Presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is airing an ad during Super Bowl LIV that is timed for maximum relevance: It features the grieving mother of a George, 20, who was fatally shot before he could realize his football dreams, all to lay out Bloomberg’s stance on gun violence.
“I just kept saying, ‘You cannot tell me that a child I gave birth to is no longer here,’” George’s mother, Calandrian Simpson Kemp, says in the minute-long spot. “Lives are being lost every day. It’s a national crisis.”
She goes on to say that Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, has “been in this fight for so long” and has “heard mothers crying.”
As an anti-gun violence advocate, Simpson Kemp says she felt like her community finally had “a dog in the fight” after Bloomberg announced he was running for the Democratic nomination: “I know Mike is not afraid of the gun lobby. They’re scared of him. And they should be.”
Following Bloomberg’s November 2019 announcement of his entrance into the 2020 presidential campaign, Bloomberg News suspended its editorial board while several of its members join the former New York City mayor on his campaign staff, according to an internal memo from editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.
In the memo, which was first published by Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, Micklethwait says that the editorial board was Bloomberg’s closest source of personal influence on his media company. While the op-ed section will continue to publish pieces from its columnists and guest writers, there will be no unsigned pieces from the editorial board while executive editors David Shipley and Tim O’Brien work on Bloomberg’s campaign.