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- On its merits, Bloomberg’s campaign sure looks like one of the greatest failures in American political history: Before his name ever appeared on a ballot, Bloomberg spent an amount of money that would also have enabled him to buy a different National Hockey League franchise every 10 days. He was humiliated in two debates and trounced in every Super Tuesday primary besides American Samoa’s. The twist, and the moment when the broader context briefly becomes visible, is that it might not quite be that. “Dropping half a billion on a campaign might probably still represent serious savings compared to what he’d have to face under a hypothetically revamped tax scheme,” the writer Patrick Blanchfield observed. That’s it, right there. That’s when you can see all of it, if just for a moment.