More Bloomberg, 2013: We're stopping white people too much, you know

Do tell. Jazz wrote earlier about video clips emerging from Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy defenses while serving as mayor of New York, comments that threaten to derail his effort to buy the Democratic Party presidential nomination. This juicy tidbit from 2013 dropped late last night as well, in which he argued not just that racial profiling was justified in stopping crime but that his administration needed to step it up.

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Specifically, Bloomberg says here, police are wasting too much time stopping white people:

https://twitter.com/upmtn/status/1227087712634724352

Ooof. Bloomberg has since disavowed stop-and-frisk but claims he had no racial animus in putting it forward. And perhaps he didn’t, but comments like this make a case against Bloomberg for promoting racist policing policies a lot easier to make. That matters much more in the Democratic primary than it will in a general election, since Donald Trump also supported stop-and-frisk at that time, but apparently had the good sense not to say something like “we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

So let’s play a game of Clue. Who’s releasing the oppo research on Bloomberg now? Is it Mr. Green in the Oval Office with the Twitter app? Or is it Colonel Bluster in the Malarkey Express with the lead weight? Or could it be Professor Glum in the streets with the guillotines? Not enough cards have been played to know for sure, but this might be one to consider:

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One clear winner has emerged so far from the Democratic presidential contest, according to strategists aligned with the president: Donald Trump.

That’s the thinking among Republican strategists as Joe Biden’s poll numbers have declined in New Hampshire and a two-way race between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg appeared to emerge ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary here, yielding what they see as a best-case scenario for Trump. …

One unknown variable: former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Trump advisers noted that there has been limited head-to-head polling on Trump vs. Bloomberg since Bloomberg began his national ad spending blitz.

But an advantage Trump advisers see to Bloomberg’s emergence is the potential for a far longer Democratic primary season that provides ample opportunity to sow further division in the party — setting up the scenario of the socialist vs. the billionaire should Sanders remain in the race, as well.

Don’t forget that Trump had a ringside seat during Bloomberg’s mayoral terms and has a long memory for slights. Now that Bloomberg appears to be splitting the centrist-y lane that Biden was occupying by himself (as is Buttigieg and now Amy Klobuchar), Trump needs to make sure Bloomberg doesn’t dominate it in order to extend the fight for the nomination as long as possible. The longer the Democratic primaries go, the more resources and internal goodwill Democrats burn.

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And this is just getting started. Oppo researchers have a long and very public record to parse. In the end, this might be more of a Murder on the Orient Express than a game of Clue.

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