Two sides of the same coin?

Allegations of sexism and gendered workplace harassment are nothing new to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; in the past 20 years, Bloomberg's company has reportedly been hit with nearly 40 discrimination and harassment lawsuits from 64 employees. The Reflector reached out via social media and asked, in light of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's controversial stop-and-frisk policy and recent misogynistic allegations, would it be hypocritical for him to run against Donald Trump in the presidential election? Mike Matheny of Norwalk thinks that Bloomberg and Trump are one and the same, but it isn't hypocritical for Bloomberg to run. "Hypocritical? No," Matheny said. "Just two sides of the same coin. Neither person's ego could resist such an opportunity." On the other hand Natalie Stringer, of Norwalk, said the Democratic Party should not endorse Bloomberg if he were to win the nomination. "I don't really think that it is hypocritical for him to want to run for president, but I do think it would be hypocritical of the party if they were to support him," Stringer said. "Almost everyone in the party has spoken out against president Trump for being a racist and sexually harassing women, so for them to turn around and support a rich guy from the same city, with the same type of sexual behaviors and racist practices would just be wrong." Bloomberg, meanwhile, maintains he would not be where he is today without talented women around him and pointed out that he picked Patricia Harris, a woman, as his deputy mayor during Wednesday night's debate in Nevada. He added Harris is the CEO of his charitable foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies. "I've depended on their leadership, their advice, and their contributions," Bloomberg recently said on social media. "As I've demonstrated throughout my career, I will always be a champion for women in the workplace." Bloomberg was attacked early and often as for the first time the former New York mayor directly faced off against his opponents. Bernie Sanders wasted no time highlighting the mayor's support of a stop-and-frisk New York City police policy that was heavily criticised by civil rights activists. Elizabeth Warren brought up derogatory comments Bloomberg is reported to have made about women and the private agreements he has made to settle sexual harassment and hostile workplace lawsuits. "Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another," she said Bloomberg also became irritated when Warren asked him to release dozens of women from nondisclosure agreements they signed after working for his financial media company, Bloomberg. "I'd like to talk about who we're running against," Warren said. "A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and no I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like red lining and stop and frisk." Bloomberg stood by his decision not to drop the nondisclosure agreements that keep details of the lawsuits against his companies private. After multiple candidates asked him to publicly release female employees from the agreements, he declined, saying that they protect both parties. "We have a very few nondisclosure agreements," Bloomberg said. "None of them accused me of doing anything other than maybe they didn't like a joke I told ... there's agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet, and that's up to them. They signed those agreements and we'll live with it," he said. Moderator Lester Holt asked Bloomberg how he thought the policy reflected his views on people of color and that led to a back and forth between Bloomberg and Biden. "Well, if I go back and look at my time in office, the one thing that I'm really worried about, embarrassed about, was how it turned out with stop-and-frisk," Bloomberg said. "When I got into office, there were 650 murders a year in New York City. And I thought that my first responsibility was to give people the right to live. That's the basic right of everything. And we started a — we adopted a policy which had been in place, the policy that all big police departments used of stop-and-frisk. "What happened, however, was it got out of control. And when we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop and frisks, we cut 95 percent of it out. And I sat down with a bunch of African-American clergy and business people to talk about this, to try to learn. I've talked to a number of kids who had been stopped. And I was trying to understand how we change our policies so we can keep the city safe, because the crime rate did go from 650, down 50 percent to 300. We have to keep the lid on crime, but we cannot go out and stop people indiscriminately." "Let's get something straight," Biden said. "The reason stop-and-frisk changed is because Barack Obama sent moderators to see what was going on. When we sent them there to say this practice has to stop, the mayor thought it was a terrible idea we send them there. A terrible idea. "It's not whether he apologized or not, it's the policy," Biden said. "The policy was abhorrent. And it was, in fact, a violation of every right people have. And our administration sent in people to monitor it. And at the very time the mayor argued against that. This idea that he figured out it was a bad idea, he figured out it was a bad idea after we sent in monitors and said it must stop. Even then he continued the policy."