march 2–15, 2020 | new york 25you’re in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book?,” one yells.
“Time out, time out,” exclaims Bloomberg, immediately filling
with the pep he thought he’d get from the energy ball. “Folks, No. 1,
the answer to your question is I have no idea. And if you stop this,
I will talk to you outside.”
“You’re a sellout!,” they scream.
“Thank you for making me feel like I was in New York City,” he
responds drily.
By ideology and temperament, Bloomberg is a meritocrat with no
time for those who might waste his. A libertarian with straight
brown hair to his butt and the only–in–Rhode Island name of Elijah
Gizzarelli tells me he stayed in the auditorium to meet Bloomberg
after his speech. “I said, ‘You said you’d talk to us afterward, and we’d
like to take you up on that,’ ” says Gizzarelli. “He said, ‘Well, you can’t
talk to everyone,’ and turned away.”
Bloomberg has mostly kept his cool during his candidacy—
“I spoke to him” around early February, says Ken Chenault, the for-
mer head of American Express, “he is encouraged by the reaction
he’s getting, though he also knows it’s going to be a tough chal-
lenge”—but he loves a jaunty comeback. And though his humor at
the debates came across less as self-deprecating than deprecating of
all humanity, he can be quite funny when he’s bitchy. From the
beginning, Sheekey and his other top aides advised him to make this
an asset, to attack Trump head on, since trading direct insults with
the president gives the impression that they are the only two candi-
dates. But it’s also because from the beginning of his campaign, he’s
known if he went after other Democratic contenders hard, they
might kill him.
A friend says Bloomberg’s deepest self-image, even at 78 years old,
is of himself in his mid-20s, in the 1960s, when he was thrust among
the blue-collar boors of Wall Street way before the Gordons from
Groton showed up. He was the middle-class son of a dairy farm’sBloomberg
campaign
headquarters in
New York.➞