President Mike?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eleanor Randolph finished her biography of Michael Bloomberg in June, 2019, just as the former mayor decided not to run for President. “He didn’t want to go on an apology tour,” Randolph tells David Remnick. Bloomberg knew he would be called to answer for his vigorous pursuit of unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policing, for accusations against him of sexual misconduct, and for his history as a Republican. Ultimately, Bloomberg not only entered the race but has spent more than four hundred million dollars on political ads to defeat another New York billionaire, the incumbent. Randolph and Andrea Bernstein, a reporter for WNYC who covered Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor, sit down with David Remnick to discuss the candidate’s time in Gracie Mansion, his philosophy of governing, and his philanthropy. Whereas Trump’s political contributions have been unabashedly transactional, Bloomberg’s generous philanthropy also has an expected return. “All the money that he gave to philanthropies and charities were a way of doing good in the world, sure, but they were also a way of making him more powerful as mayor,” Bernstein says. “Everything with Bloomberg, there’s a countervailing thing. Something benefits somebody: it also might benefit him, it also might benefit billionaires from Russia.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	I think we have two questions to face tonight. One is, who can beat Donald Trump?
0:18.8	And number two, who can do the job if they get into the White House?
0:22.6	And I would argue that I am the candidate that can do exactly both of those things.
0:28.1	Michael Bloomberg is running an unprecedented, unusual, and decidedly plutocratic campaign
0:34.2	for the Democratic nomination for president.
0:36.9	Until recently, the former New York
0:38.5	mayor's campaign was one gigantic ad by a self-financed coast-to-coast barrage of TV
0:44.8	commercials worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was barely a presence on the stump,
0:50.2	and yet he was climbing in the polls. But when Bloomberg finally went public, live at a debate in Las Vegas,
0:56.0	it was as if someone had ripped back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.
1:01.0	We have a very few non-disclosure agreements.
1:06.0	How many is that?
1:07.0	How many is that?
1:08.0	None of them accused me of doing anything other than maybe they didn't like a joke I told.
1:14.7	And let me just put, and let me put, there's a agreement.
1:17.7	Eleanor Randolph is the author of a biography of the former mayor called The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg.
1:24.0	And Andrea Bernstein watched Michael Bloomberg's approach to governing right up close.
1:28.2	She covered Bloomberg's mayoral terms, all three of them, for WNYC.
1:32.9	And I caught up with them both earlier this week.
1:35.9	Eleanor, you finished writing a biography of Michael Bloomberg in June of 2019.
	...

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