s 100 percent of their attire.”

90% of their attire? 100% of their attire? Really? I’ve been to Louisiana. I know it gets hot, and I know that, in the French Quarter at least, the folks can get pretty crazy, but I’ve never witnessed this phenomenon of people walking around wearing nothing but white rubber boots. Really? Is that something we really want to see? Is pole dancing on the beaches the local custom, too? Will the great Louisiana songwriter, Randy Newman, now have to change his fine stripper song “You Can Leave Your Hat On” to something else? Does this explain why the state votes for Senators that wear diapers on a date?

Although it’s, in no way, President Obama’s style, sometimes I think he should just go out one sunny afternoon dressed in a nice West African Dashiki shirt and matching Kofia hat. That just might send these Republican morons into such a tizzy that they’d explode and we’d be rid of their poison once and for all. Hate speech on my part? You gotta problem with that? Well, do ya, punk?