US media tycoon Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday he was quitting the Democratic primary race and instead endorsing front runner Joe Biden for the White House after being snubbed by voters on Super Tuesday.
"Three months ago, I entered the race for president to defeat Donald Trump. Today, I am leaving the race for the same reason: to defeat Donald Trump -- because it is clear to me that staying in would make achieving that goal more difficult," he said in a statement.
The billionaire former mayor of New York spent hundreds of millions of dollars on his presidential run, but failed to win any of the 14 states on offer on Super Tuesday -- the most important day in the Democratic primary season.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - With the dramatic winnowing of the Democratic presidential field, the 14 nominating contests held on Tuesday largely came down to a single question: Could former Vice President Joe Biden amass enough delegates to slow US Senator Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination?
As polls closed in the eastern United States, the emerging answer appeared to be "Yes." Polls showed Biden, whose candidacy was buoyed this week by a wave of high-profile endorsements, outperforming expectations.
The Super Tuesday contests offer the biggest one-day haul of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the party’s nomination at its national convention in July, with about 1,357 delegates, or nearly one-third of the total number, up for grabs.
Here are some initial takeaways from Super Tuesday voting.
A BIDEN COALITION
It appeared clear early on that Biden benefited from the last-minute endorsements from former presidential contenders Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. The Democratic establishment increasingly is coalescing around him as an alternative to Sanders, a democratic socialist.
North Carolina and Virginia were called for Biden immediately when polls closed, with exit polls suggesting Biden was headed for decisive wins.
Those polls suggested Biden was building the broad coalition needed for a presidential nominee. Beyond Biden's longstanding support among African-American voters, he looked to be beating Sanders in both states among white voters who did not graduate from college – a traditional Sanders stronghold.
Perhaps most important for the Democratic race, Biden was easily outperforming Sanders with women voters. More than half of the women in the US now identify with the Democratic Party, according to recent studies.
THE DELEGATE MATH
For Biden, the goal on Tuesday was to draw as near to Sanders in terms of overall pledged delegates to the Democratic national convention as possible. Going into Super Tuesday, Sanders held a slight lead over Biden because of his success in earlier primaries, or nominating contests.
It remained unlikely that Biden would be able to pull even with Sanders. Still, a strong showing might slow Sanders’ momentum enough to allow Biden to catch him in upcoming primaries.
Virginia and North Carolina offered 209 delegates between them, with the delegates awarded proportionally based on the candidates' share of the electorate.
Both Sanders and Biden will finish Tuesday with fewer than 1,000 each, still short of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination.
A BITTER PILL FOR BLOOMBERG
The result in Virginia is a particularly bitter disappointment for former New York mayor and media mogul Mike Bloomberg, who made winning the state a top priority.
It was the first state where he held a campaign event after announcing his candidacy, and recent polls showed him competitive in the state.
Final vote totals had Bloomberg finishing below the 15 percent threshold needed to win delegates, shutting him out in that state. He appeared to be in slightly better shape in North Carolina.
Even so, such a disastrous showing in what appeared to be winnable states will likely intensify calls for the billionaire, who spent more than $200 million of his own fortune on ads for Super Tuesday, to exit the Democratic race in favor of Biden.
BEATING TRUMP
The exit polls appeared to bolster Biden’s claim that he is best positioned to defeat President Donald Trump in the general election in November.
Polls from North Carolina and Virginia gave him a clear advantage over Sanders among voters who said they would rather have a nominee who can beat Trump than who agrees with them on major issues. In Virginia, for example, 64% of those who prioritized beating Trump backed Biden compared to just 16% for Sanders.
Such results appeared to suggest a growing belief within the party that nominating Sanders would hand Trump a second term.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
DALLAS -- Former Vice President Joe Biden's Democratic presidential bid picked up steam on Monday with the endorsements of two former 2020 rivals - Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar - who planned to join him on the stage at a rally on the eve of the Super Tuesday primary elections
But Biden still faces a challenge from billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg among voters hoping the party will nominate a moderate.
Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota, will become the third 2020 candidate in as many days to drop out of the race when she announces the suspension of her campaign in Dallas, where she will also publicly back Biden, a Klobuchar aide said.
Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who ended his White House bid on Sunday, also plans to endorse Biden in Dallas, a top adviser said.
Biden is fresh off a resounding victory in Saturday's South Carolina primary and is aiming for a strong showing on Super Tuesday against Senator Bernie Sanders, the national frontrunner and a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont.
The Super Tuesday contests offer the biggest one-day haul of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the party's nomination at its national convention in July, with about 1,357 delegates, or nearly one-third of the total number, up for grabs.
Fourteen states - California, Texas, Virginia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Vermont, Colorado, Utah, North Carolina and Maine - as well as American Samoa and Democrats living abroad cast ballots on Tuesday. (The primary for expatriate Americans is scheduled to run through March 10.)
Bloomberg, a late entrant to the race, will make his ballot-box debut. He is betting the $500 million of his own money he has poured into his campaign will allow him to make up for not competing in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Five candidates - Biden, Bloomberg, Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and US Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii - remain in the running for the nomination to take on Republican President Donald Trump in November's election, down from more than 20 earlier in the campaign.
Bloomberg and Biden have emerged as the main contenders for the votes of moderate Democrats, while Sanders is the progressive front-runner nationally, eclipsing Warren.
BIDEN'S MOMENTUM
Biden's high-stakes triumph in South Carolina, where his campaign had said his popularity with black voters would propel him to victory after early disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, helped winnow the field.
Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer also gave up his campaign on Saturday night after a third-place finish in the Southern state in which he had invested most heavily.
One of Buttigieg's top fundraisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of his supporters planned to donate to Biden's campaign.
Sanders' momentum might not be easily slowed. On Monday, his campaign downplayed the efforts by moderates to present a united front.
"The establishment is nervous, not because we can't beat Trump, but because we will," said Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir. "And when we do, the Democratic Party will again be a party of the working class."
It was not immediately clear who would immediately benefit from the departures of Buttigieg and Klobuchar. A Morning Consult poll taken Feb. 23 to 27, for example, before Buttigieg exited the race, showed that 21 percent of his supporters named Sanders as their second choice, 19 percent picked Biden, another 19 percent chose Warren and 17 percent favored Bloomberg.
Biden still lags his rivals in spending and organization in Super Tuesday states and beyond, but his campaign said on Sunday it had raised more than $10 million over the preceding two days.
Endorsements of the former vice president from elected officials and community leaders poured in on Monday as Democrats who believe a moderate is the best candidate to defeat Trump tried to circle the wagons around Biden.
Backing from Ohio Democrats including Representative Marcia Fudge and former Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory added to endorsements from Senator Tim Kaine and state House of Delegates Majority Leader Charniele Herring of Virginia. In Colorado, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock has backed Biden. In California, Representative Gil Cisneros is supporting the former vice president.
On Wednesday, Hollywood mogul Sherry Lansing is hosting a fundraiser for Biden featuring Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Supporters of Sanders and Warren also rushed to weigh in for their candidates. The progressive magazine "The Nation" endorsed Sanders, and the women's fundraising organization Emily's List endorsed Warren.
Former President Barack Obama planned to wait until after the primaries to endorse a candidate, a source familiar with his thinking said.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee — Consider it progress for a presidential candidate on a steep learning curve: Michael Bloomberg now thanks his hecklers.
That is not how he has always handled unwanted interruptions on the campaign trail. In Nashville, Tennessee, in December, for instance, Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, took the bait when environmental activists started shouting at him. “I’m doing more on the climate than you’ve even dreamed of,” he snapped, according to CBS News. “I’ve put a fortune into this thing.”
But on a return trip to Tennessee last month, when a man in Chattanooga started bellowing “Bernie! Bernie!” in the middle of Bloomberg’s speech, the candidate had all the graciousness of a maître d’ tending to a displeased patron.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling and continuing on with his remarks. Later, in Memphis, Tennessee, Houston, and just about anywhere else a protester yelled out mid-speech — there is almost always one — Bloomberg delivered the same reply, “Thank you for making me feel like I’m at home in New York.”
Bloomberg’s bid for the presidency, which faces its first test before voters Tuesday when 14 states go to the polls, has exposed to the country what New Yorkers have long known: He was never admired for his gifts as a retail politician.
Now as he tries to connect with Americans who know little about him, other than what they see in his ubiquitous, slickly produced ads, his campaign is trying to buff the rough exterior of a 77-year-old who can be surly, inelegant and averse to talking about himself in a way that voters find revealing and personal.
His aides have warned him about rolling his eyes in public, especially during presidential debates. Though they initially said no to appearances on cable news town-hall-style programs, some advisers acknowledged that Bloomberg could have benefited from the practice, if only they had agreed to do them before last week. They have shown him television clips of surrogates who have defended the most damaging moments from Bloomberg’s past, like his defense of racially biased policing practices, more persuasively than he has.
And when he is faced with questions about his wealth, aides have pointed him toward polling that has shown voters respond favorably when they learn he did not inherit his money, but earned it himself.
In an interview, Bloomberg said he did not believe that voters would see this as an election where charisma is paramount, given how deeply many Americans feel that President Donald Trump has led the country in the wrong direction.
As president, he said, “You have to have somebody that the public thinks, ‘Whether I like the guy or the woman or not, he is smart, well meaning and knows how to manage the process.’ ” As for the subject of his wealth, he said, “it’s tricky,” adding: “People in America fundamentally don’t want to take away what you have. They want to find a way so that they can get it as well.”
So his speeches include a line that hits directly at the self-made part of his biography, and a personal critique of the president’s signature legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, in which the benefits went disproportionately to wealthy people like Bloomberg.
“I didn’t need a tax cut, thank you very much,” he said last week in Oklahoma City.
Still, delivering a good line off a teleprompter — Bloomberg reads from one at almost every public event — means little if he cannot nail the moments when the script isn’t there. And then there are the times he mangles the script anyway, like telling the crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina, how nice it was to be in “Gainesboro.” Or how much he was looking forward to competing in “Super Bowl Tuesday.”
His audiences seem not to mind terribly much. In Greensboro, a few people in the crowd called out to correct him, but that was the end of it. “Very, very impressed,” said Jimmy Sipsis, 60, a property manager and self-described independent. “Based on his record, you look at it, and see he can stand up there and say, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done that.’ ”
Once Bloomberg entered the race late last year, the campaign benefited from almost two months in which the candidate could hone his public speaking skills, rusty and sclerotic after a decade since his last run, without too much scrutiny. The attention of the political world was trained on Iowa and New Hampshire, where Bloomberg did not compete, so hardly anyone noticed the gaffes like when he opened a campaign office in Denver in early February and joked about wishing someone else could have spoken for him so that he could spend the day at his home in Vail, Colorado.
His campaign strategy was never to pretend to have a feel-your-pain magic touch. Instead, it has leaned hard into his experience running the nation’s largest city through trying times, like the recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Sandy, an approach his aides hope will help elevate him above his rivals given the events of the past week.
With a 3-minute, direct-to-camera television ad that will air nationwide Sunday night and a sharpened stump speech highlighting his leadership as mayor, Bloomberg is hoping to draw a stark contrast with Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and the managerial records of some of his Democratic opponents.
At his first appearance in a televised debate last month, he was halting, flat and silent as his opponents pummeled him over his record as mayor, and allegations that he had spoken demeaningly of women. His second debate performance was more aggressive and confident, though he had moments when he flubbed what should have been easy comebacks. At one point, when defending his commitment to the Democratic Party by explaining how he had spent $100 million helping Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018, he caught himself after almost saying he “bought” the majority that made Nancy Pelosi the speaker. “I got them,” he said, making the moment only slightly less awkward.
Those who attend his campaign events now hear a message that is tightly focused on his appeal as the “un-Trump,” a pitch that has been redrafted multiple times in the two months he has been campaigning full time. There is an element of high and low to the approach, in which Bloomberg boasts of policy achievements like fighting for stricter gun control legislation and closing coal-fired power plants (even when he’s in eastern Tennessee, the heart of coal country) in one paragraph and, in the next, goads the president.
Seeing little use for subtlety, Bloomberg and his advisers have taken an approach they hope will not just showcase his competence as a leader, but also expose some of Trump’s biggest insecurities
“It’s not all about Trump, but there are useful moments when we can invoke Trump, compare Mike to him and poke the bear,” said Tim O’Brien, a journalist who wrote a biography about Trump and is now working as one of Bloomberg’s senior advisers. “It’s so easy,” he added.
Needling Trump, who has taken the bait by responding with a flurry of angry tweets about “Mini Mike,” is one thing Bloomberg needs little coaching to do.
The president so loathes the informality of “Donald” that he demanded that contestants on his reality show “The Apprentice” refer to him as “Mr. Trump,” yet Bloomberg repeatedly calls him by his first name.
In one regular line of Bloomberg’s that gets a guaranteed laugh, he says, “People ask me, ‘Do you really want a general election between two New York billionaires?’ To which I say, ‘Who’s the other one?’”
The contrast to Trump is at the core of Bloomberg’s campaign. He closes out his pitch to voters by making the differences, as he sees them, between the two 70-something New Yorkers clear.
“Even though Donald and I are both from New York, the truth is we could not be more different,” he said recently in Nashville. “He breaks promises, I keep them. He divides people, I unite them. He’s a climate change denier. I’m an engineer.”
“He looks out for people who inherited their wealth like him,” Bloomberg added, “and I’m self-made.”
2020 The New York Times Company
LAS VEGAS -- The top 6 candidates competing for the Democratic nomination to take on US President Donald Trump in November participated in the ninth presidential debate on Wednesday, with one quickly becoming the focus: Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor making his first debate appearance in the race, faced criticism from all his rivals on the stage in Las Vegas:
ELIZABETH WARREN
"We’re running against a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-face lesbians. And no I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk."
Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, also criticized Bloomberg for reports that his namesake media company mistreated women employees. She called on him to release women who sued his company from non-disclosure agreements.
"I hope you heard what his defense was: I've been nice to some women. That just doesn't cut it. The mayor has to stand on his record and what we need to know is what's lurking out there."
"This is not just a question of the mayor's character. This is also a question about electability. We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many non-disclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against."
PETE BUTTIGIEG
The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor went after both Bloomberg and US Senator Bernie Sanders.
"Most Americans don’t see where they fit if they have to choose between a socialist who thinks money is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power. Let's put forward somebody who actually lives and works in the middle class neighborhood in an industrial Midwestern city. Let's put forward somebody who's actually a Democrat."
"We shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out. We can do better."
JOE BIDEN
The former vice president assailed Bloomberg over the stop-and-frisk policing policy in New York City that was criticized for ensnaring disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos.
"The fact of the matter is he has not managed his city very well when he was there. He didn't get a whole lot done. He had stop-and-frisk - throwing close to 5 million young black men up against the wall - and when we came along in our administration, President Obama and I said we're going to send a mediator to stop it, he said that's unnecessary."
Biden said that the Obama administration worked to put an end to the policy.
"Let's get the facts straight. Let's get the order straight. It's not whether you apologize or not, it's the policy. The policy was abhorrent. And it was in fact a violation of every right people have."
AMY KLOBUCHAR
The Minnesota senator responded to reports of the Bloomberg campaign saying the other moderates should drop out to let him fight the liberal Sanders.
"I have been told as a woman, as someone that maybe no one thought was still going to be standing up on this stage, but I am because of pure grit ... I've been told many times to wait my turn and to step aside, and I’m not going to do that now ... I think we need something different than Donald Trump. I think don’t you look at Donald Trump and say, 'We need someone richer in the White House'.”
BERNIE SANDERS
"We are giving a voice to people who would say we are sick and tired of billionaires, like Mr. Bloomberg, seeing huge expansions of their wealth, while a half a million people sleep out on the street tonight ... Maybe it's time for the working class in this country to get a little bit of power in Washington, rather than your billionaire campaign."
Sanders added later: "Maybe we can talk about a billionaire saying that we should not raise the minimum wage, or that we should cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If that's a way to beat Donald Trump, wow, I would be very surprised."
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
"I’m a philanthropist who didn’t inherit his money, but made his money. I’m spending that money to get rid of Donald Trump – the worst president we’ve ever had. And if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and to my kids.”
Bloomberg said he had not mistreated women employees but defended his decision not to release those he settled with from non-disclosure agreements, saying they were made consensualy.
"We have a very few non-disclosure agreements. None of them accuse me of anything ... maybe they didn't like the jokes I told."
Bloomberg criticized his opponents, particularly Sanders, for advocating higher taxes on corporations and forcing unions onto boards.
"I can’t think of a better way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation. We’re not gonna throw out capitalism. We tried that, other countries tried that, it was called communism and it just didn’t work."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg's decision to back a tax on trades marks a blow for Wall Street lobbyists which had seen the moderate Democrat as a potential ally, said analysts and lobbyists.
On Tuesday, the former New York mayor and Wall Street investment banker, who made his $60 billion fortune in finance, proposed imposing a 0.1 percent tax on trading stocks, bonds and derivatives as part of a broader financial services agenda.
Bloomberg's decision to back the tax is likely to bring him into conflict with Wall Street firms that are fighting the policy, many of which are the very same clients that helped him make the fortune with which he is funding his campaign.
A spokeswoman for Bloomberg did not immediately provide comment. Bloomberg, who was a Republican, has said he would sell his eponymous Bloomberg Inc financial data company, whose trading terminal is widely used on Wall Street, if he wins the presidency.
"It is notable that a candidate who bills himself as a centrist businessman has moved so far left," said Brian Gardner, a managing director at brokerage Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in an analyst note. He added that Bloomberg's decision to endorse the tax meant it had become a more mainstream idea in Democratic circles. "It is likely to stay in headlines beyond the 2020 election."
Long seen as a radical non-starter, a trading tax has gained momentum due to the rise of progressive firebrands including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who have pledged to fund social policies with a "tax on Wall Street."
Former Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg also lists the tax among his policies, while former Vice President Joe Biden has voiced tentative support.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday put Sanders in the lead among Democratic and independent voters, with Bloomberg in second, Biden in third, Buttigieg in fourth and Warren in fifth.
That leaves Wall Street with few obvious allies on an issue that some firms regard as an existential threat. Depending on the structure of a tax, it could badly wound hedge funds and high-speed traders which profit by slicing tiny margins off millions of trades a day, according to academics.
For example, high-speed traders in France experienced a 30 percent reduction in trading volumes as a result of a 2012 transaction tax, according to a 2017 Journal of Finance study.
"It's certainly a concern for financial firms...since it increases the cost of trading," said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of Wall Street investment research firm DataTrek Research.
"I see it as a not-so-subtle attempt to show that Bloomberg the candidate is not afraid to hurt the clients of Bloomberg the business in order to appeal to Democratic voters."
Alarmed by its traction, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Modern Markets Initiative (MMI) are lobbying against the tax.
In addition to the rhetoric coming from the Democratic candidates, lobbyists note there are four bills pending in Congress that seek to impose a transaction tax of some type.
Kirsten Wegner, CEO of MMI, said advocates of the policy were wrong to frame it as a tax on the wealthy. MMI advocates on behalf of high-speed trading firms.
"It would be paid by all Americans invested directly or indirectly in the markets and not just the wealthy," she said in an email.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential contender Michael Bloomberg will sell Bloomberg LP, the financial information company that made him a billionaire, if he is elected to the White House in November, his campaign confirmed on Tuesday.
Bloomberg has risen quickly in opinion polls since entering the race for the Democratic nomination in November and he will appear in his first debate of the election cycle on Wednesday in Las Vegas. Democrats are vying for the right to challenge Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election.
The former New York mayor has said before he would likely sell Bloomberg LP if elected, which his campaign affirmed on Tuesday.
"If elected president, Mike will sell the company," spokeswoman Galia Slayen said.
Bloomberg LP provides financial information to Wall Street firms in addition to news. It is privately held, with Bloomberg himself owning most of the company, which he founded in 1981. Analysts at Burton-Taylor International Consulting estimate the firm generated over $10 billion in revenue in 2019.
Reuters News competes with Bloomberg LP's news service.
The Bloomberg campaign said the process of selling the company would begin with putting it in a blind trust and then selling it.
Bloomberg is not competing in the early voting states of the Democratic nomination process and instead hopes to start winning votes when 14 states vote on March 3 in the Super Tuesday contests.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MIAMI — In a warehouse covered in murals in the Design District here, cater waiters served wine and platters of Cuban sandwiches, summer rolls and kosher pigs in a blanket. They wore all black but for red, white and blue T-shirts reading “I Like Mike Bloomberg.”
Before the candidate took the stage — set against an oversize painting reading “Mike 2020” that a local artist had been paid thousands to produce in 36 hours — the former mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine, introduced him.
“We both started from nothing, and we made a few bucks,” Levine said, proudly likening himself to Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who announced his run for president in November. “But he’s got more zeros at the end of his name than I do.”
Bloomberg, the multibillionaire behind Bloomberg LP, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the race, paying to make his voice omnipresent on television and radio. He has deployed his corporation in service of his campaign, reassigning employees from the various arms of his empire and recruiting new ones with powerful financial incentives, including full benefits and salaries well above national campaign norms.
Entry-level field organizing work for Bloomberg, for example, pays $72,000 annually — nearly twice what other campaigns have offered. In under 12 weeks, Bloomberg’s operation has grown to a staff of thousands, with more than 125 offices around the country and a roster of slick events featuring swag, drinks and canapés.
Such spending has helped make Bloomberg an increasingly strong contender in the Democratic presidential primary. While Sen. Bernie Sanders, the leading progressive, has emerged as a front-runner in an exceedingly tight race, former Vice President Joe Biden has faltered and several other candidates have splintered the moderate vote that Bloomberg hopes to capture in the Super Tuesday contests March 3.
In the first quarter of his campaign alone, Bloomberg, who is not accepting political donations, spent $188 million — more than what numerous candidates in the race had spent combined. Seventy percent of that went toward advertising. Millions went toward rent, including for the campaign’s Times Square headquarters as well as furnished apartments on Manhattan’s East Side where some staff members are living.
Millions more have paid a robust network of consultants, lawyers and campaign staff members — some of whom are new to the speculative work of electioneering and are finding it oddly lucrative.
For David Enriquez, a 23-year-old recent graduate of the University of Florida acting as a field organizer for Bloomberg in Tampa, the pay came as a surprise. “I was expecting 30,000 a year, essentially till March, so whatever that is,” he said, referring to a salary that would have translated to $2,500 monthly. He is receiving more than twice that — $6,000 a month — and he expects his work will continue through November, given Bloomberg’s pledge to support the Democratic effort to unseat President Donald Trump regardless of whether his own name is on the ballot.
“I was just going to pay the minimum payment on my credit card for an extended period, but when I found out what my salary was, I was like, ‘Wow’,” Enriquez said.
The campaign’s pay for field organizers, the equivalent of $72,000 annually, is well above the $42,000 that other campaigns have offered. Bloomberg staff members have also been issued campaign-owned electronics, including Apple laptops and the latest-generation iPhones, which a spokeswoman said were distributed with cybersecurity in mind.
“I was paid $15 a day as an organizer for Ted Kennedy in 1980,” said Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic strategist, referring to a rate that, adjusted for inflation, would amount to roughly $1,500 monthly today.
Trippi called substantial pay such as what Bloomberg was offering plausible for a campaign’s staff members in key early-voting states, like Iowa or New Hampshire, but highly unusual as a standard for employees across regions — and even more so for the apparent sense of job security through the fall. “That’s never happened before,” he said.
Reflecting similar premiums, Bloomberg’s state communications directors and state political directors uniformly receive $12,000 monthly, according to the campaign, while state press secretaries make $10,000 monthly and the campaign’s national political director commands $30,000 a month, or $360,000 annually.
“Everyone knows that campaigning is hard work, long hours and lousy pay,” said Stu Loeser, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman. “We can’t change the first two, but we can do something about the third.”
For employees working at the New York headquarters, the campaign also offers three meals daily and unlimited snacks in a central cafe that acts as a hub of the office. In late December alone, according to the campaign’s first filing with the Federal Election Commission, it paid more than $16,000 to a sushi restaurant in Manhattan as well as roughly $200,000 to FLIK Hospitality, a catering company.
James Thurber, a professor of government who founded the Campaign Management Institute at American University, said money was an unlikely motivator in campaign work, but he called some of Bloomberg’s spending necessary.
“Since he’s gotten in so late, he’s got to pay above-market salaries to get good people to jump in at all levels,” Thurber said. “You can’t win a campaign on an air war,” he said, referring to a blitz of advertising. “You’ve got to have a ground war. He knows that, so he’s buying the ground war.”
On the ground, an aura of abundance has extended to Bloomberg’s campaign events, where an array of shirts and buttons are laid out for the taking. On offer at recent rallies: “I Like Mike”; “Women for Mike”; “Ganamos con Mike”; “United for Mike,” with a Jewish star; “Mishpucha for Mike”; as well as permutations tailored to different states — “Florida for Mike,” unembellished; “Florida for Mike,” decorated with palm trees.
For a rally in New York City in January, Bloomberg rented out the very same Times Square hotel ballroom in which he had celebrated one of his mayoral victories, with a DJ presiding and wine and beer and goat cheese puffs on hand for all.
At a Philadelphia rally last week, more than 1,000 people were offered cheese steaks, hoagies and platters of honey-coated brie, fig jam and gourmet flatbreads. Michael Dacosta, who was posted up at one of the drinks stations, raved about the selection, expressing regret that he had eaten at Papa John’s beforehand. “I think it’s classy,” said Dacosta, a New Yorker who’d paid $55 to have “Let’s Get Bloomin Again” embroidered on his bomber jacket but also grabbed a “PA for Mike” shirt.
“He’s generous,” Dacosta said, as colorful lights projected Bloomberg’s name on a wall of the National Constitution Center, where the rally was held. “I feel like it’s a nightclub in here. This is what he needs to get people going.”
The fanfare has also drawn some who don’t plan to vote for the billionaire. “Don’t get me wrong, I like Mike Bloomberg,” said Ramon Vivas, who attended Bloomberg’s Miami rally in January and wore one of the free shirts bearing that message, along with two Bloomberg buttons. “But I don’t think he’s going to get the nomination, and I support Bernie.”
Still, Vivas said he thought the Democratic Party had “moved too far to the left” and called Bloomberg a good influence on the race, adding that at other rallies he’d attended, “you typically have to pay for the T-shirts.”
The large-scale painting that Cindy Franco, the Miami artist, produced — a colorful streetscape decorated with the candidate’s name and “Miami Will Get It Done,” a variation on the campaign’s slogan — was a central backdrop for little more than an hour.
“I only had a day and a half to make it,” said Franco, who worked round the clock in the Miami warehouse with security guards provided by the campaign on hand. “They were always asking if I needed anything,” she said, declining to specify exactly how much she was paid but adding: “It was a lot. They were very good to me.” (The campaign did not name the amount, which it will be required to report in its next federal filing.)
Day-to-day, some Bloomberg campaign workers with prior political experience, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about their work for Bloomberg, described what they saw as an unfathomable luxury: the ability to brainstorm and act on their ideas without concern for costs. The campaign has, for instance, hired 70 staff members in Florida and opened field offices in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
But being forced to think about how to stretch dollars in politics can have its advantages, Trippi said, recalling that in 2004 — when he worked for Howard Dean’s campaign, which broke the record at that time for Democratic presidential fundraising — “a lot of the things we pioneered were exactly because we had to be that creative.”
Nonetheless, he added, laughing: “Picking between the advantage of being a little bit more creative with your money, versus having the money to do whatever you want to do — most campaigns would pick having more money.”
Thurber, the American University professor, said that self-funding a campaign could make it difficult to know a candidate’s true popularity. “When you’ve got a lot of money, you can try all kinds of strategies and tactics, and also have the money to measure whether they’re working or not,” he said. “But in a primary, small donors are really the invisible measure of how excited people are about you.”
Financially invested supporters, no matter the size of their donations, also tend to be more loyal and engaged, Trippi said. “If I give $10 to a candidate, I’m much more likely to stay with them and do other things, like call my friend about them,” he said. “There’s buy-in.”
Bloomberg has crisscrossed the country hoping for emotional buy-in. He has come and gone on a schedule, reflecting a candidate famously focused on efficiency. A Bloomberg LP plane has often been waiting to shuttle him to the next destination, with pilot costs and in-flight catering expenses also figuring into the recent report to election authorities.
For some younger staff members, the degree to which the campaign’s finances are unusual has not necessarily registered. “I wasn’t surprised because I actually didn’t know how much field organizers make,” said Jordy Portugal, a 22-year-old who recently graduated from Columbia University and lives in Queens.
Portugal said that he had weighed joining the Bloomberg campaign or accepting a job at a media company that would have paid him a salary amounting to roughly $4,700 a month — significantly less than what he now makes placing calls and canvassing voters for Bloomberg.
“Bloomberg’s pay has helped me,” he said. “But I don’t have any prior experience to look at it and say, ‘Wow, these are amazing benefits and experiences,’” he said, adding that the food the campaign provided reminded him of a stint working at a tech company. “This was more an opportunity for me to make an impact.”
For other supporters, the depth of Bloomberg’s coffers is central to his appeal.
“I can’t tell you the pleasure of having someone call me and ask, ‘Who are important people in the community?’” said Patricia Halfen Wexler, a venture capitalist who spoke in support of Bloomberg at one of his recent rallies, “and to not have to think, ‘Who can give money?’”
© 2020 The New York Times Company
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — The Democratic presidential primary is entering an intensely tumultuous phase, after two early contests that have left former Vice President Joe Biden reeling and elevated Sen. Bernie Sanders but failed to make any candidate a dominant force in the battle for the party’s nomination.
Within the Democratic establishment, the results have deepened a mood of anxiety and frustration: The collapse of Biden’s support in the first two states, and the fragmentation of moderate voters among several other candidates, allowed Sanders, a Vermont progressive, to claim a thin victory in New Hampshire and an apparent split decision in Iowa with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.
In both states, a majority of voters supported candidates closer to the political center and named defeating President Donald Trump as their top priority, but there was no overwhelming favorite among those voters as to which moderate was the best alternative to Sanders. Unless such a favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael Bloomberg as a potential savior.
In an unmistakable sign of Bloomberg’s growing strength and Biden’s decline, 3 black members of Congress endorsed the former mayor of New York City on Wednesday, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, a high-profile lawmaker and gun-control champion in her first term — and a senior adviser to Bloomberg told campaign staff that internal polling showed the former mayor now tied with Biden among African Americans in March primary states.
The turmoil in the party has the potential to extend the primary season, exacerbating internal divisions and putting off the headache of uniting for the general election for months.
The Democrats’ proportional system of allocating delegates and the nature of the calendar this year could make it all but impossible to avert such an outcome. With no winner-take-all contests, and no indication yet that Sanders can broaden his appeal or that a moderate can coalesce support, the candidates are poised to keep splitting delegates three or four ways, as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“We are obviously going to have a longer battle here,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who directed an anti-Sanders ad campaign in Iowa.
The leading candidates are plainly worried about the party’s divisions, and signaled as much in their speeches in New Hampshire on primary night: Sanders, blamed by much of the party for his slashing approach to the 2016 primaries, stressed in his victory speech that the most important task was defeating Trump, while Buttigieg urged his supporters to “vote blue, no matter who” in November.
In a particularly urgent plea, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who slumped to a fourth-place finish Tuesday, warned that no candidate should be “willing to burn down the rest of the party in order to be the last man standing.”
At the moment, no one is close to being the last candidate standing. But unless another Democrat rapidly consolidates support, Sanders could continue to win primaries and caucuses without broadening his political appeal, purely on the strength of his rock-solid base on the left — a prospect that alarms Democratic Party leaders who view Sanders and his slogan of democratic socialism as wildly risky bets in a general election.
The Biden team stoked that sense of alarm Wednesday: Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a chairman of Biden’s national campaign and a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, warned on a conference call with reporters that Democrats would risk “down-ballot carnage” if they selected Sanders.
“If Bernie Sanders was at the top of the ticket, we would be in jeopardy of losing the House,” Richmond said. “We would not get the Senate back.”
Yet in a reflection of the multidimensional melee that allowed Sanders to claim victory in New Hampshire with the smallest plurality of any winner in decades, Richmond also criticized two other candidates, Bloomberg and Buttigieg, lumping them into the same risky group and arguing that Democrats should not “take a chance with a self-defined socialist, a mayor of a very small city, a billionaire who all of a sudden is a Democrat.”
Mellman said Sanders would continue to benefit as long as there was a relative abundance of moderate candidates in the race. “The longer more of those people stay in,” he said, “the easier it is for Sanders to skate through.”
There is no sign that any of the half-dozen major candidates left in the race are headed for the exits: Buttigieg and Biden will have to contend in the Nevada caucuses against Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who finished a strong third in New Hampshire, while on the left Sanders still faces a dogged competitor in Warren. Unless one candidate comes out of Nevada and South Carolina with a powerful upper hand, it is quite likely that the same atomized delegate count could continue into Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all delegates in the Democratic race, cast ballots on March 3.
Indeed, with early voting already taking place in California and other Super Tuesday states, and no dominant front-runner, the fragmentation may already be well underway.
In Arkansas, a Super Tuesday state where early voting starts next week, a poll taken after Iowa illustrated the Democrats’ dilemma: Bloomberg, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg were each winning 16 percent to 20 percent of the vote.
All of those candidates are increasingly confronting Bloomberg’s presence as a rival in the March primaries. Bloomberg skipped all four February contests but has climbed into double digits in national polls on the strength of an enormous and sustained advertising campaign, funded from his personal fortune.
On a conference call with campaign staff members Wednesday afternoon, Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s senior adviser, said that internal tracking data showed that the former mayor had pulled “very narrowly” into first place across the March primary states, inching ahead of Sanders overall and tying Biden among African American voters.
Though Wolfson did not provide specific numbers, he said Biden had “rather precipitously fallen” in the larger array of states voting next month, according to Bloomberg polling.
But Bloomberg is facing new tests as a candidate: For the first time, he may qualify for a televised debate, next week in Las Vegas, and he has come under newly direct criticism from other Democrats for his record on policing and much else.
Wolfson acknowledged as much on the conference call, telling staff members that Bloomberg would have a “bigger target on his back” as his numbers rose. He said Bloomberg would address scrutiny of his support for stop-and-frisk policing by calling it “the biggest regret of his 12 years as mayor,” and saying that the language he had used in the past to defend it did not “reflect who he is or what is in his heart.”
But the recently circulated audio recording of Bloomberg in 2015 matter-of-factly stating that “the real crime is” almost always committed by young “male minorities” quickly ricocheted across the tight-knit community of black political leaders.
J. Todd Rutherford, the minority leader of the South Carolina House, said many African Americans had increasingly recognized that Biden did not have “what it takes” and had been ready to bolt to the former New York mayor.
“A lot of people would’ve said Bloomberg last week, but now I don’t know,” said Rutherford, alluding to the recording and declaring that the gnawing uncertainty hanging over the Democratic race was “really scary.”
Biden and other candidates have indicated that they intend to challenge Bloomberg on race in the coming days, and his resiliency, or lack thereof, on the subject could shape the primary campaign.
Yet even supporters of Biden acknowledge that if one of the moderates does not take a clear lead with that faction of the party after Nevada, the eyes of many establishment-aligned Democrats will turn to Manhattan.
“The longer the waters are muddy, the better off Bloomberg is,” said former Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina, who recently backed Biden.
The campaign in Nevada is as disordered as anything else in the Democratic race, according to people closely watching the contest there. But as in New Hampshire, Biden long held a considerable advantage as the candidate perceived as the safe and electable choice, while Sanders entered the race with a strong bloc carried over from his last run for the presidency. It remains to be seen whether Biden will bleed support there as rapidly as he did in New Hampshire, or whether any other candidate will be able to take advantage of his fall.
Tick Segerblom, a prominent Sanders backer in the state who is a member of the Clark County Commission, said Biden’s national plunge would upend the campaign in Nevada. He said that Sanders could count his “25 percent” but that his ability to expand his coalition was an open question.
“Bernie is still alive and Biden is definitely a disaster,” Segerblom said. “I think Pete is going to do very well — he’ll be able to pick up the Biden people.”
Rep. Dina Titus, perhaps the most prominent Biden supporter in the state, said the campaign needed to send in the political cavalry to stave off defeat.
“He could certainly use more hands — and they’re supposedly coming now,” she said.
She added that she would spend her time helping Biden with senior groups and labor unions. But the former vice president’s hope that the most influential union in the state, the Culinary Workers, would endorse him in an effort to halt Sanders has been dimmed after his poor performance in the first two states.
In South Carolina, even moderate Democrats who are sympathetic to Biden believe he is in grave danger of losing the state.
“He’s wounded,” Tyler Jones, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist, said of the former vice president. Like other political professionals in the state, Jones is increasingly less concerned about Biden’s weakness than about billionaire Tom Steyer’s strength — and what it means for the nominating process.
Steyer has been pouring money into South Carolina, cutting into Biden’s lead with black voters and raising the specter of Sanders’ winning another state with a plurality thanks to a divided electorate.
“A vote for Steyer is a vote for Bernie, which is a vote for Trump,” said Jones, who believes Sanders cannot win the general election and wants to stop his campaign “dead in its tracks.” But he acknowledged that urging voters to act strategically and reject Steyer was easier in theory than in execution.
Other Democrats are turning to what they believe is a more simple solution.
In early January, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York offered an off-the-cuff assessment of the Democratic race: Should Biden wheeze in the early states, many in the party would turn to Bloomberg as a Plan B.
“If Mr. Biden can’t get out of New Hampshire and Iowa, then Bloomberg has Super Tuesday,” Meeks said at the time.
On Wednesday, he was one of the three black lawmakers who endorsed Bloomberg.
2020 The New York Times Company
Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has secured a 60-second advertising slot to air nationally during this year’s Super Bowl telecast, an ad buy that will most likely cost at least $10 million.
Bloomberg campaign officials confirmed the buy Tuesday and said they would be paying “market rate,” although they would not specify the cost of the ad. But executives at Fox, which is broadcasting the game Feb. 2, have said they were seeking “north of $5 million” per 30-second ad.
The Bloomberg campaign said its Super Bowl ad would be a new spot that has not yet aired.
"The biggest point is getting under Trump’s skin," said Michael Frazier, a spokesman for the Bloomberg campaign. By "taking the fight to Trump," Frazier said, "the ad is part of Mike’s strategy of running a national campaign that focuses on states where the general election will be decided, parts of the country that are often overlooked."
Bloomberg’s campaign has continued to set records for political ad spending by a presidential candidate, having already dropped nearly $170 million on television and digital advertising, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm. Bloomberg, a billionaire media owner and former mayor of New York, is funding his campaign with his own money and is not soliciting donations.
"We have the means to raise a national campaign unlike any other candidate," Frazier said.
Bloomberg has made targeting President Donald Trump a core element of his ad strategy. Before he announced his candidacy, he pledged to spend $100 million on ads criticizing the president. And since he launched his bid, his campaign has unloaded a barrage of Facebook attack ads in general-election swing states, seeking to erode support for Trump by highlighting what Bloomberg calls broken promises on infrastructure, health care and dysfunction in Washington.
The Super Bowl ad is a show of financial force rarely seen in presidential politics. Although some campaigns have made local advertising buys during past Super Bowls, a national buy has often been out of reach, given the expense. It is also usually viewed as wasteful to pay to reach a 50-state audience rather than buying ads in the swing states where campaigns would prefer to target their message.
But Bloomberg is running an unconventional primary campaign with a heavy national emphasis, choosing to avoid the four states that vote first in February and instead focusing his efforts on Super Tuesday on March 3, when 14 states will vote.
"It’s actually smart for Bloomberg," said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. "Bloomberg is running a national campaign, and the most efficient way to reach a lot of people in a national campaign is buying an ad in a top-rated show. And as expensive as it is, it’s cheaper than buying the ads market by market."
The Bloomberg campaign has rapidly expanded its payroll to 800 staff members over the past month, with 500 organizers on the ground across the 14 Super Tuesday states. The expansion, first reported by NBC News, gives Bloomberg another leg up on his Democratic rivals; former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, for example, has roughly 400 staff members on its national payroll.
2020 The New York Times Company
source: news.abs-cbn.com
Michael Bloomberg on Friday brushed back critiques about his wealth and bristled at the suggestion that he was using it to buy success in the 2020 presidential race, arguing that other Democrats who have complained about his entry into their party’s primary could have taken it upon themselves to earn their own personal fortunes, as he had done.
In a television interview, Bloomberg’s first since he announced his presidential campaign, the billionaire and former mayor of New York City rejected the idea that he had an unfair advantage, saying that while other candidates asked donors for money, he had made his money himself and then given most of it away.
“I turn and they’re criticizing me for it,” he said to Gayle King on “CBS This Morning.” “They had a chance to go out and make a lot of money. And how much of their own money do they put into their campaigns?”
“I’m doing exactly the same thing they’re doing, except that I am using my own money,” he added. “They’re using somebody else’s money, and those other people expect something from them. Nobody gives you money if they don’t expect something. And I don’t want to be bought.”
The interview with Bloomberg, 77, covered a wide range of topics, including the candidate’s recent apology for having defended so called stop-and-frisk policing as mayor of New York. Asked about the timing of his about-face, Bloomberg asserted that “nobody asked me about it until I started running for president.”
Discussing his reasons for entering the race, he said he worried that if other Democrats took on President Donald Trump in a general election, Trump would “eat ’em up.” He described one of those Democratic hopefuls, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, as “very well-spoken,” a phrase that quickly drew criticism as belittling of a black politician.
In addressing his wealth and the way he has deployed it to help him play catch-up after his late entry into the race, Bloomberg confronted the central critique of his candidacy that his Democratic rivals have deployed early on: that he is seeking to “buy” the election and the presidency. Bloomberg, who built a successful financial information and media company, spent more than $30 million on his first week of advertising as a candidate last month — far more than the entire rest of the Democratic field spent that week.
For months, progressive candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have criticized billionaires, saying the rich have not paid their fair share in taxes and proposing a tax on wealth to help pay for the wide-ranging government programs they have pledged to install if elected.
Warren and Sanders, two of the leading candidates in the race, have shunned high-dollar fundraising events, relying instead on smaller contributions from grassroots supporters and arguing that such a strategy prevents influence by wealthy donors.
Warren took aim at another top-tier candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, on Thursday night, calling on him to open his fundraising events to the news media. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the leader in national polling of the primary contest, has allowed journalists to attend his private fundraisers.
In his interview, Bloomberg said he did not come from money and noted that his “father made $6,000 the best year of his life.”
“Nobody gave me a head start,” he said.
Still, the power of money in elections has been on full display in the 2020 race, as candidates have scrambled to meet donation and polling thresholds in order to qualify for the Democratic National Committee’s televised debates. Another billionaire, Tom Steyer, got into the race relatively late but has spent millions of dollars on advertising and other resources that have helped him become one of just six people in a 15-person field to qualify for the debate this month.
The surprise departure this week of Sen. Kamala Harris of California from the race has forced the Democratic Party to grapple with the possibility of having only white candidates on the stage in Los Angeles and prompted some candidates of color — like Booker and the former housing secretary Julián Castro — to sound an alarm about the diversity of the field.
Asked about Booker and the concerns he had raised, Bloomberg praised the senator’s ideas but said the current makeup of the field did not worry him.
“If you wanted to enter and run for president of the United States, you could have done that. But don’t complain to me that you’re not in the race. It was up to you,” he said. “I thought there was a lot of diversity in the group of Democratic aspirants. Entry is not a barrier.”
Bloomberg’s description of Booker as “well-spoken” ricocheted on social media and on morning radio talk shows. Asked about the comments Friday morning on “Signal Boost,” a radio program on SiriusXM, Booker said he was “taken aback.”
“It’s sort of stunning at times that we are still revisiting these tired tropes or the language we have out there that folks I don’t think understand — and the fact that they don’t understand is problematic,” Booker said, also noting that his relationship with Bloomberg dates to when they both were mayors.
At another point, Bloomberg agreed with King that his longtime companion, Diana Taylor, would be a “de facto” first lady. He said he had been living with Taylor for 19 years, which would not change if he became president.
Bloomberg’s interview aired one day after he released a sweeping plan on gun control, putting an issue on which he has a long record at the center of his emerging candidacy. He said Friday that the National Rifle Association, whose leadership has been in turmoil, “has basically been beaten.”
Bloomberg’s gun-control plan, which calls for a national gun licensing system and stricter background checks, among a host of other measures, represents some of the most left-leaning views of a candidate who is something of an ideological moderate. Bloomberg described himself in the interview as “a social liberal, fiscal moderate, who is basically nonpartisan.”
Bloomberg, who was elected mayor first as a Republican and then as an independent, and who registered as a Democrat more recently, has given millions of dollars to groups and candidates who he believes share his goals, including Republicans.
He delivered a speech just before kicking off his campaign in which he apologized for the controversial stop-and-frisk policing tactics that he defended as mayor. Under the program, officers stopped, questioned and often searched people on the street millions of times. The vast majority of those stopped were young black and Latino men, even though they were no more likely than white people to be arrested as a result.
In the interview, King pressed him on his assertion that “nobody” had asked him about his position on the tactics until he began his presidential run. He responded by once again expressing remorse.
“I’m sorry. I apologize,” he said. “Let’s go fight the NRA.”
2019 The New York Times Company
source: news.abs-cbn.com
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign said Monday that it would bar Bloomberg News journalists from attending its rallies and political events, an attempt to retaliate against the news organization’s decision to cease investigating Democratic candidates in the wake of its billionaire owner’s entry into the 2020 presidential race.
The Trump campaign broke from years of precedent in 2016 by revoking the press credentials of journalists from outlets like The Washington Post, Politico and BuzzFeed News, an early sign of the efforts to demonize the media that have become a hallmark of the Trump presidency.
But Bloomberg News is facing a fraught situation, too. After the company’s owner, Michael Bloomberg, decided last month to pursue the Democratic nomination, editors at the news outlet instructed their reporters to avoid “in-depth investigations” of Bloomberg or any other Democratic candidate. It was an attempt at fairness that some journalists called stifling.
On Monday, Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, called it something else: biased.
“Bloomberg News has declared that they won’t investigate their boss or his Democrat competitors, many of whom are current holders of high office, but will continue critical reporting on President Trump,” Parscale wrote in a statement, calling the decision “troubling and wrong.”
“Since they have declared their bias openly, the Trump campaign will no longer credential representatives of Bloomberg News for rallies or other campaign events,” Parscale wrote. The campaign said it would decide “on a case-by-case basis” whether to respond to inquiries from individual reporters on stories.
The editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwait, quickly fired back.
“The accusation of bias couldn’t be further from the truth,” Micklethwait wrote in a statement. “We have covered Donald Trump fairly and in an unbiased way since he became a candidate in 2015 and will continue to do so despite the restrictions imposed by the Trump campaign.”
Howard Wolfson, a top campaign adviser to Bloomberg, also weighed in, pithily. “One week in and Mike is already under Trump’s skin,” Wolfson wrote on Twitter.
Trump and his senior aides routinely disparage individual reporters and entire news organizations for coverage they deem unfavorable. Press advocacy groups say the president’s attacks have contributed to one of the more hostile domestic environments for journalists in recent memory.
Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, criticized the Trump campaign’s move in a statement on Monday. “We condemn any action that keeps quality news media from reporting fairly and accurately on the presidency and the leadership of the country,” Baquet wrote.
At the same time, Bloomberg News’ approach to covering its owner’s candidacy has proved divisive.
Roughly 2,700 journalists work at Bloomberg LP, the financial data company that is the wellspring of Bloomberg’s fortune, and this is not the first time that Bloomberg’s ambitions have placed his employees in an awkward spot. During Bloomberg’s 12 years as mayor of New York City, coverage of the billionaire’s wealth and personal life were considered off-limits at Bloomberg News.
In a memo last month, Micklethwait acknowledged that “there is no point in trying to claim that covering this presidential campaign will be easy,” but added that the newsroom would continue to investigate Trump’s administration “as the government of the day.”
On Monday night, Trump, who had flown to London for a conference, added his own thoughts on the matter, deriding Bloomberg in a Twitter post as “Mini Mike Bloomberg” and describing Bloomberg News as a “third rate news organization.” (He also accused The Times of “hatred & bias.”) The president wrote that “It’s not O.K.!” for Bloomberg News to skip investigations of Democratic candidates.
While Bloomberg News has pledged to continue covering polls, policies and “who is winning and who is losing” the 2020 race, the prohibition against investigative reporting — considered among the most valuable forms of campaign journalism — has caused some uproar.
Megan Murphy, a former Washington bureau chief at Bloomberg News, wrote on Twitter that it was “staggering” for the news outlet to prevent “an army of unbelievably talented reporters and editors from covering massive, crucial aspects of one of the defining elections of our time.”
2019 The New York Times Company
source: news.abs-cbn.com
