The former New York City mayor should not imagine the country is waiting for him, or that the anti-Trump sniggering of the Upper East Side and the Hamptons has the least connection to the broader American electorate.
"The best aspect of Michael Bloomberg’s potential presidential run is that if he were elected, we may be reasonably confident that he would be a competent president, which should be an immense relief to anyone who takes seriously the possibility that any of the four remaining Democratic candidates with appreciable support—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg—could be elected.
"On a previous presidential campaign, Biden cribbed a silly assertion by Neil Kinnock, the leader of the British opposition at the time, and he joined enthusiastically in Teddy Kennedy’s crucifixion of President Reagan’s outstanding Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. He has much to answer for in Ukraine, and is a seriously unimpressive candidate. It gets worse from there.
"Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is everyone’s nightmare of a nasty kindergarten teacher, terrorizing the class with a wooden spoon. She is a quasi-Marxist who lied about her ethnicity to advance her career, lied about being fired for pregnancy, and she advocates impossible policies—especially in health care—that would not work and could not be financed. She can’t tell the truth, in words or numbers, and the United States is not a Marxist country.
"Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.—until he switches back to independent) is a cranky old Communist, but one who believes in free elections; he endlessly proclaims fatuous revolutions in a manner as irritating in content as it is acoustically. Pete Buttigieg is the indifferent mayor of an under-achieving town. He is advancing the gay cause but is the personification of glibness. But he would be a completely infeasible president.
The Most Sensible of the Lot
"Given this fearsome drought, it is small wonder that Michael Bloomberg is coming down with Potomac Fever again. He built an immense and magnificent commercial news business from scratch; his career is one of the most illustrious of any businessman or industrialist now living. He was, on balance, an excellent mayor of New York. He promoted charter schools, showing some appreciation of the ruination of state schools accomplished by the teachers’ unions, who have turned a huge number of schools into crime-ridden day-care centers that don’t teach anything useful and waste billions of dollars. His “stop and frisk” authorization to police reduced crime in New York, which justified the disagreeable infringement of human liberties, and demonstrates that alone among the possible serious Democratic contenders, he is prepared to dissent from oppressive political correctness." . . .
Why Bloomberg’s presidential run doesn’t have a hope in hell . . "Now Bloomberg is testing the waters as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. But there’s a reason no New York City mayor gets to move up to a higher office, ever, and Bloomberg embodies it: He has annoyed far too many people. My fellow conservatives despise him because of his loud support for abortion and gun control and his unabashed nanny-statism. (Bloomberg cheerfully played Mary Poppins at the Inner Circle show for politicians and journalists.) Meanwhile, liberals hate him because of his loud support for stop-and-frisk programs and because he loves capitalism and Wall Street, not to mention the Iraq War.
"Furthermore, in a Democratic Party that genuflects before the altar of political correctness, he seems almost Trumpishly insensitive. " . . .
