Democrats step up attacks to blunt Bloomberg's rise

Democratic presidential candidates hoping to revive their flagging campaigns increasingly took aim at Mike Bloomberg, blasting their billionaire rival for trying to buy his way into the White House and raising questions about his commitment to racial equality.

Struggling to recover from poor showings in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden took the lead in attacking Bloomberg.

Biden, the former vice president, said on ABC's "The View" that "I don't think you can buy an election," while Warren took Bloomberg to task for his 2008 comments that ending redlining, a discriminatory housing practice, helped trigger the economic meltdown.

Biden and billionaire Tom Steyer also joined forces in slamming Bernie Sanders after the Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist won New Hampshire and essentially tied for the lead in Iowa with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Biden said Sanders hadn't done enough to explain how he'd pay for his "Medicare for All" proposal to replace private insurance with a government-run program.

Steyer said that "refusal to tell us how he will pay for his plan adds unnecessary financial risk to achieving health care as a right for every person."

Voters, Steyer said, "should have all the facts."

The sniping reflects the remarkably fluid state of the Democratic race even after two states that typically winnow presidential fields have already voted.

The White House hopefuls are trying to blunt Bloomberg, who gained attention by flooding the national airwaves with hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements and is on the verge of being admitted into next week's presidential debate.

And the lagging candidates are trying to prove that they still have the mettle to stay in the race, even if their path is becoming increasingly difficult.

Warren told The Associated Press on Thursday that she has raised USD 6 million since the February 3 Iowa caucuses, a haul that could silence questions about whether she will soon leave the campaign because of her disappointing showings so far.

She called the race "wide open." "There's a lot of froth," she said.

"It's going to be a long process." That's especially true as moderates are struggling to coalesce around a candidate.

Biden has long argued that he's the most electable, in part because his centrist approach has broad appeal and could make it easier for Democrats to defeat President Donald Trump in the fall.

That's at risk of being undermined by his middling finish in Iowa and New Hampshire.

He's now staking his campaign on success in the February 29 South Carolina primary, which is the first race in a state with a significant black population.

But before then, candidates will face voters in Nevada, which holds its Democratic caucuses on February 22.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, whose moderate presidential campaign surpassed expectations in New Hampshire this week, raced to Nevada after a Senate vote Thursday to try to keep momentum going.

"The political landscape is littered with people who raised more money than Amy Klobuchar," said Tom Nides, a former deputy secretary of state and Democratic donor who served as an intern on Capitol Hill with Klobuchar when they were in college.

"Her whole campaign strategy has been based on the fact that she's scrappy. She just grinds it out."

Klobuchar's rise is inviting new scrutiny, especially from Buttigieg, hoping to keep her from eating into his support among moderate Democrats.

Buttigieg, a target of Klobuchar's for weeks over what she has characterized as light experience, Thursday turned his criticism of Washington politics toward the Minnesota senator.

During the LULAC forum, he took aim in a not-so-veiled way at Klobuchar's 2018 vote in the Senate to confirm Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan, who he criticised for "the horrifying conditions that children were kept in."

"I've heard some people say that, you know, my experience is not relevant because you have to have Washington experience in order to become a president. But some of those same voices are among those who voted to confirm Kevin McAleenan as the CBP head," Buttigieg said.

Biden received more bad news when Nevada's most politically powerful union, the casino workers' Culinary Union, said it wouldn't endorse any of the candidates before the state's caucuses.

The former vice president warned his supporters on Wednesday that an endorsement was unlikely, but the confirmation of that was still a blow.

"We've known Vice President Biden for many years. We know he's been our friend," Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Union, said at a Thursday afternoon news conference.

"We know all of these candidates, and we respect each one of them.