“I was taken aback by it. I'll say this, you know, Mike and I have known each other for a long time," Booker told the “Signal Boost” radio show on SiriusXM, going on to praise the Bloomberg for the support he offered him several years ago, when Booker was mayor of Newark.

The senator said it was “sort of stunning at times that we are still revisiting these sort of tired, you know, tropes or the language we have out there that folks, I don't think understand — the fact that they don't understand is problematic.”

Booker rebuked Joe Biden over the summer for statements the former vice president made about working with segregationist lawmakers during his time in the Senate, and has recently targeted Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., for his inability to gain ground within the African American community.

Still, Biden has enjoyed the steady backing of most black Democratic voters, while Buttigieg has re-emerged in recent weeks as a top-tier primary contender. At the same time, Booker has yet to qualify for the December debate stage after languishing in public polling, and California Sen. Kamala Harris exited the nominating contest Tuesday.

“I don't understand how we've gotten to this place where there's more billionaires in the race than there are black people,” Booker lamented Wednesday in a Buzzfeed News interview on Twitter.

Asked about that assessment Friday on “CBS This Morning,” Bloomberg said of Booker: “He's very well-spoken. He's got some good ideas.”

That characterization and others like it have been roundly denounced as patronizing and offensive to people of color, and were infamously invoked by prominent politicians during former President Barack Obama’s entrance onto the national stage and subsequent 2008 White House run.

“I mean, you've got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a story-book, man,” Biden, then a U.S. senator from Delaware, said in January 2007.

Former President George W. Bush also said Obama was “an attractive guy” and “articulate” during an interview on Fox News that same month. Such outmoded turns of phrase have no place in the 2020 election cycle, Booker argued Friday.

“This is part of the campaign, and lots of people say things that they wish they could take back, and I'm sure people — Mike gets it now, I hope,” he said, later adding: “I think that what we as a party have to understand is that we can't win without not just the African American vote, but we can't win without the enthusiastic sport of black voters.”