The Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, may run for president, and former White House political director Ed Rollins, writing in Sunday's Washington Post, thinks that could "turn out to be a good thing for American democracy." Rollins, to show us why, engages in good-natured sophistry; as former Republican administration officials do when they are convinced that Ronald Reagan's political heir presumptive is someone to the left of Walter Mondale.
Why Bloomberg? Rollins begins factually. The mayor is, indisputably, serving a second term. And? He enjoys wide public approval that, when he was still a Republican, was given strongly by opposition voters. And? He is "one of the least ideological." Here Rollins infers, wrongly, that an independent registration implies pragmatism. If "unaffiliated" does not mean "indifferent," a very deliberate choice has been made. Ideologues eschew parties precisely because they interrupt the flow from notion to policy.
Speaking of beliefs, Rollins attempts a convertend: a favorite axiom of the fortieth president's into one of the would-be forty-fourth's. "There is no limit to what a man can accomplish," Reagan espoused, "if he doesn't care who gets the credit," and that speaks to civic and personal humility. Bloomberg says, "Working together, there's no limit to what we can do," which could mean stock options for a five-year contract and a non-disclosure agreement. Similar statements, suggests Rollins — well, at least they are homophonic.
Mayor Bloomberg's watchword is "control." He has raised taxes and allowed city hall to promulgate so restrictively that statutes include the expunging, from food, of a certain type of grease. The actor minimized government; the entrepreneur exalts it to a desideratum. "An energizer, a force that gives other unaffiliated and justifiably frustrated citizens a candidate to support" — for what, the liquidation of those frustrating, consecutive daily choices?
Another quality Rollins attributes to Bloomberg is that Bloomberg isn't H. Ross Perot. Now, Perot would have treated the United States like a miniskirted stenographer, yes, but Bloomberg's misconception would simply be different. Based on his own tenure, the mayor should run the country like an apartment: payment on first of month, approved furniture and appliances on premises, two cats maximum. On that, we have no guarantee that Landlord Bloomberg will allow rent control.