Bloomberg flexes financial muscle in debut

NORFOLK, VA. >> Sen. Kamala Harris declared her presidential candidacy on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and held her first rally before a crowd of 20,000 in Oakland, while her colleague Sen. Elizabeth Warren addressed thousands on a bitter winter day in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the site of a historic textile workers’ strike.

Michael Bloomberg started his campaign at a hushed diner in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, shaking hands with a snowy-haired afternoon crowd, drawing a combination of selfie requests and quizzical stares, before strolling to a nearby hotel ballroom and making an efficient statement.

Accompanied by a small platoon of aides, Bloomberg described himself as a political pragmatist skilled at wielding his wealth to win elections.

“I know how to win,” Bloomberg, the former three-term mayor of New York City, said, “because I’ve done it time and time again.”

If Bloomberg’s first inperson appearance as a presidential candidate lacked something in organic political energy, he has already jolted the race through the sheer scale of his political spending, stunning the Democratic political establishment and stirring an outcry from the party’s populist wing. He is airing nearly $1 million in television ads in Virginia this week, as part of nearly $35 million in television advertising nationwide.

In his remarks to the news media, Bloomberg invoked his record as mayor and his advocacy on issues like climate change and gun violence, education and smoking, and positioned himself as a political moderate who could bring the country together.

But the most consistent theme of the day was the financial firepower he has brought to the Democratic Party and some of its causes.

Bloomberg, who is one of the wealthiest men in the country, noted he had spent “hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the NRA,” including considerable “moneys that we provided on gun safety” in Virginia’s recent elections.