Mike Bloomberg to campaign hard in N.C., senior adviser Tim O’Brien promises
The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg continued its push Monday to win North Carolina with a visit to Fayetteville by television commentator, journalist and author Timothy L. O’Brien.
Bloomberg visited Fayetteville to open a field office here on Jan. 3.
The city and North Carolina will see more visits from Bloomberg ahead of the Super Tuesday primary on March 3, O’Brien said, “because this is an important state to us and I think Fayetteville is at the locus of a part of the state that’s going to be influential in the outcome of the election here.”
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North Carolina is one of 14 states that will hold primary elections on March 3. The campaign has five field offices and nearly 100 staffers across the state, the campaign said. O’Brien spoke to about 40 voters at the campaign’s Fayetteville office and then had an interview with The Fayetteville Observer.
Issues that are important to Fayetteville and North Carolina, including infrastructure, health care and job creation and access to quality education, “are core policy priorities for the campaign,” O’Brien said.
Military veteran Helena Hall asked whether Bloomberg supports a graduated income tax in which people who earn more money pay higher tax rates.
“Absolutely,” O’Brien said. “He believes he should pay more. He thinks that wealthy people in this country don’t pay their fair share.” Bloomberg is a billionaire.
Bloomberg also wants to double the minimum wage, O’Brien said. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
Some Democrats have been critical of Bloomberg because when he was the mayor of New York he had a “stop-and-frisk” policy. Police stopped people on the street and searched them without a warrant or other specific cause that could be legally justified. The policy was used heavily on minorities and eventually found to be unconstitutional.
Prominent Fayetteville Democrat Val Applewhite was to appear with Bloomberg during his visit on Jan. 3, but she canceled. On Facebook this month, Applewhite said the stop-and-frisk issue was one reason she changed her mind.
Bloomberg has apologized for the policy, The New York Times reported.
“Stop-and-frisk was a mistake,” O’Brien said. ”It pains him that he stood by it as long as he did.”
People should consider things that Bloomberg has done to assist minorities, O’Brien said, such as diversification of the New York Police Department and programs that provided mentoring to help young black residents get jobs.
If elected, Bloomberg plans to create a program called The Greenwood Initiative, O’Brien said. Bloomberg’s website says the initiative would help 1 million more black Americans own homes, spur creation of 100,000 black-owned businesses and invest $70 billion in 100 disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Some other points O’Brien made:
• Bloomberg has several people in mind as potential vice presidential running mates, but he wasn’t able to say who they are.
• Bloomberg didn’t enter the campaign until relatively late because he had grown to believe that none of the leading Democratic candidates would be able to beat Republican President Donald Trump. This was based watching the Democratic debates, on the candidates’ policies and on polling that Bloomberg commissioned. “And I think by the fall he felt extremely alarmed that Trump was going to walk away with it.”
• Bloomberg knows how to partner the private sector with the public sector to invest in new industries, as was done in the past with railroads, radio, aerospace and the internet. “These came about because of the creativity of the private sector married to support from the public sector,” O’Brien said. “That’s how most growth happens in the United States.”
Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com and 910-486-3512.