Billionaire businessman, philanthropist and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought his late-developing presidential campaign to Chicago for the first time Wednesday morning to criticize President Donald Trump’s record on the economy and unveil a jobs plan of his own.
Bloomberg gave his speech on Chicago’s South Side to illustrate it as an area that had been “left behind” economically, but his remarks just as easily could have been delivered in Cleveland or Cincinnati. He made virtually no reference to Chicago, the state’s March 17 primary or the significance of the venue his campaign chose, Olive-Harvey College. He didn’t ask for a single vote or make an appeal for any campaign volunteers either.
Instead, Bloomberg gave a general address aimed at a national audience that repeatedly cast Trump as failing to keep his promises on jobs, trade and infrastructure while offering his business career and three-term tenure as New York’s mayor as proof he’d be a better steward of the U.S. economy.
“I know how to create jobs and build businesses, not because I played a business leader on a TV show, but because I’ve actually been one in real life,” Bloomberg said to applause inside an automotive facility at Olive-Harvey, where American flags hung from car lifts. “My strategy starts with the basic premise that the federal government is grossly under-investing in America and Americans.”
Bloomberg highlighted his plan to create an “All-In Economy,” a proposal that lists a series of goals and initiatives aimed at better preparing an American workforce for an economy of the future, but he has not ascribed a cost to any of the initiatives or identified how they would be funded.
The former mayor’s presidential campaign is an unconventional one.
He did not announce his candidacy until late November, just a little more than two months before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses that kick off the Democratic nominating contest. As a result, Bloomberg has decided to skip the four early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, where voters will cast ballots next month, and instead focus on states that vote in the Super Tuesday primaries of March 3 and beyond.
Illinois, with its mid-March primary, falls squarely into that strategy. Bloomberg hopes to make up ground by relying in large part on his vast fortune to flood local airwaves with campaign ads and attract support in a state that awards a high number of delegates. The nation’s eighth wealthiest individual, according to Forbes, has pledged to spend $100 million on ads criticizing Trump alone, in addition to what he’ll spend in support of his own bid. So far, Bloomberg’s campaign has spent $170 million on TV and digital ads, already a record amount for a presidential candidate.
As in many of the March states, where the majority of the race’s delegates will be awarded, Bloomberg has spent fast and furiously in Illinois to hire experienced staff and to air a seemingly constant stream of ads. Still, in his nearly 30-minute speech, Bloomberg didn’t offer a single nod to the Illinois primary. He declined interview requests with local media outlets, and he took no questions from reporters while in the state for the first time.
One of the few local touches came at the beginning of the event when Chicagoan AJ Jadduah introduced Bloomberg while noting that she had participated in Skills For Chicagoland’s Future’s “Beyond the Diploma” program that strives to educate and match workers searching for a job with companies that have unmet hiring needs. The program, Jadduah said, landed her a business management job with McDonald’s.
After Bloomberg encouraged the crowd of roughly 200 people to applaud her, the notorious anti-obesity advocate couldn’t help but note he’s “more of a Subway sandwich guy. I could have the BMT every meal for the rest of my life, no oil or cheese or extra vinegar, please.” The New Yorker also commiserated from the stage on the Chicago Bulls’ struggles this season by proclaiming, “It could be worse. You could be a Knicks fan.”
Bloomberg saved the rest of his criticism for Trump, accusing the Republican president of pursuing a nonsensical trade policy with China, failing to deliver the massive infrastructure program he vowed and stiffing farmers and factory workers. And in a reference to the rest of the Democratic field, Bloomberg sought to set himself apart as the best positioned candidate to challenge Trump on the economy.
“Others shake their fists and point to scapegoats and make promises they can’t deliver on. I think we’ve had enough of that. I believe we need a president who’s actually done it, and knows how to get things done,” Bloomberg said. “I think we need to replace Donald Trump. He’s counting on the economy to lift him to victory, and he’s hoping to face a career politician who’s never created any jobs. Well, let me tell ya, I’m going to take him on over the economy, and I won’t let him get away with selling the American people more empty promises.”
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With an “I like Mike!” button fastened to his lapel, John W. Rogers applauded along. The Ariel Investments founder and CEO, who is a close personal friend of former President Barack Obama, originally backed California Sen. Kamala Harris in the race. When Harris dropped out last month, Rogers said he switched to Bloomberg, noting his well-established practice of spending millions of dollars to advocate for gun control.
“He’s been so successful in everything he’s touched, from building a business to being a very effective mayor of New York City, but the other thing is the key issues he cares deeply about are the issues I care deeply about, particularly the gun violence that plagues our urban communities,” Rogers said. “His passion around this is something that is so important, and it’s moved the needle so successfully that that’s the thing that’s really inspired me.”
Rogers called Bloomberg’s approach of skipping the early states “very, very smart” and a “winning strategy.” Asked for his reaction on Bloomberg’s speech offering little connection to Chicago or Illinois voters, Rogers smiled and noted Jadduah’s introduction of the former mayor.
“Well, as a board member of McDonald’s, I was thrilled to see the young woman having started her career at McDonald’s,” he said with a chuckle.
Before the event, Bloomberg met for 45 minutes at a downtown hotel with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who has yet to make an endorsement in the presidential race, representatives for each confirmed.
Bloomberg delivered his remarks as Trump addressed the nation about Iranian missile strikes Tuesday night at a pair of military bases in Iraq that house U.S. soldiers. Bloomberg said very little about the incident, other than to use it as an opportunity to raise doubts about Trump’s temperament.
“The situation is still unfolding, but in any crisis, it’s imperative that the commander in chief go through all the implications of his actions or her actions with the help of her or his top advisers and not act irrationally or recklessly, and I certainly hope the president does that,” Bloomberg said. “But as we all know, that’s just not in his nature.”
After criticizing Trump for spending the last three years “dividing us by party, by race, by ethnicity and by religion,” Bloomberg moved onto his jobs proposal.
Under the plan, Bloomberg would place a major emphasis on overhauling and expanding the federal government’s job training and re-training programs, an initiative he would place his vice president in charge of on his first day in office.
As part of his plan, states would receive “substantial grants” from the federal government to upgrade job training, including “major new investments in community and technical colleges while partnering with employers,” according to the campaign. Bloomberg has not identified how much he would spend on the grants, some of which would be competitive, or how he would pay for them.
Bloomberg did little to connect the policy to Olive-Harvey other than to say, “We have to invest in our community colleges, like this one, so they can connect more Americans to good-paying jobs, and I will do that.”
Bloomberg’s plan also seeks to expand the number of students enrolled in apprenticeship programs, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, expand access to Pell grants, give all workers the right to unionize, launch a $100 billion research and development initiative to create industry jobs, expand broadband access to rural areas and offer tax credits to attract businesses to locate and hire in “distressed communities.”
Much of the South Side would fit that bill, with its large swaths of neighborhoods that have eroded for decades under a lack of public investment, little economic development, high unemployment, frequent bouts with high crime and, most recently, an ever-growing population loss. Many of those struggles stem from the city’s history of segregation and redlining on the predominantly African American South Side, but Bloomberg’s plan doesn’t address removing racial barriers that stand in the way of creating jobs and businesses. His campaign says that separate effort will be announced at a later date.
In the runup to his visit, Bloomberg and his campaign noted the historic disinvestment in the city’s South Side, but he made no direct reference to it in his speech Wednesday.
The former mayor’s visit to Chicago was followed by a stop at a soybean farm in Wells, Minnesota, where Bloomberg highlighted aspects of his plan aimed at rural communities, and a visit to an innovation hub in Akron, Ohio, where he emphasized plans to increase spending on research and development for new jobs.
“I’ll be visiting three of the communities our plans are designed to help, the South Side of Chicago, for example, a neighborhood that has long suffered from very high poverty rates in one of the world’s wealthiest cities,” Bloomberg said in a brief telephone statement to reporters on Tuesday before his trip.
Like Bloomberg, the New York-based campaign’s news releases also referred to the South Side as a “neighborhood of Chicago,” the equivalent of referring to Brooklyn as a village or town instead of a borough.
Chicago, of course, is known as the city of neighborhoods, with dozens of its more than 200 neighborhoods spanning the South Side alone.
Twitter @BillRuthhart
