Bloomberg downplays central role in changing city term limits
Who, me?!
Mike Bloomberg tried to downplay his center-stage role in pushing the City Council to override the Big Apple’s strict term limits and allow him a third run for mayor — insisting it was the lawmakers’ doing.
The eye-popping remark came amid an answer to a question during an MSNBC interview Friday morning about whether he would seek to change the US Constitution to allow for a similar maneuver.
“I will not try to change the Constitution. That’s correct,” the billionaire media mogul said, before adding: “Yes, but keep in mind it was my City Council that did it.”
That account glossed over Bloomberg’s acrimonious 2008 effort to pressure city lawmakers into changing the law.
Bloomberg’s 2009 Democratic rival, city Comptroller Bill Thompson, objected, calling it “a suspension of democracy in New York City.”
Quinnipiac University pollsters found 89 percent of voters wanted a referendum rather than a city council vote.
Bloomberg argued at the time that the Great Recession required steady leadership.
“There are times when you know a job is done, and there are times when you feel you’re in the thick of major changes that still require hard work and careful management and tough accountability,” he said at a City Hall press conference.
Term limits were twice approved by New York residents in the 1990s before Bloomberg persuaded city lawmakers to temporarily scrap them. As mayor, he signed the bill allowing himself a third term.
Despite the history, it’s not the first time Bloomberg’s tried to write himself out of the term limits fight.
In 2009, he offered a similar revisionist answer when pressed by a reporter, Azi Paybarah, if an improving economy undercut his rationale for the term limit nix and his ultimately successful campaign for a third term.
“The rationale for extending term limits is that the City Council passed it and the voters will have a chance on Nov. 3 to say what they want,” he told Paybarah — who he called a “disgrace” as he turned to leave the press conference.
Nowadays, Bloomberg — seeking to score his first wins in the Democratic presidential primary when 14 states vote on Tuesday — is courting centrist voters to stop the momentum built by Vermont’s self-described socialist US senator, Bernie Sanders.
But his campaign has struggled to respond to a string of attacks from rivals over longtime allegations of inappropriate workplace remarks to women and his past support for “stop-and-frisk” policing.
The former mayor was elected to two terms as a Republican before becoming an independent in the run-up to his third term.
Bloomberg, worth an estimated $65 billion, already has spent more than $500 million on his bid to become president.
The media mogul’s campaign did not return requests for comment.