Today, Explained - Can a billionaire buy the presidency?

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

Former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg thinks he can beat Donald Trump in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Getquip.com slash explained. Mike Bloomberg started as a middle class kid who had to work his way through college, then built a business from a single room to a global entity, creating... Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg makes it official, announcing he is running for president. He put his money where his heart is. Michael Bloomberg would be the richest man ever to run for president, and while his wealth could reshape the money landscape, it could also be his biggest liability.

The 77-year-old media mogul joins 17 other Democrats all hoping to take on President Trump. Bloomberg's net worth is $52 billion. That makes him the eighth richest American. Mike Bloomberg for president, jobs creator, leader, problem solver. It's going to take all three to build back a country. Emily Stewart, Vox, why is Michael Bloomberg running for president? Either he has an opening or he's not real happy with the candidates in the race right now. It seemed like he wasn't going to run and now he's changed his mind. What it seems like is going on is that Joe Biden is looking a little bit weaker. He apparently does not like Pete Buttigieg, the other sort of moderate frontrunner in the race.

And so he's entering as a moderate alternative with a lot of money. And he's running as a Democrat, not as an independent or a Republican, which he has been at various times in the past? Right. I mean, he seems to have determined correctly that there's not a real path to the White House as an independent. He mulled a run in 2016, decided against it, and then he would have run as an independent. But we saw Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, thinking about it earlier this year and kind of back away. It's a two-party system. You've got to play within the rules of the game. How have the actual candidates responded to his candidacy?

Warren has taken a dig basically saying that Michael Bloomberg is making a bet about democracy in 2020. He doesn't need people. He only needs bags and bags of money. Even you have like an Amy Klobuchar kind of looking at this and thinking like. I think you have to earn votes and not buy them. I don't think you just waltz in and say instead of, well, I'm good enough to be president. Your argument is the other people

aren't good enough. You know, Biden was like, OK, let him run in, see what he can do. But I think in general, there's a sense that a lot of people have been in the race for a long time. He had all of his time to think about it. Why now? Like some of his fellow candidates, Bloomberg is in his 70s. He's been around for a very long time. We do know a lot about what he stands for. What is his platform? What is his vision for the United States? Well, we know a lot about his past.

We really don't know a ton of exactly what he's going to focus on. I would sort of assume it's going to be the things that he's focused on throughout his political career and after being mayor of New York City. So climate, guns, education, the environment, health, things like that. So let's talk about a few of those specifically. Guns. What I have asked for and most of my friends who have asked for are background checks. We shouldn't be selling guns to minors, to people with psychiatric problems or people with criminal records. We know he doesn't like them. Where does he stand on the environment? Michael Bloomberg has been out front on climate change and talking about the importance of addressing it. The oceans are warming and rising, and you see these terrible storms that have killed

a lot of people and done enormous damage in Florida and Texas and Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. So it's a very serious thing. And the science says that things are getting warmer and they will continue to get warmer unless we reduce the amount of greenhouse gases. Is he going to back the Green New Deal as it stands today? We don't know. He has sort of said it might be a little bit too aggressive, a little bit too much pie in the sky, but you can expect him to pay a lot of attention to climate. And education? Education, it's one of those areas where he's not going to be for free college. He's going to talk

about it more in a typical moderate way of access to college, about technical education, things like that. And is it similar on health care where he's going to take a moderate stance? Yeah. Michael Bloomberg probably will not be backing Medicare for All. And of course, that sets him apart from Bernie and Warren. And he also probably will be set apart in how he funds his campaign. Right. So Michael Bloomberg is worth more than $50 billion. He is not asking anyone else for money.

He plans to self-fund his entire campaign, which appears to mean that he won't be on the debate stage because the Democratic National Committee has made a rule that you have to have a certain amount of donors to get onto the debate stage. He's not taking small donations, so he probably won't be in the debates. How do you become the candidate without debating the other candidates? I think that is sort of the question. A lot of it's going to be ads. So we're going to see a lot of commercials. We're going to see a lot of digital ads. He will do some campaigning. On Monday, he was in Virginia. But mainly, it seems to me he's going to be on TV. He's spending $30 million in these first couple of

weeks to be in markets like Los Angeles, New York. He also is taking out digital ads on Facebook. So we're going to see if his plan works. If we're never going to see him on the debate stage alongside these other candidates, I'm kind of curious, how does he shape up next to them personality wise? Well, I think it's going to take a while to figure that out. I think for me, one of the strange things about the campaign so far is that if you look at the announcement video that his campaign put out on Sunday, Mike Bloomberg doesn't really appear in it. But when New York suffered the terrible tragedy of 9-11, he took charge, becoming a three-term mayor who brought a city back from the ashes. He's not doing the typical candidate sits and talks to the camera thing. He's not voicing it.

They hired someone else to voice it over. So it's going to be a little bit strange. Like how much are we actually going to see Michael Bloomberg? I don't really know. That campaign ad plays into this self-made billionaire theme. I'm sure we're going to hear more about as the months progress. For those who aren't aware, how did Michael Bloomberg go from middle class to one of the richest men in the world? Right. So Bloomberg started out working on Wall Street and then he was laid off as part of an acquisition in 1981 and took the money that he got from his layoff

and started a company called Bloomberg after himself. And the main way that they have made money is through the Bloomberg terminals. They're basically like these kind of spacey looking computers that share a lot of financial information. You go into any, you know, the floor of Goldman Sachs or a financial publication and you're going to see a Bloomberg terminal. That's how he's made a lot of his money. And at some point he like becomes a media mogul too, or is that part of the same parcel back there?

Yeah, so it's all sort of part of the same thing, but obviously the way a lot of people interact with Bloomberg now is through Bloomberg News. And they're going to continue operating now that he's running for president, but they have said they will not investigate him. And because they will not investigate him, they also will not investigate any of the other 2020 Democratic candidates. So if you're a reporter at Bloomberg News right now, you're probably wondering what you're going to be working on the next couple months. When does he decide that he's going to become the mayor of New

York? Well, he ran and won in 2001. He actually ran as a Republican, but he had been a Democrat before then. And then he served for three terms. He switched parties from Republican to independent in 2007. But yeah, he had three terms as mayor. He changed the term limit so he could serve a third term, yeah? That he did. What did he accomplish as mayor of New York? You know, his record is mixed. You know, he got record low crime, but at the same time, one of the things we've been talking about a lot lately is that his administration was a proponent of stop-and-frisk policing.

And Bloomberg stood by this policy for a long time, for years. He apologized for it at a black church a week before announcing his White House run. I didn't understand that back then, the full impact that stops were having on the Black and Latino communities. I now see that we could and should have acted sooner and acted faster to cut the stops. I wish we had. I'm sorry that we didn't. He focused a lot on public health, so he put in place a smoking ban in bars and restaurants, but also a lot of people remember him for trying to ban large sodas in New York, which he was unable to do. Michael Bloomberg wants to ban the sale of all sugary drinks that are larger than 16 ounces.

No! They can still sell 32 ounces of a sugar drink to you, but they'd have to put it in two containers. What are you doing? We already let you make up a third term as mayor, put cameras on every intersection, and for some reason picnic tables in the middle of 7th Avenue? What the f*** is that? This is all we have left. He did a lot of real estate development, which was good for the business community,

but you could also argue hurt some underdeveloped and poor communities. He took mayoral control of the schools. What's he been up to since his third term as mayor ended? He's really focused a lot on philanthropy, on giving to causes that he cares about. So, gun control, the environment. He made a $1.8 billion donation to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, in 2018. He also launched the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, like a real fancy meeting of business people and politicians in New York. The Clintons used to do a similar event, but they stopped doing it when Hillary Clinton began running for president. So he sort of took over the mantle for them. And speaking of the Clintons, you mentioned that he thought

about running in 2016. What made him decide against it? He, in 2016, decided not to run because he worried it would result in a Donald Trump presidency. He wrote an op-ed about it, how it was a risk that he did not want to take. Trump won anyway. Are they friends? Do billionaires all hang out same places in New York? I don't think they're friends anymore, but they definitely knew each other. Mike Bloomberg appeared on The Apprentice twice. They used to golf together. And in 2013, they sort of worked together in New York for the Trump organization to help open a golf course in the Bronx. So they know one another, but they are no longer friends. So after like building a golf club together and golfing together and going on reality TV together,

what broke these two billionaires up? Well, if you see some of the things that Michael Bloomberg said about Donald Trump when he was first running for the White House in 2016, it's pretty easy to see what happened. I don't remember. What are the things? Well, Bloomberg spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. I do remember that.

Through his career, Donald Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits and angry stockholders and contractors who feel cheated and disillusioned customers who feel they've been ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's running his business? God help us. I'm a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one. And so obviously, if you're coming out and telling everybody that your old friend is dangerous and a demagogue and will ruin the country, you're probably not going to golf together anymore. And now there's a chance they could run against each other

for the presidency in 2020. Billionaire against billionaire. I mean, maybe. We'll see. Bloomberg seems to think he can really just dump all his money in and get there, so I guess we're really going to find out in the next couple months. He doesn't have the magic to do well. He will not do very well. And if he did, I'd be happy. There is nobody I'd rather run against than little Michael. That I can tell you. Can I just ask you before we go, who's the bigger billionaire?

Michael Bloomberg is the bigger billionaire. By how many billions? Well, I guess it depends if you believe Trump has any billions or how many billions he has. Significantly more billions is what you're saying. It's many more billions. It's tens more billions. Ugh, that must eat at President

Trump. I mean, he probably doesn't like it. More on Mikey B. in a minute. This is Today Explained. I don't hang out with dentists, but the people at Quip do. And the people at Quip would argue that if you asked a dentist, hey dentist, what toothbrush should I get? The dentist wouldn't say, oh, buy X toothbrush, buy Y toothbrush. They'd say, it's not the toothbrush that matters. It's how you brush.

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G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash explain. The Quip starts at just $25, and your first set of refills is free. Okay, we're going to talk about a billionaire and what it means. Sure. He's rich. Michael Bloomberg.

Eighth richest man. In the world? Maybe just in America. Yeah. That's pretty good, though. Yeah. I normally look this stuff up by going to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but because Bloomberg News does not cover Michael Bloomberg, he is omitted from the Bloomberg Billionaires

Index. Even from their list? Yes. So it's like the 13th floor on a tall building? It means that the whole list is inaccurate. Yeah. Because the order for almost everyone is off by one. But they've decided that's more ethical.

I don't get it. Matthew Iglesias, you host the Weeds podcast. Can a billionaire buy the presidency? Probably not. Okay, good. That says something for our democracy, right? Look, so television advertising, it does work in political campaigns. It does matter. But we have lots of examples of the best funded candidate not winning presidential primaries. This kind of money that Michael Bloomberg can bring to the race, it's a big deal. But there's no reason to think it's

going to be dispositive or decisive. And he has a lot of problems, frankly, as a candidate. Let's talk about those. You know, it starts with the fact that like Michael Bloomberg's relationship to the Democratic Party is kind of fraught. He ran for mayor of New York as a Republican in 2001. You know, he doesn't have deep ties to the Democratic Party, despite his recent generosity. And he also, as mayor of New York, had a very poor relationship with the city's black and Latino voters, which is a really important factor in Democratic presidential primaries. That was a discussion featured prominently in the last debate. Yeah, I mean, it was. And he, I guess you would shorthand this by saying that he was a

proponent of the NYPD's stop and frisk policies. More broadly, you know, when he ran, he won his elections with a coalition of sort of moderate, rich Democrats and actual, honest to God, Republicans. Like if you look, if you look at the precincts of New York City that voted for Donald Trump, those precincts voted New York City that voted for Donald Trump, those precincts voted really heavily for Michael Bloomberg, right? And that's a coalition that's not available in a Democratic primary.

Republicans, A, don't vote in the Democratic primary and B, will vote for Trump in the general election. But Bloomberg is seen in part as Rudy Giuliani's successor, as an ally of the police department and the police unions who would have their backs relative to civil rights and civil liberties advocates. That was integral to his political coalition there, but it becomes a reputation he carries forward into the Democratic primary. It's going to make it very hard for him to sort of poach Joe Biden's African-American and Latino base.

How does a Democrat then who is mostly a Democrat by default, by opportunity, win over the base? I mean, he obviously has a plan to dump a whole lot of money on TV ads. A lot of money. I mean, if you think about Bloomberg's sort of progressive cred, right, it would come from a focus on gun control and a focus on climate change. Those are two issues he's been very associated with on the progressive side. But the sorts of people who are most interested in climate change as an issue tend to be young and very left-wing and really in the core Bernie Sanders base, right? So I can sit here and like spell it out for you, but it doesn't look to me like coalition math that works. It's the same reason Inslee had trouble. I heard a lot of

nice things said about Jay Inslee from people who are voting for Bernie Sanders, right? Like they appreciated the idea of the climate-focused campaign, but they're not really shopping for other candidates. And you see that, right? The Sunrise Movement people, the Green New Deal people, they are not like agitating for Michael Bloomberg to get in there. It'll be interesting to see. A friend of mine who works in Democratic Party politics on the Hill, I mean, he called it billionaire identity politics. And I think that's not so far from the mark. And your friend is talking about how there are now multiple billionaires running for president. And I think the fact that there are people like Michael Bloomberg, like Tom Steyer, but others who are a little less political, but who are left of center in their political views and are hurt personally by the anti-billionaire rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

And we cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years. Not even just like they're threatened in a practical sense because, you know, these things won't pass Congress, but it makes them mad that there is this anti-billionaire discourse happening. And they don't see Joe Biden as kind of reflecting the sort of vibrant, effective politics that they want to have. And they are excited about the idea of a Michael Bloomberg coming in to be like, it's okay to be a billionaire. Is it possible that the anti-billionaire sentiment on the left

could fire up the base behind Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders right now? I mean, that's definitely how they are playing it, right? That, you know, it's you need to vote for me. You need to show that our democracy can't be bought. It's a good kind of line for them. And I mean, I think the specter of somebody coming in and trying to, you know, say like, he's not even going to participate in the debates. He's not going to do retail politics in Iowa and New Hampshire. He's going to count on big spending in the larger states that come next

to make himself like the default alternative that people need to rally to after a chaotic couple early primaries. You know, it rubs a lot of people the wrong way. It's not how we like to think of our political processes working. Do we know how this might go? Is there sort of a historical example of someone jumping in, skipping the early primary states, buying a lot of TV ads, sucking a lot of air out of the room? Do we know how this is going to play for Bloomberg? There's nothing quite like this. I mean, we do have examples of candidates saying they can skip Iowa and New Hampshire and pick it up later.

Rudy Giuliani in 2008 was the most prominent example of that. It hasn't worked. No. We've never had a self-funder on this scale, but we have had a lot of campaigns. Phil Graham in 1996, Jeb Bush in 2016, who sort of amassed these huge amounts of money through super PACs or other mechanisms. And then they proved they couldn't ultimately win with that. People sometimes take that too far to say like, well, money doesn't matter. Tom Steyer spent a

lot of money to try to get up to four or 5% in the polls to try to get on the debate stage. And that worked. If Bloomberg comes in, he can probably find a niche constituency for himself and that will take a couple percent away from other people and that will impact the race. It's just it's hard to imagine going forward like what is really the constituency for Michael Bloomberg? Like what is the lane he's in? How does he connect with people? He's not a super dynamic person. He's not a natural politician. If he wasn't a successful businessman, you wouldn't meet him and be like, this guy should run for office someday. That's a problem. You know, his election results in New York, his first race was a very, very, very narrow

win against an opponent who he badly outspent. And it's because his constellation of views is a little bit weird and his charisma is like zero or less. We need a president who understands that truth and who can do it rather than just make promises. And I offer myself as a problem solver and a doer, not a talker. So we shouldn't feel this sort of malaise that billionaires can just jump in and buy the presidency. Instead, we can maybe feel a lesser malaise that billionaires can jump in and buy 5% or 6% of the base. I mean, there is a malaise in that billionaires can derail the national conversation, at least for a couple days, with their spending,

and they can buy certain things. But yeah, I mean, I don't think we should worry that Michael Bloomberg is going to single-handedly come in and take everything over. If anything, by running, he is depriving other candidates of the opportunity to potentially benefit from his money, right? has a solid progressive record on environmentalism, is a strong gun control supporter, is an education reformer, which is controversial with some unions, but who has a lot of charisma and could be a big moderate champion, Cory Booker. I wanted to return back to this issue of black voters. I have a lifetime of experience with black voters. I've been one since I was 18.

His campaign has really been struggling. But a pro-Booker super PAC with a few hundred million dollars in it to generate a little rise for him in the polls could get people to write more stories like, what's up with Cory Booker? And that could get more people to watch him on TV. And he's like a really good public speaker, unlike Michael Bloomberg. And he's African-American and could gain some of those votes from Biden, right? You could tell a story where a little booker boom takes off and where a big infusion of funds helps him. But Bloomberg's not going to do that because he's spending the money on himself. Well, what does it say that this billionaire with a long history of supporting progressive causes and even progressive candidates took a look at this field and said, I got to run.

Well, there's a fascinating divergence, right? If you look at polls, satisfaction with the Democratic field has never been higher. Most Democrats like Joe Biden. That's larger than the share who say they're going to vote for him. But he's very popular. Bernie Sanders is also liked by most Democrats. And he has a base of people who are fanatical about him. Elizabeth Warren is also liked by most Democrats and he has a base of people who are fanatical about him. Elizabeth Warren is also popular with most Democrats and she has her own base in the middle there.

Then you have a bunch of sort of also ran candidates who are above 50 percent in their approval with the Democrats who've heard of them. That's people like Amy Klobuchar, people like Cory Booker who are nowhere in the polls. But most Democrats, when they see these people, they say, yeah, that person is fine. Then you have elites, right? Both donors, elected officials, party professionals, they look at this field and they see Warren and Sanders are too far left and Joe Biden is too old and not dynamic enough and not raising enough money. And they are freaking out. And it's incredible disjuncture between the voters who are very happy with their top three choices, also happy with a number of lesser choices, and the sort of people who do this professionally who are like, wait, this is terrible. Like, why do we have three 70-somethings, two of whom have extreme views and one of whom can barely put a coherent sentence together?

And so another 70-something enters the race. It would be fascinating to see someone like Bloomberg get in and like a class traitor campaign to be like, you're right. The billionaire class has betrayed the American people and I'm the only one who can stand up against them. Like people might like that, but he's not trying that. And he's not probably going there anytime soon. No, definitely not. I mean, that's not what he thinks. Michael Bloomberg is, to the best I know him and know his team, he is one of the most sincere and uncomplicated politicians you see out there. He thinks he's right about this sort of nonsensical constellation of political views. He thinks he'd be a good president.

He doesn't have a lot of political skills or a natural constituency, but he's not going to let that stop him. Matthew Iglesias is the host of the Weeds podcast from Vox. Episodes drop on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today's episode is all about the policy context of impeachment in terms of U.S.-Russia relations and Ukraine-U.S. relations going all the way back to the protests in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and 2014, the decline of U.S.-Russia relations that happened after the fall of Viktor Yanukovych, and the long-term repercussions of that for American politics. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. episode of Today Explained.

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