Mike Bloomberg apologized for calling fellow presidential candidate Cory Booker “well spoken” in a TV interview Friday, after the New Jersey senator said he was “taken aback” by what he saw as a racist “trope.”
“I probably shouldn’t have used the word, but I could just tell you he is a friend of mine,” Bloomberg told reporters in Georgia later Friday. “He is a Rhodes Scholar, which is much more impressive than my academic background. I envy him.”
Booker criticized Bloomberg’s use of the phrase — which is considered condescending and offensive by many African American — after he said it during a “CBS This Morning” interview earlier Friday.
“I was taken aback by it,” Booker, 50, told SiriusXM radio show Signal Boost, adding he hoped the multi-billionaire now understood why the comment was hurtful.
“It’s sort of stunning at times that we are still revisiting these sort of tired, you know, tropes or the language we have out there that folks, I don’t think they understand, the fact that they don’t understand is problematic,” he said.
Bloomberg’s comments were made during an interview in which the multi-billionaire got defensive when asked if he was trying to ‘buy the election,’ and told journalists who work for his company who’ve complained about his ban on coverage of him to take the money and shut up.
Both men are presidential candidates and have known each other more than a decade when Booker was the mayor of Newark and Bloomberg was mayor of New York City from 2006 to 2013, Booker told Signal Boost.
“I have a great deal of regard for him as somebody who helped me help the city of Newark,” Booker said.
“I’m sure Mike gets it now, I hope, and I hope people around him are talking to him about why that plays into what is, for the black community in particular, just these are signs of frustration that we continue to deal with.”
The comments echo similar remarks presidential candidate Joe Biden made about Barack Obama during the 2007 campaign, calling him “articulate.”
“You’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy, Biden, then a Delaware senator, said in January 2007. “I mean, that’s a story book, man.”
The slap prompted Biden to call Obama to personally apologize.
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