Michael Bloomberg Isn’t a Moderate — He’s Just Out of Touch
Amid the possibility that Democrats will nominate a New England socialist while Republicans are in thrall to Donald Trump’s theatrically fascist campaign, Michael Bloomberg believes he may be poised to claim some mythical middle ground with a history-making independent bid for the White House.
The former New York City mayor is both media mogul and media darling. As a self-made billionaire with deep connections to both Wall Street and New York media, he is persistently portrayed as a public intellectual. As an equal-opportunity offender of Republicans and Democrats alike, he can lay claim to the “moderate” label that seems so appealing in these extreme political times.
Many of us like to think of ourselves as moderate, in opposition to the extremists on the other side of the debate. But somehow, despite a glut of moderation and bipartisan sentiment, people on the left and the right keep getting elected to national office, while those like Bloomberg are left sniping from the chairs of weekend chat shows.
There’s a reason for this: Bloomberg’s brand of moderation is not popular. His economic platform, as he described it repeatedly between 2011 and 2013, is full of ideas that voters simply do not want. For example, he has proposed to balance the federal budget by 2025 by raising taxes across the board (including for middle-class workers) while cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because Bloomberg’s ideas are based on the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan committee put together by President Obama in 2010 with the mission of breaking Washington gridlock and balancing the federal budget. It became known as the Simpson/Bowles Committee, and it failed because setting up a blue-ribbon panel to accomplish something voters don’t want cannot work in a democracy. Simpson/Bowles polled quite poorly among voters, and the ideas flopped in Congress.
Bloomberg endorses all of the recommendations of Simpson/Bowles and has spent considerable time and money lobbying Congress to adopt such remedies since early 2011. The promise of the moderate is that they can deliver on some unspoken public will but this promise is fantasy. There simply is no groundswell of support for the economic ideas behind a Bloomberg candidacy.