The BlazeSay what you want about Michael Bloomberg – he’s a nanny-statist with his trans-fat and salt bans – but he’s no slouch when it comes to running a business (he’s a billionaire after all), and he knows how economies work. You can’t say the same about Barack Obama. His greatest achievement before he entered politics as an Illinois state senator was as a community organizer when he sued Citibank under the Community Reinvestment Act because the bank would not give homes loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back.
So when Michael Bloomberg talked to Barack Obama about the economy, you’d think Obama would listen to what Bloomberg had to say and then thank him for taking the time.
You’d be wrong. From Jake Tapper:
The pool report at the time said that “We are told Bloomberg and Obama talked in the clubhouse for about 15 mins about the economy. They then went to the driving range.”
Apparently – at least from a second-hand report – the Obama-Bloomberg convo could have gone better.
In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch says ”Bloomberg said it was a pleasant day. In conversation he put a few ideas … He said it was like verbal ping pong.”
Bloomberg, according to Murdoch, “came back and said ‘I never met in my life such an arrogant man’.”
A spokesman for Bloomberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murdoch – the Australian-born founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of News Corporation, which owns conservative media outlets ranging from Fox News Channel to the New York Post – is described by The Age as saying in the interview that President Obama “might make great speeches but doesn’t get things done and doesn’t listen to anybody.”
What would a community organizer know about solving the world’s largest and most complex economy’s problems? Not a thing, yet he plays verbal ping pong about the economy with a man who created billions of dollars of wealth? Arrogance doesn’t even begin to describe Barack Obama.
Hat tip: The Blaze
