Could NY City Mayor Mike Bloomberg support Mitt Romney?
By Richard K. Barry
I see that Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain was in New York recently talking up presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney with New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
In a different political tradition, some would call Bloomberg a Red Tory - progressive on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues. I'm not unused to politicians like Bloomberg, but he is a rare breed in the U.S. these days.
He supports abortion rights, gay marriage, gun control, amnesty for illegal immigrants, stem-cell research and opposes the death penalty. He supports government action on climate change and state intervention to improve public welfare. On the other hand, he has been an immensely successful businessman, he's naturally strongly pro-business, calls himself a fiscal conservative and is a free-trader. He's kind of hawkish on military matters.
As far as I can tell, Bloomberg seems to be the sort of politician with whom you could have a conversation, with whom you could disagree, with whom you might be able to compromise, in short, the kind of guy with whom you could work in a political sense.
In other words, Bloomberg seems to be the kind of politicians Republicans don't much like. He passes few of their purity tests. He would never have gotten to first base had he decided, in a moment of insanity, to seek the GOP presidential nomination.
The point is that I'm not quite sure why McCain was sniffing around Gracie Mansion trying to, presumably, court Bloomberg's endorsement for Romney. Mayor Bloomberg is not much of a Republican either formally or informally.
His history is that he was Democrat before he ran for elective office. He then ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican. He subsequently left the GOP over philosophical disagreements with the national party leadership and has been an independent ever since.
I don't know what Bloomberg is going to do. We're not in touch. But if he had problems with the GOP in 2007, I can't imagine he'd be thrilled with them today.
I guess if you're Romney, or a surrogate, you have to ask. I'd be disappointed if he said yes. Even if he and I are far from politically sympatico, he still seems far too rational to line up with Romney in the current climate.
(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)
In a different political tradition, some would call Bloomberg a Red Tory - progressive on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues. I'm not unused to politicians like Bloomberg, but he is a rare breed in the U.S. these days.
He supports abortion rights, gay marriage, gun control, amnesty for illegal immigrants, stem-cell research and opposes the death penalty. He supports government action on climate change and state intervention to improve public welfare. On the other hand, he has been an immensely successful businessman, he's naturally strongly pro-business, calls himself a fiscal conservative and is a free-trader. He's kind of hawkish on military matters.
As far as I can tell, Bloomberg seems to be the sort of politician with whom you could have a conversation, with whom you could disagree, with whom you might be able to compromise, in short, the kind of guy with whom you could work in a political sense.
In other words, Bloomberg seems to be the kind of politicians Republicans don't much like. He passes few of their purity tests. He would never have gotten to first base had he decided, in a moment of insanity, to seek the GOP presidential nomination.
The point is that I'm not quite sure why McCain was sniffing around Gracie Mansion trying to, presumably, court Bloomberg's endorsement for Romney. Mayor Bloomberg is not much of a Republican either formally or informally.
His history is that he was Democrat before he ran for elective office. He then ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican. He subsequently left the GOP over philosophical disagreements with the national party leadership and has been an independent ever since.
I don't know what Bloomberg is going to do. We're not in touch. But if he had problems with the GOP in 2007, I can't imagine he'd be thrilled with them today.
I guess if you're Romney, or a surrogate, you have to ask. I'd be disappointed if he said yes. Even if he and I are far from politically sympatico, he still seems far too rational to line up with Romney in the current climate.
(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)
Labels: 2012 presidential election
posted by Richard K. Barry at
11:00 AM
1 Comments:
Found this post by googling "Romney Red Tory" to see if Phillip Blond had any comments.
It's absolutely bizarre to me that you would consider a Red Tory to be "progressive on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues." That's just false.
A Red Tory would be conservative on each, but this means rejecting the neo-liberalism that Republicans foolishly think is conservative.
Blond wants more dispersed local participation in everything, including the market. This means breaking up banks, taxing corporations as they get too big, employee buyouts of certain sectors, etc.
He also supports civic control of the state and market, which would factor into price structures certain negative externalities like pollution, climate change, social degradation, family dissolution, etc.
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