President Obama met at the White House with 18 mayors about youth gun violence yesterday — but Mayor Bloomberg wasn’t on hand, even though he’s widely considered the nation’s leading spokesman on the subject.
Bloomberg’s office said he was invited last week, but couldn’t attend because of an unexplained scheduling conflict.
His conspicuous absence comes just days after he penned an opinion piece in The New York Times slamming Obama for “caving” on anti-tobacco measures in trade negotiations.
The administration is “on the verge of bowing to pressure from a powerful special-interest group,” the mayor said in the article.
One administration source insisted the mayor’s absence wasn’t intended as a snub and that Bloomberg has been invited before to events in Washington that he has had to turn down for scheduling reasons.
Yesterday’s meeting included Newark Mayor and Senate nominee Cory Booker, plus the mayors of Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Oakland, Calif., and Flint, Mich.
All but two of the mayors are members of the Bloomberg-funded Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
The powwow was an effort to recover from the failure of Congress to enact new gun-control laws.