Mike Bloomberg has been attaching himself to the hip of Obama in all his commercials as if they’ve been mutual supporters. Yet in newly exposed tapes, he trashed his endorsement of Obama.
A new Bloomberg tape emerges that proves who he is.
English Catholic historian, politician, and writer John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton coined the phrase “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…” As more and more billionaires expose themselves to the public, that statement seems to become ever so prescient.
Mike Bloomberg made it quite clear that he was not too keen on endorsing President Obama. The New York Times reported the endorsement as follows in 2012.
Even in his endorsement, the mayor continued to express criticism of the president. He said Mr. Obama had fallen short of his 2008 campaign promise to be a problem solver and consensus builder, noting that Mr. Obama had “devoted little time” to creating a coalition of centrists in Washington who could find common ground on important issues like illegal guns, immigration, tax reform and deficit reduction.
“Rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice,” Mr. Bloomberg said of Mr. Obama, “he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive populist agenda focused more on redistributing income than creating it.”
In making his endorsement, Mr. Bloomberg listed the various steps that Mr. Obama had taken over the last four years to confront the issue of climate change, including pushing regulations that seek to curtail emissions from cars and power plants. But the mayor cited other reasons for endorsing Mr. Obama, including the president’s support for abortion rights and for same-sex marriage, two high-priority issues for the mayor.
At the same time, Mr. Bloomberg said he might have endorsed Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, except for the fact that the Republican had abandoned positions that he once publicly held.
“In the past he has taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care — but he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the very health care model he signed into law in Massachusetts,” the mayor said of Mr. Romney.
Notice the billionaire was trying to have his cake and eat it too. The tapes made it clear the disrespect he had for Democrats who he expected to balk at such a backhanded endorsement.
“The second Obama election I wrote a very backhanded endorsement of Obama,” Bloomberg said. “Saying I thought he hadn’t done the right thing, hadn’t done, hadn’t been good at things that I think are important and Romney would be a better person at doing that. But Romney did not stick with the values that he had when he was governor of Massachusetts.”
“He was much more liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-immigration, things that I care about. And so I was going to vote for Barack Obama. I thought the Democrats would throw it back in my face. They loved the endorsement.“
Is this who we would want leading the Democratic Party? The country? I think not.