Elizabeth Warren: Your plan is not a plan. Neither is yours. Or yours. Welcome to the Maclean's Politics Insider: America 2020, launched for readers who crave U.S. political news during primary season. If you want to receive this new newsletter, take no action, it will arrive in your inbox every weekday at noon. If you'd rather not receive it, please unsubscribe here. Bloomberg-bashing in Vegas: Though Bernie Sanders is still considered the front-runner, candidates at Democratic debate in Las Vegas turned their fire on the new guy, Michael Bloomberg, whose self-financed campaign won him good polling numbers and a spot on the stage (even though he won't even be on the ballot in next week's Nevada caucuses). As a rich, elitist ex-Republican, Bloomberg has something for virtually any Democratic candidate to attack, and they did: Elizabeth Warren pressed Bloomberg on the non-disclosure agreements female ex-employees signed with him, asking him to allow the women to reveal the problems that led to the agreements ("Maybe they didn't like a joke I told," Bloomberg said). The 78-year-old Sanders tried to argue that the 78-year-old Bloomberg has a heart just as weak as his, since both of them have "two stents." And after Bloomberg made another half-apology for his crime policies as Mayor of New York, Joe Biden seized the opportunity not only to call Bloomberg's policies "abhorrent," but to remind everyone once again that he, Joe Biden, used to work for Barack Obama: "The reason that stop-and-frisk changed is because Barack Obama sent moderators to see what was going on." Warren vs. everybody else: Apart from going after Bloomberg, part of Elizabeth Warren's strategy for reviving her campaign is to revive the idea that she's the candidate with a plan to fix the perennially-unfixable U.S. health care system. Her campaign faltered over contradictions in her Medicare-for-all plan, so in Las Vegas she took aim other candidates' plans, portraying them as incomplete or undefined. Pete Buttigieg's plan, she said, is "not a plan, it's a PowerPoint" ("I'm more a Microsoft Word guy," said Buttigieg), Amy Klobuchar 's plan is "like a Post-it note, 'insert plan here,'" ("I take personal offense," Klobuchar said, "because Post-it notes were invented in my state"), and the Sanders campaign "relentlessly attacks" anyone who asks questions about his plan. No boxes for the Mayor: The Bloomberg campaign felt it necessary to announce, officially, that the candidate would not be standing on a box to increase his height during the big debate: "Bloomberg will stand on the floor with the rest of the candidates," NBC News reported after a talk with Bloomberg campaign officials. This announcement was in response to Donald Trump repeatedly claiming that his New York nemesis had requested a box to make him look taller. There were, however, no official campaign replies to Trump's claim that Bloomberg is several inches shorter than he says he is. The Bernie vs. Obama election that almost was: A new piece in The Atlantic reveals that Sanders wanted to challenge Obama from the left in the 2012 Democratic primaries . This possible challenge had Obama's people "absolutely panicked," the story says — not because they thought he might lose, but because they remembered what happened to Jimmy Carter after Ted Kennedy challenged him in 1980, weakening Carter's support and possibly leading to his loss against Ronald Reagan. The Democrats' then-Senate leader, Harry Reid, had two conversations with Sanders to get him to back off the idea. Though Obama's friends emphasize that he will support Sanders if he becomes the nominee, their relationship has never been warm. —Jaime Weinman | 