Michael bloomberg

When several Proud Boys attended a New Hanover School Board meeting about 175 miles from my North Carolina hometown, I was reminded of the night years ago when I woke to the sound of my mother weeping. Klansmen demonstrating outside our local library had made the late-night news. The sight of those ignorant men outside the doors through which I’d recently exited with Where the Wild Things Are proved unbearable to my mother. She sent a blistering letter to the editor, inciting Klan supporters to call our house hoping to discuss, as one woman asked me before my mother snatched the phone from my hand, just what exactly her problem was with the Klan. And, oh, did my mother tell them.

There’s an infamous anecdote from an old New York magazine story, in which then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived at a party, ‘gestured towards a woman in a very tight floor-length gown standing nearby and said, “Look at the ass on her.”’Presumably Mr Bloomberg exuded similar bluntness during his negotiations to speak at this year’s Democratic National Convention. When you’re the 19th richest man in the world, you can stroll into a room and say what you want. Money talks, and therefore so does Michael Bloomberg.

Well, well, well. There was former White House press secretary Sean Spicer at today’s press conference in a new incarnation as Newsmax reporter. Looking much better tailored than when he was press secretary — Trump was apparently livid about his schlumpy appearance back then and a GoFundMe campaign was launched to buy him fresh habiliments — Spicer was looking quite the dandy, or about as dandyish as he can get: checked jacket, pocket square, shirt and tie all of which appeared to be various hues of purple. For the most part, Spicer’s posture towards Trump remained unchanged, which is to say that he was as cringing as ever. 'Mr President, two questions if you’ll indulge me,' he said. Trump indulged.

I met Joe Biden last month, after one of his town hall events in New Hampshire. His team had turned the music up loud, presumably so that 77-year-old Joe — the gaffe machine from Scranton, Pennsylvania — would not be recorded saying something stupid as he mingled with the fans and reporters. I shook Biden’s hand and — limey hack that I am — asked: ‘Mr Vice President, how, as President, would you approach Brexit Britain and Boris Johnson?’ ‘What?’ he said. I repeated the question, shouting this time. ‘What?’ he said again, smiling. His dentures were brilliant; his eyes mad blue. He had no idea what I was talking about. I tried one last time, screaming ‘Boris Johnson!’ in his ear.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short. The characters I’ve just mentioned are, of course, fictitious. Mike Bloomberg is not. Nor are his fifty billion big ones. Bloomie recently wrote that unlike Trump he did not inherit a fortune. That he did not. But nor, really, did The Donald. The latter’s father was a comparatively small-time Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer.

1) Joe Biden lives to fight another day, bloopers, gaffes, and all. But on Tuesday he needs to win a major state or finish a strong second to seize the spot as Bernie Sanders’s chief competitor.Biden’s poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire meant the South Carolina primary was his last stand. His recent polling showed his lead was small and decreasing. So the stakes were high and the situation dire. But the former VP was right to go all-in for South Carolina, which he always called his firewall. His loyalty to President Obama and his endorsement by Rep. James Clyburn were crucial in a state with a large African American population.

Dear Diary, Another day on Team Mike. Or should I say Team Mic? It’s like a reunion around here. Half of our reporters and literally the entire back office staff are aboard the good ship Bloomberg and we are living LARGE. Free pizza for lunch every day that we don’t have to beg for on GoFundMe. Booze flowing like water. Damn sushi. This morning when I got here (and yes, it was still technically morning) there was an omelet station. I literally haven’t had it so good since prep school. Williams was a dump compared to this.Honestly, I’d have left journalism ages ago if I’d known how great life is when you’re making more than 60 grand a year on top of the old trust fund. I moved to Brooklyn.

The Nevada caucuses confirm that Sen. Amy Klobuchar has clung to the ledge by her fingernails as long as she could and will almost certainly fall off on Super Tuesday. It also confirms that the end is nigh for the Pete Buttigieg phenomenon, the typecasters’ candidate, a prefabricated person with all the outer ingredients but no relevant governmental or equivalent experience, no fixed beliefs, and nothing but flippant and fluently well-rehearsed answers to all subjects; an articulate facade with nothing tangible behind it. Klobuchar and Buttigieg both have made a valued contribution and if Klobuchar had had more panache, she might have made a strong run for the nomination.

The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right.

Unlike the previous snoozers where all the candidates pretended to like each other, the debate in Nevada ahead of their caucuses, was exciting. It’s what happens when six politicians, picked to be on a stage together, stop being polite and start being real. But it’s unlikely to make a blip of difference. For one thing, most of the candidates didn’t do what was in their self-interest. Joe Biden had one real job — take the nomination away from runaway train Bernie Sanders. Instead, he let the Mike Bloomberg media campaign get into his head. Bloomberg isn’t on the ballot in Nevada and he isn’t on the ballot in the next contest in South Carolina either.