02/14/2020
Michael Bloomberg Appeared To Blame Obama For Racial Division In 2016
The Democratic candidate has been touting his relationship with the former president in his ubiquitous campaign ads.
Though Democratic presidential candidate
Michael Bloomberg has been playing up his relationship with
Barack Obama in his recent campaign ads, the billionaire once blamed the former president for letting racial division thrive.
During a November 2016 speaking event at Oxford University in England, the former New York City mayor suggested that Obama had failed to address issues of racial segregation:
I would argue that today we are more segregated, in America certainly, than we were, in terms of race, than we were a dozen years ago, and yet we're just finishing up eight years with our first Black president. "Why are we more separated than we were before?" is the question you've got to ask yourself. Why during the Obama administration didn't we pull together? Ask the president. That's his job really to pull people together.
You can listen to the remarks around minute 54.
Those critical comments from 2016 throw a bit of a wrench in the image of his and Obama's relationship that Bloomberg's campaign has tried to push. A
Bloomberg ad that began circulating Feb. 5 centers entirely on past supportive comments Obama has made about the candidate, including one praising him for bringing people together.
