’We can keep Donald Trump off balance’: Bloomberg adviser makes case for his candidate in California
He worked his way to the top ranks of the Huffington Post and Bloomberg Opinion after reporting for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. He also wrote “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald.”
Tim O’Brien hasn’t had the most conventional pathway into national politics.
Now, with California’s March 3 primary quickly approaching, O’Brien is working as senior adviser for Michael Bloomberg. He helps oversee policy, strategy and messaging. He helps secure endorsements from high-profile lawmakers, prepares Bloomberg for future debate appearances and is working to get former New York City mayor a win in the most delegate-rich state in the nation.
To that end, he traveled to California this week to speak with state political reporters about why he thinks Bloomberg, a candidate who Trump belittles as ‘Mini Mike’ for his 5’7”-or-so stature, is best positioned to defeat the president in November. He also addressed attacks from Bloomberg’s Democratic rivals on his past support for “stop and frisk” police policies and accusations that his company has discriminated against women.
Here are the highlights from one conversation:
Q: What’s the campaign’s approach to the 2020 presidential race?
A: We’re sort of running three campaigns in a way. We’ve got a general election campaign that we ran right out of the gate against Trump because he was already campaigning nationally. We’re now in 45 states and territories. We’ve got about 2,200 people on the campaign. But to get to the general, you’ve got to win the primary. Our core primary focus is Super Tuesday. I’ve been in a handful of states that we think the 2020 election is going to be won or lost on. My first mandate was to go into the seven of them: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas and Florida.
Q: I know you can’t reveal which districts you think you’ll do best in. But can you share what success will look like and which type of voter you believe will support Bloomberg?
A: Our campaign begins on Super Tuesday. We are very happy with what we’re seeing in all 53 congressional districts in California. We have a broad coalition of support from moderate Democrats, pragmatic progressive and even moderate Republicans who are very comfortable with Michael Bloomberg’s track record. In a race that’s very fragmented, I think a lot of gravity is moving towards Mike. ... There’s 400 people (paid to work for Bloomberg) here. We are running the biggest operation in California political history.
Q: Is Sanders the biggest challenge in the primary race?
A: Sure, Bernie’s the frontrunner. I think a lot of the gravity among moderates and what I would call pragmatic progressives has shifted towards Mike. You know, Mike cares about every single issue that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders care about, but he wants the math to add up. We want to be transparent with voters about how much things will cost, how much it’ll cost taxpayers, where we’ll get the money and how it will be spent because that’s the way he’s always been and that’s the way he’s built things, and they’ve been built to last because of that.
Bernie’s essentially offering voters seashells and balloons around every one of his policies. There’s no clarity there around how he would pay for all of this stuff. He’s just ringing up tens and tens and tens of trillions of dollars of spending without providing any kind of transparency or accounting for how he’d get there.
Q: You guys aren’t saying how much you’re spending in California. Can you give me some idea of how much you spend per week?
A: No. I’m just not authorized to.... California’s our biggest market. I can tell you that. Our biggest ad spend is California. Texas is second, so we take California very seriously. (We have) a huge ground operation, robust ad spending, lots of canvassing. We’re making, on average, 150,000 calls a day.
Q: A lot of Democrats who are going to be deciding... wanted a diverse candidate who was of the people, who isn’t buying the election, who is, even, not abrasive because Donald Trump is abrasive. And how you’re offering a candidate (who could beat Trump) who is the antithesis of that...
A: Voters are certainly responding to Mike because they think he can beat Donald Trump. But I don’t think we think we can beat Donald Trump just by being abrasive. We can keep Donald Trump off balance because he’s easy to play by being abrasive. I think other people who’ve competed against him have made the mistake of looking the other way when he’s nasty or not getting into the trenches with him when he starts to filet people in a very unfeeling way. We’re not going to walk away from that. We’re going to meet him right there, and it’s useful for us to do that because it keeps him focused on the wrong thing, which is character assassination. While we keep him at bay, we’re going to be focused very deeply on the issues voters care about. And we’re in their communities talking to them about those things: access to affordable, high-quality health care, affordable housing, better public education, the climate crisis, gun violence, immigration.
Q: (from Dan Morain of CalMatters) I got a text from somebody I know who said, “Am I crazy for considering Bloomberg? He’s misogynistic, racist and narcissistic, but I think he can win.” What do you say to people like that?
A: He’s not misogynistic or narcissistic. I think if you look at his platform and what he’s done in his life, on the misogyny side of it, every single platform we have is about empowering women in the workplace and socially and around issues that women are under fire for right now or are threatened by in the Trump era. He’s the least narcissistic person on the planet. In fact, he would be a better candidate if he was more narcissistic.
He does not like talking about himself. He usually prefers talking about we. He’s much more comfortable saying “We the campaign, we at Bloomberg ....” I do debate prep with him extensively and getting him just to talk about I is (difficult) – I singlehandedly broke the back of the NRA, which is something he could say. It makes him uncomfortable going there. I think he’s gotten a lot better at this, and it’s showing up in his stump speeches, on the campaign trail. ...
So I don’t think he’s a narcissist at all. He’s not a racist. Honestly, I think all these things open the door to good conversations about who he is and what ails us beyond this candidacy. He’s the polar opposite of Trump, and that’s why Trump is scared of him because Mike is everything Trump isn’t and there’s very little he can go after Mike on. We talked earlier about stop and frisk. I think that that’s something he’ll have to always own up to and apologize for. But the totality of his career as mayor is not somebody who’s a racist.
He’s actually somebody who’s very dedicated to empowering vulnerable communities of color, and it’s everywhere in his track record. There’s decades of work on this as a businessman, as a philanthropist and as a mayor. That is not apparent in any of the records of anybody else we’re campaigning against. It’s remarkable that Bernie’s gotten a complete pass on the 1994 crime bill. That is easily the most oppressive piece of legislation in terms of how it’s affected nationally people of color and introduced this brutality into sentencing in the criminal justice system, and he hasn’t been held accountable for that.
Q: For the debates, is he going to stand on a box?
A: ... Donald Trump made that up, and it’s gotten into the media bloodstream. It began with an interview with Trump and Sean Hannity in which Trump made it up. ... (Bloomberg) already stands on a stack of accomplishments that makes him 10 feet taller than Donald Trump, so he doesn’t need a box. Trump knows Mike’s wallet makes him 10 feet taller than Donald Trump. ... We have not asked for a box. That is not a real story.
Q: A big part of your job is seeking out endorsements. Do you expect to see Bloomberg get the support of Sen. Kamala Harris or Gov. Gavin Newsom?
A: We expect to see a lot of important and monumental endorsements in the state of California.
This story was originally published February 18, 2020 at 8:19 PM with the headline "’We can keep Donald Trump off balance’: Bloomberg adviser makes case for his candidate in California."