New York City dwellers are often ridiculed for thinking they’re the center of the universe.
It’s a sentiment satirized in the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” illustration that graced the cover of the New Yorker in 1976. But in Michael Bloomberg’s case, he seems to believe it.
“We really are better than everybody else,” Bloomberg told the West Side Chamber of Commerce to some laughs in 2001 during his first campaign to become the city’s mayor, according to the Daily News that summer. “We really are. I mean, the rest of the world is a disgrace compared to New York.”
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, who is set to compete in his first states this cycle on March 3 in the Super Tuesday round of voting, lobbied the New York City Council in 2008 to lift the two-term mayoral limit so he could run again and steer the city through its recovery efforts following the financial crisis.
The billionaire former banker and information services entrepreneur, 78, grew up in Massachusetts.
Bloomberg similarly made elitist remarks about suburban life that same year when asked about the trend of jobs and workers moving away from the city’s five boroughs.
“People that want to go there [the suburbs] aren’t the people that you want to have in your company,” he said, according to the Daily News in October 2001.
Bloomberg’s White House bid faces its first hurdle next week when 14 states decide whether he should be the Democratic nominee who takes on President Trump in the general election. The former Republican and independent, who has relied on $500 billion worth of ads to make his case to voters across the country, has recently consented to a handful of national TV interviews in an effort to gin up a broad base of support in states not typically considered the home of “coastal elites.”
He also must overcome a weaker than expected inaugural debate performance in Nevada last week on stage in South Carolina on Tuesday night.
[Also read: Ex-Bill Clinton adviser: Bloomberg and Hillary cooking up ‘scheme’ for her to become Democratic nominee]
