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Will Bloomberg Save or Sink the Democrats?
The billionaire and former Republican could test the limits of the Democratic dictum to “vote blue no matter who.”
This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays.
In 2012, Fran Lebowitz, the humorist and noted nemesis of Michael Bloomberg, who was then New York City’s mayor, sneered that the billionaire businessman and philanthropist could not stand the thought of someone having a bigger job than his. “You ever see a picture of the mayor standing next to the president? He can’t bear that!” she said. “You know what, Mike? Here’s when a 5-foot-2 Jewish billionaire is gonna be president: never.”
Ms. Lebowitz’s bet has been looking less sure these days: In the fall, Mr. Bloomberg’s height was put at 5 feet 7 inches; also in the fall, he announced he was going to run for president. He has since chartered his way into a prominent position in the Democratic primary battle, having now qualified for Wednesday night’s debate.
Is Mr. Bloomberg, a former Republican who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 and a major donor to both parties, the perfect candidate to defeat President Trump, or would his nomination amount to a Faustian bargain for Democrats? Here’s what people are saying.
‘A gusher of cash’
Mr. Bloomberg is using his fortune, estimated at over $60 billion, to hack voters’ attention, as Charlie Warzel has explained in The Times. Since November, he has spent over $400 million to blanket TV and social media with advertisements, according to one estimate. This is more than three times the combined spending of Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg over a far longer time period, and only about two-thirds of a percent of Mr. Bloomberg’s total wealth.
“It is not quite, as admirers present it, that Mr. Bloomberg is a chess master whose opponents play checkers,” as The Times’s Matt Flegenheimer reported. “He is more accurately working to bury the board with a gusher of cash so overpowering that everyone forgets how the game was always played in the first place.”
[Related: “What Bloomberg’s $11 Million Super Bowl Ad Would Cost You on Your Budget”]
The Democrats are in no position to refuse this kind of money, says Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. “Whether by fund-raising (where Buttigieg has shown success) or by spending his own money as Bloomberg has done (promising to ‘spend whatever it takes’), Democrats will need someone who fully appreciates what they are up against,” she writes. “Democratic voters who want to win more than anything else would be well advised to find a candidate who does as well.”
But David Dayen argues in The American Prospect that Mr. Bloomberg’s nomination would actually be an unnecessary disaster for the Democratic Party, since he has already said he is open to putting his campaign operation and up to $1 billion in service of whichever candidate wins. “The ‘any blue will do’ fallacy ignores that parties must stand for something to succeed,” Mr. Dayen writes. “Shacking up with a billionaire,” he says, “reinforces the concept that everyone and everything associated with the Democratic Party can be bought.”
‘A mirror image of Trump’
Mr. Bloomberg is the polite man’s authoritarian, writes Alex Pareene in The New Republic. His mayoralty was defined by a callous indifference to civil liberties and democratic norms, made manifest in his defense of New York Police Department efforts to surveil Muslim college students across the Northeast, his campaign to repeal term limits so that he alone could run for a third term and his expansion of the stop-and-frisk program, which a federal judge ruled in 2013 an unconstitutional “policy of indirect racial profiling.” Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Pareene writes, “is precisely the sort of person who should be kept out of power.”
Just like President Trump, Mr. Bloomberg is getting a pass for his well-documented history of sexism, writes Laura Bassett in GQ. He and his company have fielded nearly 40 sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits over decades. In one case, when Mr. Bloomberg found out an employee was pregnant, he allegedly told her to “Kill it!”; he also allegedly told the same employee, after pointing to another female employee, “If you looked like that, I’d do you in a second.” “If the Democratic Party wants to claim the moral high ground on issues of misogyny and sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement,” Ms. Bassett writes, “it has a moral obligation to reject as its highest leader a man who talks about women much in the same way Trump does.”
His record on race is a nonnegotiable deal killer, the Times columnist Charles Blow wrote when Mr. Bloomberg announced his candidacy. Stop-and-frisk, he said, was “nothing short of a massive, enduring, city-sanctioned system of racial terror.” After defending the program as recently as January 2019, Mr. Bloomberg apologized for it in November. But his racial politics have drawn scrutiny for other reasons as well, such as linking the 2008 financial crisis to programs devised to overcome the damages of redlining.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton, told CityLab (which Bloomberg Media bought in December), “I think that Bloomberg’s comments are a kind of cynical way of shifting blame back onto communities that were most victimized by the unchecked practices within the banking and real estate industries in the late 1990s and through the early aughts until the crisis exploded.”
“In the same way that liberals fear for the future of democracy under four more years of Trump, they should fear for the implications of giving four years, period, to Bloomberg,” the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “Given his record, he’s someone who might try to consolidate Trumpism — moderating its hostilities into less disruptive form — rather than reject it wholesale.”
‘Bloomberg has the right stuff’
Mr. Bloomberg’s mistakes have to be weighed against the rest of his record, the Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes. While Mr. Trump was pretending to be a C.E.O. on “The Apprentice,” Mr. Friedman says, Mr. Bloomberg was building one of the most admired global companies. He has spent at least $10 billion on charitable and political pursuits, including “virtually every progressive cause — gun control, abortion rights, climate change, Planned Parenthood, education reform for predominantly minority schools, affordable housing, income inequality and tax reform.” What’s more, Mr. Friedman says, “he has vowed as president to focus on building black wealth, not just ending poverty.”
[Related: “Bloomberg’s progressive college plan”]
Mr. Bloomberg was also a remarkably successful mayor, according to the Times columnist David Leonhardt. Although elected as a Republican, he governed as a data-driven technocrat: He started a $20 billion climate change adaptation plan in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, made aggressive strides in public health by restricting smoking and banning trans fats and stewarded the trend of falling crime he inherited upon taking office. “While Bloomberg didn’t solve the great stagnation of living standards that afflicts the American middle class and poor,” Mr. Leonhardt wrote in 2017, “it’s hard to think of a contemporary mayor or governor who made more progress.”
“Mr. Bloomberg introduced an ambitious plan to preserve or build 165,000 units of affordable housing, and he oversaw the most extensive rezoning in modern city history,” as Emily Badger and Luis Ferré-Sadurnà recently reported for The Times. “His administration rezoned about 40 percent of the city, paving the way for increased density and development in old industrial waterfront neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn.” Over all, The New York Times’s editorial board wrote in 2013, “New York is in better shape than when he became mayor.”
He stands a good chance of beating Mr. Trump, writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike the president, Mr. Bloomberg was born to a middle-class family before making his fortune. “He is what Mr. Trump claimed to be and probably wishes he were. And he isn’t afraid of the president. Whatever he says, Mr. Trump, who respects money more than anything, would be afraid of him.” If Twitter is any indication, Mr. Bloomberg has already gotten under the president’s skin.
And he could be a great chief executive, says the Times columnist Bret Stephens. “Even his opponents know there can be no gainsaying his ability to serve as president; or his talent for appointing competent deputies; or his mastery of the mechanics of government; or his overwhelmingly successful tenure as New York mayor; or his understanding of business and the economy; or his immediate credibility on the world stage; or his sobriety of judgment or general probity of character,” he writes.
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE BACKGROUND AND PERSPECTIVES ON BLOOMBERG
“A ‘Fixer’ or a ‘Bully’: New Yorkers Have Opinions on Bloomberg as Mayor” [The New York Times]
“Past Remarks Are Challenging for Bloomberg, and Fair Game for Rivals” [The New York Times]
“The Bloomberg Campaign Is a Waterfall of Cash” [The New York Times]
“Welcome to the Bloomborg. Resistance is futile.” [BuzzFeed]
“Why Mike Bloomberg could win black voters’ support as Joe Biden’s candidacy falters.” [NBC News]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
A year ago, a reader wrote a letter to The Times about how women were underrepresented on the letters page, prompting us to start the Women’s Project in an effort to correct that imbalance. Since then, 43 percent of the letters The Times has published have been from women and 57 percent from men. The Times is committed to reaching parity, but we need your help; to anyone who feels underrepresented, please write to us. (Here’s a guide.)
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