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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The Many Iterations of Michael Bloomberg, C.E.O., Mayor, and Presidential Hopeful

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.33.9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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 that he would be called to answer for his vigorous pursuit of unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policing, accusations against him of sexual misconduct, and his history as a Republican. Ultimately, Bloomberg did enter the race, and he has spent more than four hundred million dollars on political ads to defeat another New York billionaire, the incumbent, Donald Trump. Randolph and Andrea Bernstein, a reporter for WNYC who covered Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor, join Remnick to discuss the candidate’s time in Gracie Mansion, his philosophy of governing, and his philanthropy. Trump’s political contributions have been unabashedly transactional, but 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.”

Eleanor Randolph is the author of “The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg.” Andrea Bernstein’s book is “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.”

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Transcript

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0:48.2

I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, a conversation about Mike Bloomberg.

0:55.4

David Remneck will talk with Andrea Bernstein, who covered Bloomberg's mayoral administrations for WNYC,

1:02.0

and Eleanor Randolph, the author of the biography The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg.

1:10.4

I think we have two questions to face tonight.

1:13.6

One is who can beat Donald Trump, and number two, who can do the job if they get into the White House?

1:19.6

And I would argue that I am the candidate that can do exactly both of those things.

1:25.6

Michael Bloomberg is running an unprecedented, unusual, and

1:29.9

decidedly plutocratic campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. Until recently,

1:35.3

the former New York mayor's campaign was one gigantic ad-by, a self-financed coast-to-coast

1:41.5

barrage of TV commercials worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

1:45.5

He was barely a presence on the stump, and yet he was climbing in the polls.

1:50.3

But when Bloomberg finally went public, live at a debate in Las Vegas,

...

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