Speaking in Mountain View, CA, “Mayor Mike” gave the Republican establishment and the Administration in particular both barrels:
[W]hen [the interviewer] asked him about a hypothetical independent candidate deciding to enter the race, Bloomberg launched into a broad critique of the Bush administration and Congress — without naming names — and a lament on the empty theatrics of the presidential debates to date.
“I think the country is in trouble,” Bloomberg said, listing the war in Iraq and America’s declining standing globally as two principal examples.
“Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years,” he said. “We’ve had a go-it-alone mentality in a world where because of communications and transportation, you should be going exactly in the other direction.”
He also faulted the U.S. government’s failure to halt genocide “and protect freedom elsewhere in the world.”
In a speech later in Los Angeles, Bloomberg revisted the theme, saying partisan gridock in Washington had paralyzed government and left “our future in jeopardy.” He said the nation’s “wrong-headed course” could be changed if there is a commitment to shared values and solving problems without regard to party label.
“It all begins with independence,” he said, opening a University of Southern California conference examining ways to build consensus in a divided government. Progress, he added, “means embracing pragmatism over partisanship, ideas over ideology.”
In Mountain View, Bloomberg seemed to side with President Bush when he decried “an anti-immigration policy that is a disgrace” and called for a more open migration policy. And he dismissed the notion of deporting illegal immigrants as part of immigration reform.
“We need to recognize we’re not going to deport 12 million people already here,” he said. “Let’s get serious, we don’t have an army big enough to do that, it would be devastating to our economy, it would be the biggest mass deportation of people in the world.”
The mayor said there had been too little discussion of health care and education on the campaign trail, and later blamed journalists for not asking hard enough questions of the candidates.
In one of his harshest comments, Bloomberg dismissed creationism — the theory that the universe was created by intelligent design — mistakenly calling it “creationalism.” The remark made plain that Bloomberg has no interest in running in the Republican presidential primary, where outreach to Christian conservatives is critical.
“It’s scary in this country, it’s probably because of our bad educational system, but the percentage of people that believe in Creationalism is really scary for a country that’s going to have to compete in the world where science and medicine require a better understanding,” he said.
This is an interesting example of the bit of political set theory we saw this morning at Tom Tomorrow’s blog: In the GOP, there are sincere conservatives, bright conservatives, and conservatives who support the Administration. It’s possible to find examples of each of these categories, and some persons may belong to any two of them, but there are no conservatives who belong to all three.