2020 Democrats step up attacks to blunt Bloomberg's rise

Democratic presidential candidates hoping to revive their flagging campaigns increasingly took aim at Mike Bloomber, 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."
"Her whole campaign strategy has been based on the fact that she's scrappy. She just grinds it out."
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."