December was his last month on Wall Street. In mid-January he disclosed contributions of $145,000 on top of a $250,000 loan he made to his nascent campaign. By the end of March his full name, Gustavus Adolphus Henry Christensen IV, was grist for a fake Twitter feed whose icon is the mustachioed Monopoly man. The page calls him a “Gazillionaire banker.”
Even friends and colleagues who support his decision to give up banking have asked why he doesn’t want to go to Washington, or why he would want to become a politician.
“The laws that affect our day-to-day lives as New Yorkers most are laws that are written in Albany,” Christensen said.
He wants to fund programs for the poor by raising taxes on the rich, expand New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s push for universal prekindergarten to daycare, release thousands of nonviolent drug offenders from prison and boost the minimum wage and tax credits.
Venture capitalist Perkins and Home Depot Inc. co-founder Langone have apologized for causing offense. In a Bloomberg Television interview, Perkins added that he didn’t “regret the message at all” and said his watch was worth six Rolexes.
“I’m not angry at the barons of Wall Street,” Christensen said. “I don’t think that they’re collectively bad people who need to be punished. I am worried about the other side.”
‘Class Warfare’
His father, Henry Christensen III, stood near the doorway before the Yale Club dinner began.
“Certainly a number of my clients have said, ‘Gus, we’re delighted that you’re running,’” said the attorney, who advises families in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland as head of McDermott Will & Emery’s private-client practice in New York. “‘But why are you running as a Democrat?’”
The candidate’s wife, Courtney, a Sotheby’s art auctioneer, was standing there. They’d gotten married two weeks earlier. Her husband, she said, can understand both of the two cities de Blasio sees carved inside New York by widening inequality. Her father-in-law interrupted.