The sad thing is, everything in that headline is true. I would take Mike over Trump, though by a damned small margin. Not only does Bloomberg have a record of obvious racism, blame-shifting with regard to the provenance of the Great Recession, authoritarian longings, and a frenzied Likudist/interventionist take on foreign affairs, as mayor he tried to force mothers of newborns to breast feed their babies.1
A 2015 tape of Bloomberg speaking at an affair in snow-white Aspen, Colorado contains this choice passage:
“Ninety-five percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” Bloomberg said. “They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of people that are getting killed."
Well, no, Mike, that’s not how it is. It’s “interesting” that a man who made billions supplying reams of data for intense quantitative analysis can, when the subject turns to violent crime, sound like Park Avenue matron after her third martini—a comparison that is, in all likelihood, totally unfair to Park Avenue matrons, drunk or sober.
Here’s the facts, Mike. First off, according to 2018 FBI statistics, if you’re a white guy, and you do get offed, there’s an 81% chance that another honkie will be pulling the trigger. Secondly, while it’s true that slightly over half of murders committed in the U.S. are committed by blacks, even though they constitute only about 15% of the population, so that blacks are, in fact, far more violent than any other group, 52% ain’t 95%, something that one of your fancy little machines that have made you so rich should be able to tell you, if you ever bothered reasoning with your head rather than your rectum.
Mike displayed further obtusiosity regarding the causes of the recent unpleasantness known as the “Great Recession.” Asked why Wall Street suffered a systemic meltdown while largely running on “Mike Machines”, Mike “explained” that “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp,” causing me to snort, snicker, and sneer “Michael Bloomberg: Dumber than the Kochs? Or just more unscrupulous?”. You might have thought that a “centrist” like Mike would have tried to take a “centrist” position—“Both sides made mistakes”—if only out of politeness, but not Mike.2 Poor people bad, rich people good!
On top of that, of course, is Mike’s record of frat boy trash talk, the way the big boys talk when they walk the walk down on the Street. Mike doesn’t look like a bad ass, of course, and, as far as I know, he wasn’t really a bad ass, but it clearly gave him a thrill to talk like a bad ass. It probably made him feel, you know, “less Jewish”.
Which leads to another aspect of Mike that’s “problematic” to me, his clear, though largely implicit, embrace of the Likudist line with regard to Israel. Mike doesn’t say much himself about Israel, but his minions at the “Bloomberg View” sure do. Back before President Trump canceled President Obama’s agreement with Iran regarding nuclear weapons, “Bloomberg View” presented an endless chorus of complaints demanding, you know, real action!.
Yeah, there’s so much not to like about Mike that one has to ask “what is there to like”? Over at Slate, Tom Scocca has a piece similar to this one, though Tom, more lefty than me—I am still a neoliberal, though, compared to Mike, definitely a lefty neoliberal—is even less enthusiastic than I am.
The basic answer, for me, is that he isn’t Trump. Anyone on the horizon would be better than Trump, because a second term of Trump would surely be much worse than his first term, unless he somehow totally self-destructed and discredited his entire “movement”. Bernie Sanders would be better than Trump, even though he would be a terrible president, totally out of his depth. Elizabeth Warren would not be much better. Pete Buttigieg is small city mayor, Amy Klobuchar a Midwest housewife, while Joe Biden is Joe Biden. All the Democratic candidates are amateurs of one kind or another, even Joe Biden. There’s a reason why Uncle Joe never won the presidential nomination. Perhaps Pete or Amy can convince people they’ve got the right stuff, and I’m willing to be convinced, but right now I’m skeptical.
There is no doubt that electing someone like Mike Bloomberg president represents a failure of America, but, clearly, America has failed when one of its political parties collapses, as the Republican Party has, and lets itself be taken over by a solipsistic egomaniac who so far has fortunately displayed no greater goal than his own self-glorification. The political crisis sweeping the globe—the revenge of the “left behind”, which includes many on both the left and the right—continues to slap us around despite the prosperity that the U.S. has enjoyed for the past four years. People have lost faith in the “system” and their ability to manipulate it. They want guaranteed security of some sort. They want protection, which unfortunately makes them afraid of freedom.
One guarantee that Bloomberg would be better than Trump, beyond the simple fact that his ideas are better, is that he would not have the unthinking support of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party under Michael Bloomberg would function as congressional parties always did until Trump came along. There will be no Cult of Bloomberg as there is of Trump. It’s true that Bloomberg can buy a lot of support, but he can’t buy worship. He’ll always be a manager, not a hero.
1. Literally true. Back in 2012, Amy Sullivan reported in the New Republic that the Big Apple was encouraging hospitals to get tough with new moms who didn’t want feed their infants as God and Nature intended: “Parents who want to bottle-feed their infants will have to convince a nurse to sign out formula for them by giving a medical reason for every bottle. They’ll also have to endure a lecture about why they really should be breastfeeding instead.”
2. Back in 2011, Mike Konczal, at “Rortybomb,” provided a detailed analysis—you know, what Mike should have done before he started shooting his mouth off—explaining why Mike was simply talking out of his ass on this one. Two years later, Konczal updated his arguments to refute Sen. Marco Rubio’s reworking of Bloomberg’s banalities.
