Michael Bloomberg this weekend stopped in northern Virginia, fertile ground for a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate hoping to pick up his first delegates on Super Tuesday.
But the billionaire former New York City mayor, who will be judged by voters for the first time as people in 14 states and one U.S. territory head to the polls Tuesday, once suggested it was a “problem” for government employees, a dominant occupation of residents in Virginia and nearby Washington, D.C., to oversee private industry because of the caliber of talent willing to work for “a civil-service salary.” He argued it created a lopsidedness in “skill sets and experience.”
“You always have this problem when the government deals with the private sector,” Bloomberg, 78, said at Georgetown University in 2008.
He explained, using banking regulators as an example: “In the public area, you can’t pay people the way you could pay them in the private sector. It looks unseemly. And so you have a Nobel Prize-winning economist who probably was working at Long-Term Capital when they went belly up. But, nevertheless, you have somebody who is very smart and very well paid being regulated by somebody who is working on a civil-service salary.”
But Bloomberg was careful not to disparage the government sector as a whole, having managed the country’s largest municipal budget during his three mayoral terms, which ended on Dec. 31, 2013.
“I can just tell you of the 300,000 employees New York City has, if there’s anything that’s amazed me and that my friends don’t understand is just how the quality of the people we can get to work for a dollar a year or civil-service salaries where they could make an awful lot more in the private sector is really quite amazing, and that’s why the city has done so well. But it is still a mismatch,” the information services entrepreneur and philanthropist said.
He added: “You wonder why your public projects are always over budget and delayed in construction things. Well, who’s managing the project from the government’s side? It is a mismatch once again in terms of skill sets and experience because of the mismatch in compensation.”
Bloomberg’s comments resurfaced as he campaigned in Florida, which doesn’t vote on Super Tuesday, a signal he intends to continue his White House bid no matter what results Super Tuesday yields.
During a Fox News town hall in Virginia late Monday, he said a presidential hopeful who wasn’t “one of the two leading candidates,” Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders, could rack up a plurality of delegates before the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer.
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When asked in Miami on Tuesday whether his path to the nomination ran through a contested convention, he told reporters he didn’t think he could “win in any other ways.”
The former mayor, who served as a Republican and an independent before registering as a Democrat in 2018, is banking his candidacy on his managerial record, slamming Biden for lacking executive experience, despite his two terms as a vice president and 36 years as a Delaware senator.
Bloomberg was poised to perform respectably on Super Tuesday. He was over the 15% vote share threshold required to earn delegates in states such as Texas, according to polling averages compiled by RealClearPolitics. He’s also proved to be popular in individual public opinion surveys of more conservative states such as Oklahoma, which haven’t received as much attention by a cash-strapped field of contenders. Yet it remains to be seen whether Bloomberg will be hurt by the late coalescing of support behind Biden after his win in South Carolina.
