Category Archives: Michael Bloomberg

February 16, 2013 · 11:46 AM

Bloomberg takes gun fight to Chicago

Michael Bloomberg is pictured. | AP Photo

Michael Bloomberg is pictured. | AP Photo

I truly hope Mayor Bloomberg’s super-pac will run powerful ads against the gun lobby…

Politico

A Chicagoland special House election to replace disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has suddenly become Ground Zero of the national gun control debate, courtesy of anti-gun crusader Mike Bloomberg.

The billionaire New York City mayor’s super PAC is poised to dump at least $2 million into the race, sources told POLITICO — a staggering sum for a single House race that’s meant to thwart a National Rifle Association-aligned Democrat who was cruising along as the frontrunner until a barrage of Bloomberg-financed attack ads hit the airwaves.

The massive independent expenditure by Independence USA PAC dwarfs what any of the 17 Democratic candidates have raised themselves. It’s a none-too-subtle statement of Bloomberg’s intention to take on the NRA after the Newtown, Conn. school shooting — though it’s debatable how much of a test case it is since the NRA is staying out of the race.

(PHOTOS: An interview with Michael Bloomberg)

The bulk of Bloomberg’s cash has financed an air war against Debbie Halvorson, a former one-term congresswoman and longtime ex-state legislator with an “A” rating from the NRA. The lone white candidate in the Democratic field, she’s hoping that her base of suburban and rural voters in the southern outskirts of the district — who by and large favor gun rights — will be enough to give her the small plurality it will take to win.

The Democratic primary is on Feb. 26. The general election is all but irrelevant given the district’s heavy Democratic makeup.

“I believe that substantial expenditure by the forces doing battle with gun violence will likely send a real … loud warning to a lot of members of Congress that it’s no longer safe to side with the NRA — that’s really what’s going on here,” said Robert Creamer, a partner at Democracy Partners who has followed the race.

Indeed, gun control advocates believe that defeating Halvorson would send a message nationally that the climate has changed in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in December.

With the NRA steering clear, the air waves are awash in Bloomberg’s millions without any significant response. Still, Bloomberg’s ad onslaught comes as a number of Democrats have urged him to become a counterweight to the NRA when it comes to political spending, and as his aides have met with President Barack Obama’s advisers about coordinating on gun control efforts.

(Also on POLITICO: Obama: Chicago gun toll ‘Newtown every 4 months’)

A Bloomberg adviser said he made the decision to spend the money “without blinking.”

“The fact that it’s a special election, the fact that it’s in the middle of a national debate over the president’s plan … [there is an] understanding that it’s both a bellwether and a harbinger.”

Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the PAC, said the group is trying to seize “distinct window of opportunity” to make headway on gun control while the public is paying close attention.

“We must and we will continue to be aggressive in informing voters across the country about the necessity of electing leaders who will stand up to the NRA and help pass the president’s gun reform package,” she said.

An NRA spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bloomberg, who until this week had only gone after Halvorson, is now backing Democratic state lawmaker Robin Kelly. A number of other members of the Illinois congressional delegation are also rallying around Kelly, who released internal data showing her inching ahead of Halvorson in the wake of the Bloomberg ads.

(Also on POLITICO: Bloomberg’s D.C. footprint explodes)

Bloomberg also backed a handful of candidates last year in general elections in House districts, largely over the gun issue. But that was before the schoolhouse massacre.

Continue reading here…

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November 1, 2012 · 3:45 PM

Bloomberg endorses Obama

Michael Bloomberg Obama

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is an independent so there should be no hurt feelings on the part of the GOP leadership.

Politico

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose city is still partially submerged, without power and facing a rising death toll from Hurricane Sandy, endorses President Obama, via the Twitters:

@BloombergTV: BREAKING: Mayor @MikeBloomberg endorses @BarackObamafor re-election

And if anyone is wondering what message Bloomberg, who had for months signaled he would stay out of the presidential race, is sending with this endorsement, click here. The endorsement moves  climate change front and center in a way that the mayor, who endorses based on specific issues, clearly wants it to be.

Bloomberg has been critical of Obama in the past, and declined to have Obama come visit New York – he went to New Jersey instead. But as the endorsement makes clear, that was not a diss. And the endorsement of the mayor, a business leader, is one that Obama and Mitt Romney had both sought.

UPDATE: Bloomberg lays out his case here on his political website, in which he argues that Sandy exemplifies the climate change issue:

But we can’t do it alone. We need leadership from the White House – and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.

Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap-and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels. “The benefits (of that plan) will be long-lasting and enormous – benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have `no regrets’ when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation,” he wrote at the time.

He couldn’t have been more right. But since then, he has reversed course, abandoning the very cap-and-trade program he once supported. This issue is too important. We need determined leadership at the national level to move the nation and the world forward.

I believe Mitt Romney is a good and decent man, and he would bring valuable business experience to the Oval Office. He understands that America was built on the promise of equal opportunity, not equal results. In the past he has also taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care. But he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the health-care model he signed into law in Massachusetts.

That last point, about Romney having “reversed course on all of” his past “sensible” positions, is at the heart of Obama’s argument against Romney right now.

Bloomberg has gotten more engaged in electoral politics in the last few weeks, creating a super PAC to fund with his fortune, and which senior adviser and current on-leave deputy mayor Howard Wolfson is running.

Bloomberg is not a swing-state pull. But coupled with the warm words from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose state was similarly battered by the storm, Obama has had two days in which the cable news focus is going to be on the storm and on testimonials about him.

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November 17, 2010 · 7:40 AM

Michael Bloomberg & Joe Scarborough: The Independent Odd Couple

Leave it to Huffington Post’s newest Senior Political Editor, Howard Fineman  to break this story!  This is huge, if it plays out.

The Huffington Post – Howard Fineman

There’s no campaign yet, and there may never be, but New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and MSNBC’s morning talk-show host Joe Scarborough have begun trying to figure out whether they could be an independent presidential ticket in 2012 — and who would be better to be on top if it happens.

They’re the Odd Couple of Guys Outside the System.

The two are friends and, in both public and private, mutual admirers. They spent the day after the midterm elections complimenting each other at a Harvard symposium — Vanity Fair was there to document it all for a spring issue — bemoaning the same political rift they may try to exploit to win the White House.

Well-placed sources tell The Huffington Post that the mayor and the host have talked about running together, with Bloomberg in the top spot. In an interview, Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida, issued a firm yet carefully-worded denial. “We haven’t discussed it directly,” he said, adding, “Have people discussed it in his sphere and in my sphere? I think so.”

Bloomberg’s chief political lieutenant, Kevin Sheekey, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

On “Morning Joe,” Scarborough has repeatedly praised the mayor and talked up the likelihood — and the necessity — of an independent presidential bid by someone, even if it isn’t going to be Bloomberg leading it.

It can get effusive. “I don’t know anybody who has seen what Bloomberg’s done for this city,” the host said on his morning program in October, “who would not say that he is one of the best administrators we have had in American politics in quite some time.”

Continue reading…

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November 9, 2010 · 9:05 AM

Bloomberg, 2012?

The New Yorker

John B. Anderson, the former Republican congressman from Illinois and 1980 Presidential candidate, said that his mind was “in a whirl,” late last week. Anderson, who now lives in Florida, was a Charlie Crist supporter, and, despite his long-standing disaffection toward the two-party system, he feels no affection for the ascendant Tea Party movement. “I break out in a cold sweat at the thought that any of those people might prevail,” he said. Nationally speaking, Anderson remains an Obama man—for now. “But I’m still fiercely independent, and believe that only an independent might take us to a higher plane,” he said.

On November 4th, Joe Trippi, the Democratic consultant and former campaign manager for Howard Dean, was “cruising down the beach,” as he put it, in Mexico, recuperating. “I would put the odds of an independent candidacy for President in 2012 or 2016 at probably sixty to seventy per cent,” he said. “People make the mistake of saying that this was a big Republican victory. They were the only other option. The question is: Who? It’s not going to be like Ross Perot coming from out of nowhere.” He added, “The White House seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time with Bloomberg, keeping him close.”

So, that again: the maddeningly perennial game of speculating about the next move of New York’s mayor. Last month, the CNBC host Larry Kudlow announced on his show that, according to a “serious insider,” Michael Bloomberg would be the next Treasury Secretary. “The deal has been done,” Kudlow reported, perhaps prematurely. Then, the week before the election, Bloomberg’s grander ambitions were publicly revived by New York’s John Heilemann, in a cover story titled “2012: How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President.” The scenario, in short: Amid ongoing polarization and a stalled economic recovery, Bloomberg declares his candidacy, wins a handful of coastal states, thereby denying Obama the requisite electoral votes, and the Republican House awards the office to Palin.

Speaking at Harvard, the day before the election, Bloomberg said, “I think, actually, a third-party candidate could run the government easier than a partisan political President,” and then he went on, as he always does, to deny that he intends to pursue the position. He is, as he is fond of saying, Jewish, unmarried, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-immigrant, and pro-gay-marriage. Add to that a strong allegiance to Wall Street, a weekend house in Bermuda, and his vehemence, last summer, in defense of the mosque near Ground Zero, and it’s hard to see how he plays to the populist moment. A recent Marist poll indicates that only twenty-six per cent of New Yorkers favor the prospect of his running.

Yet the dream persists. “I think it’s a strong possibility,” Clay Mulford, the chief operating officer of the National Math and Science Initiative, and, as it happens, Perot’s son-in-law, said the other day. “The mood of the country is not ideological but more practical. The timing is unusually right.” Mulford mentioned that a Google search of his name and Bloomberg’s would reveal that the two of them met, a couple of years ago, to discuss ballot logistics. “His people put the story out,” Mulford said.   Continue reading…

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October 25, 2010 · 2:47 AM

Speculation: 2012 – How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President

New York Magazine

Why do you think Barack Obama is being so nice to Michael Bloomberg?

On a pale-gold mid-October afternoon, Sarah Palin takes the stage at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, and the faithful are ready for her. The crowd, 1,500 strong, is mostly white, on the older side, and casually dressed—though in my row there’s a hulking young Samoan in full Revolutionary War regalia. For the past hour, the audience has been treated to a series of warm-up acts that aren’t your typical Northern California fare: a choir called Celestial City; the head of the outfit sponsoring the event, the Liberty & Freedom Foundation, who speaks of a conservative “reawakening”; and a local talk-radio host whose shtick is that of a bargain-basement Glenn Beck, replete with attacks on Karl Marx, Richard Nixon (for creating the EPA), Nancy Pelosi, and, of course, “Barack Hussein Obama.”

Palin’s own brand of performance art is no less barbed and no more subtle, but still infinitely fascinating. In a deep-blue jacket and tight black skirt, she uncorks a 40-minute soliloquy that is equal parts populism, moralism, stand-up comedy, and free association, all rendered in a syntax as fractured as Joe Theismann’s tibia after Lawrence Taylor got through with him. She doles out personal, if possibly fictitious, anecdotes that position her, despite the millions she has pocketed in the past two years, as a defiantly downscale girl: that she and Todd drove their motor home from Wasilla to Los Angeles (distance: 3,375 miles) to watch Bristol on Dancing With the Stars. She winks (metaphorically) at her pop-culture image, snapping off a “you betcha” and later declaring, “November 2 is right around the corner—I can see it from my house!” She rails against union bosses who are “thugs” and “elitist billionaires who are funding the leftist agenda,” while gaily mocking Obama, Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Jerry Brown: “They act like they’re permanent residents of some unicorn ranch in fantasyland.” She invokes the California of old as a paradise lost and declares that it must be regained: “I want you all to get to yell ‘Eureka’ in this Golden State of opportunity.” And she cites Ronald Reagan in promising the same for the country: “If we do our part, as President Reagan said … the great confident roar of American progress, growth, and optimism will resound again!”      Continue reading…

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