City Room: Bloomberg Tells Trump to Drop the ‘Birther’ Issue

 

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who once harbored presidential aspirations himself, had some advice on Sunday for another billionaire considering national office: Stay away from the “birther” issue.

Mr. Bloomberg, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” declared flatly that “the President was born here,’’ and suggested that Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon now exploring a presidential run, is not helping his prospective candidacy by affiliating with those who argue that President Obama was not born in the United States.

“The Republicans are making a terrible mistake in making this a big issue,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We have immigration, we have the deficit, we have the economy. Those are the things that the public cares about.”

Still, Mr. Bloomberg called Mr. Trump a friend and “New York icon,” and he said that “anybody can run for president.’’

Citing the wisdom of his longtime girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor, an investment banker, Mr. Bloomberg said that what matters to the public are the issues of jobs and housing. “If the Republican Party doesn’t start addressing that,” he said, “they will lose and they deserve to.”

Making his first appearance on the Fox program, Mr. Bloomberg seemed to have a word of advice for everyone on Sunday. He said President Obama should spend more time wooing his political foes. “He has to pick up the phone and call and say, ‘I know we disagree on this, but I just want to say, I heard it was your wife’s birthday, or your kid just got into college.’ ”

He said Republicans and Democrats in Congress need to find common ground, and come up with a plan to reduce the nation’s debt. “We seem to be emphasizing our differences in this politically charged time, rather than focusing on what unites us,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg grew most passionate in discussing immigration, an issue he has emphasized as mayor. He said providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is essential to growing the economy. “You’re not going to solve the problem,” he said, “by yelling and screaming at those people.”

The mayor’s loquaciousness on all things national seemed to beg a familiar question: Does he see the White House in his future?

“I’m not running for president,” he said twice to Chris Wallace, the show’s host. “Is that explicit enough?”

Mr. Bloomberg told Mr. Wallace that, at a dinner in Brooklyn on Saturday night, somebody had told him he would make a great president.

“Thank you very much,” Mr. Bloomberg said he replied, “but I have a job.”

 

City Room: Thrills, Chills, Roller Coasters? Bloomberg Will Pass

 Yana Paskova for The New York Times Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg looks on as Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, addresses the crowd during the opening of the Scream Zone amusement park in Coney Island.

It was not Edvard Munch’s “Scream.” It was not Michael Jackson’s “Scream.” And it was not even Howard Dean’s infamous Iowa scream.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as a crowd witnessed on Wednesday, is apparently not one for screaming.

On a day so foggy that the boardwalk’s towering Ferris wheel seemed to brush the clouds, Mr. Bloomberg traveled to Coney Island to help christen the Scream Zone, a new amusement park that will feature four “thrill” rides.

“Nothing says summer like Coney Island, I think it’s fair to say,” Mr. Bloomberg said, speaking as the sun began to peek out and the sky turned a pearly blue. “And this week may have gotten off to a damp and gloomy start, but the fact is we are here ready to open four new spine-tingling rides at America’s greatest seaside destination. And the fact that we are ready to do that means that sunny days are ahead for New York City.”

Scream Zone will operate alongside Luna Park, the amusement park that opened last year and helped draw 450,000 people to Coney Island, according to the city. It also boasts two roller coasters — the first major coasters since the terrifyingly rickety Cyclone opened in 1927.

“If you have thrill-seeking friends or loud neighbors, send them down to Scream Zone,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It is the one place in the city where you can scream all you want, and nobody will call 311 to complain. Or if they do, let me say we won’t pay a lot of attention to it.”

Mr. Bloomberg himself does not seem to be much of a roller-coaster aficionado. He said he might have ridden one as a boy at Revere Beach in his home state of Massachusetts, but that he had no “great recollections of it.”

But that didn’t stop Antonio Zamperla, a well-known designer and manufacturer of amusement park rides, from trying to rally the crowd.

“It is now time to scream!” Mr. Zamperla said. “C’mon, where is the scream? Are you ready?”

Everybody cheered, while Mr. Bloomberg opened his mouth — but no words seemed to come out. “Great,” he half-quipped, half-stated as the applause died down.

The mayor seemed to relish more in the idea of others twisting their stomachs into Nathan’s pretzel-size knots.

“We have a special announcement today,” he said when he took the small podium. “The members of the press have volunteered to go on all of the rides, but no seat belts.”

And when he introduced Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, the mayor joked that Mr. Markowitz had volunteered to go on every single ride when the Scream Zone was ready.

“I said yes,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I will go on that sling-shot ride right over there, provided that the mayor ponies up thousands of hundred-dollar bills, high up, so that it will soften my fall. I don’t see a buck out there, mayor!”

Finally, it was time to scream. The mayor made his way over to the Sling Shot — a large blue and yellow orblike contraption that shoots riders 150 feet into the air at 90 miles per hour — and began counting down.

“Get ready, they’re going up,” Mr. Bloomberg said, looking skyward. “0, 1, 2, 3.”

With that, he flipped a large black switch to the up position and, after a brief pause, the orb shot into the air.

Many screams and a few minutes later, the two riders were back on earth, with nothing but praise for the ride.

“I felt like I could do it again, any day, anywhere,” said Najee Jenkins, a 12-year-old from Staten Island, as he hopped off of the Sling Shot. “I didn’t eat anything today. I didn’t dare.”

But Mr. Bloomberg wasn’t interested in doing a test run of his own.

“I don’t have time today,” the mayor said, with a sly grin. “Unfortunately, I have pressing city business.”

 

Covering (and Working for) Bloomberg

 

Mr. Goldman is Bloomberg’s man on Mr. Bloomberg. For 10 years, his assignment has included chronicling Mr. Bloomberg’s ups and downs for the global news service the mayor founded. Now, as Mr. Bloomberg’s third term wobbles through a rough start, with his approval ratings the lowest they have been in eight years and news coverage increasingly critical, Mr. Goldman’s task has gotten trickier: maintaining his down-the-middle style during one of the toughest periods of the mayor’s administration.

Mr. Goldman’s job is inherently problematic: cover the mayor too positively and risk looking like a shill; cover the mayor too negatively and risk the ire of the man who pays his salary.

“I can’t think of a more uncomfortable position to be in,” said Joyce Purnick, the author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics” and a former City Hall bureau chief for The New York Times. “I’m not suggesting any direct pressure to write a certain way or cover something or not cover something or ask something or not ask something. I don’t think Henry would put up with that. But the pressure to just stand up straight and keep things objective — it’s just got to be very, very difficult. I don’t know how he does it.”

While much of Mr. Goldman’s work is praised by his colleagues, Bloomberg News’s coverage of the mayor has come in for some criticism. Last month, an article in Editor & Publisher magazine criticized the New York news media for the way it covered Mr. Bloomberg’s handling of the December blizzard that left the city paralyzed. Bloomberg News, the article reported, “totally ignored the intense debate over the mayor’s whereabouts as 20 inches of snow closed in on New York.”

“The news service,” said the article, written by Allan Wolper, “behaved as if City Hall had sent over a city editor to make sure the majority owner of its company wouldn’t get into trouble during any of his snow days.”

Mr. Goldman, 61, has covered some of the central controversies of the mayor’s tenure: his successful push to win an extension of term limits, and his unsuccessful appointment of Cathleen P. Black as schools chancellor. But Mr. Goldman’s coverage of Mr. Bloomberg is generally in connection with news events, rather than investigatory work.

Mr. Goldman’s portfolio includes topics other than the mayor. Bloomberg News describes him as a state and local municipal finance reporter, and says that differentiates him from other reporters based at City Hall. Mr. Goldman declined to be interviewed for this article, but in 2002, he told American Journalism Review, “It’s a difficult assignment.”

“I’ll stick to documents, what he says, what he does and what others say — and will do it faithfully,” he said in the interview. “In this job, I’m going to be a lot more conservative writing about Bloomberg, because we’d be idiots not to think about what our readers think.”

A spokesman for Bloomberg News declined to comment, but all of Mr. Goldman’s articles that mention Mr. Bloomberg include a matter-of-fact disclosure: “The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg L.P.”

The mayor has also acknowledged a potentially awkward dynamic: at a holiday party in his first term, Mr. Bloomberg, who has been known to tease Mr. Goldman at news conferences about their relationship, presented him with an autographed rock, described as the “Rock and a Hard Place Award.”

“We view Henry like any other reporter,” said Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman. A former deputy of Mr. Loeser’s, John Gallagher, said Mr. Goldman could “definitely be tough, and being in the position he’s in, I never felt we benefited from it.”

“I would occasionally just think,” he added, “?‘This makes no difference.’?”

Mr. Goldman has arguably even lost out on occasion because he works for Bloomberg News. The mayor’s office tends to dole out exclusives to other outlets, and Mr. Goldman has never landed an exclusive interview with Mr. Bloomberg.

“I don’t think his employer gave him any breaks,” said Frankie Edozien, a former City Hall reporter for The New York Post. “Certainly it wasn’t evident, because I was getting things that he wasn’t getting.”