Kellyanne Conway had some surprisingly nice words for Michael Bloomberg following his presidential announcement but said Democrats wouldn’t be as kind.
Conway, 52, revealed that she lived in New York City while Bloomberg was mayor and thought he was a “great mayor.” During an interview on Sunday’s Face the Nation, Conway suggested Bloomberg would be better off running for mayor again than running for president as a Democrat.
“Michael Bloomberg was a great mayor of New York City. I lived there under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. All four of my kids were born in New York when Michael Bloomberg was mayor. I wish he would be mayor of New York City again,” Conway said.
She later added, “It’s not that Michael Bloomberg may not be unwelcome by the national electorate, is he welcome in his own Democratic Party? We have front-runners saying we don’t want any billionaires in the country, let alone in the Democratic primary.”
Conway explained that the country might not want that type of billionaire president. She noted that Bloomberg’s promised advertising spending differs from the way “billionaire Trump” campaigned and claimed Trump’s 2016 campaign was “under-resourced and under-staffed.”
She complemented Bloomberg’s primary campaign strategy, however, which seems to be to skip the smaller early states in favor of the larger Super Tuesday states. Conway, who was the first woman to successfully manage a presidential campaign, explained that Bloomberg’s Super Tuesday strategy could have a higher payout when the convention rolls around than an early win in Iowa.
As Conway noted, Democratic candidates such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have claimed that billionaires “shouldn’t exist” and have called for wealth taxes on the exceptionally wealthy.
