http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/nyregion/19bloomberg.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&bl Bloomberg Pushes Moderates in National Races
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: September 18, 2010
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In an election year when anger and mistrust have upended races across the country, toppling moderates and elevating white-hot partisans, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is trying to pull politics back to the middle, injecting himself into marquee contests and helping candidates fend off the Tea Party.
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Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg backs Lincoln D. Chafee, right, for governor of Rhode Island.Readers' Comments
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New York’s billionaire mayor, whose flurry of activity is stirring a new round of speculation about his presidential ambitions, is supporting Republicans, Democrats and independents who he says are not bound by rigid ideology and are capable of compromise, qualities he says he fears have become alarmingly rare in American politics.
Next month, Mr. Bloomberg will travel to California to campaign for Meg Whitman, the eBay entrepreneur and Republican running for governor on a platform of corporate-style accountability and fiscal prudence. He visited Rhode Island on Thursday to champion Lincoln D. Chafee, a Republican turned independent who is locked in a three-way battle for the governor’s office.
And, in perhaps the mayor’s most direct confrontation with a Tea Party candidacy, he will host a fund-raiser at his Manhattan town house for Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader facing an unexpectedly forceful challenge from Sharron E. Angle, a political neophyte backed by Sarah Palin.
In his first extensive interview with a newspaper in several years, Mr. Bloomberg outlined his plans, which will include raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for candidates and represent his greatest involvement in a national election since he entered public life a decade ago.
Mr. Bloomberg described the Tea Party movement as a fad, comparing it to the short-lived burst of support for Ross Perot in 1992. The mayor suggested that the fury it had unleashed was not a foundation for leadership.
“Look, people are angry,” he said. “Their anger is understandable. Washington isn’t working. Government seems to be paralyzed and unable to solve all of our problems.”
“Anger, however, is not a government strategy,” he said. “It’s not a way to govern.”
Mr. Bloomberg said he wanted to see more of the cooperation once displayed by Senators Orrin G. Hatch and Edward M. Kennedy.
He said that he would not have voted for either of them (“one because he’s too liberal for me, one because he’s too conservative for me”), but added, “These two guys who went into the Senate together and were the closest of personal friends for 40 years, they were everything that democracy says a senator should be.”
In the last election, Mr. Bloomberg, the nation’s most prominent and wealthiest independent elected official, explored the possibility of a presidential run but concluded that the moment was not right for a third-party candidacy. But his plunge back into national politics suggests he is once again seeking to elevate his profile and test the viability of running as a centrist problem solver.
Mike Murphy, a Republican political strategist who is advising Ms. Whitman’s campaign, called Mr. Bloomberg “a very special breed.”
“People see him not through a Democratic or Republican prism, but through a results, grown-up, get-it-fixed, make-it-work prism, which is very attractive,” Mr. Murphy said. “He has a very wide appeal.”
Asked about a White House bid, the mayor forcefully dismissed the idea that he would run but sounded restless, acknowledging he was casting about for a new career after City Hall. But he said the presidency was the only job he would want in Washington.
“I don’t know what the next thing is,” Mr. Bloomberg said, stressing that he would not be interested in serving as Treasury secretary or anything else in an Obama cabinet. “I am not an adviser; I am not an analyst,” he said. “You know, I am a doer.”
President Obama has been publicly courting Mr. Bloomberg recently, inviting him to play golf on Martha’s Vineyard and dispatching Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Gracie Mansion to seek the mayor’s views on the economy.
Still, asked whether he would endorse Mr. Obama for re-election now, Mr. Bloomberg declined to do so, and said his friends in business felt “vilified” by the federal government.
But during a week in which the Republican Party experienced searing defeats at the hands of Tea Party activists, it was Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks about the movement that were especially striking.
“I think these boomlets come along when the public is dissatisfied,” he said. “There was a Ross Perot boomlet, there was a John McCain boomlet, there’s the Tea Party boomlet.”
Mr. Bloomberg added, “It isn’t like people are going to gravitate towards one of these boomlet — splinter might not be quite the right word, since it might have other connotations — but the small nouveau parties.”
Eventually, the mayor said, “people go back to the major parties.”
His endorsements hinge on several factors — a person’s level of independence and record on immigration and guns — but that approach has aligned him with at least five candidates facing Tea Party-favored opponents.
Mr. Bloomberg has endorsed a Democrat, John Hickenlooper, for governor of Colorado, whose rival, Dan Maes, has called for the deportation of illegal immigrants and decried a bicycle-sharing program as a threat to personal freedom. The mayor supports Senator Michael F. Bennet, another Colorado Democrat, who is running against the Tea Party-backed Republican Ken Buck.
The mayor has endorsed Mark S. Kirk, an Illinois Republican running for the Senate who beat back a Tea Party primary candidate,
and he is supporting Joe Sestak, a Pennsylvania Democrat, for the Senate. Mr. Sestak faces an uphill fight against Pat Toomey, a Tea Party challenger. In Nevada, Mr. Bloomberg has embraced Mr. Reid, whose challenger, Ms. Angle, wants to phase out Social Security.
But a blessing from the mayor could create a backlash. In Nevada, where Republicans are seeking to portray Mr. Reid as too cozy with Wall Street, Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the state party, said that a fund-raiser at the mayor’s home “will only remind Nevadans of how well he’s represented New York’s interests in Washington.”
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Levi Russell, a spokesman for the Tea Party Express, which helped defeat Michael N. Castle, a Republican whom Mr. Bloomberg backed in Tuesday’s Delaware primary, said the mayor was “doing everything possible to maintain the status quo — to keep old names in power.” He added that Mr. Bloomberg was “out of touch with the zeitgeist.”
But those seeking Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement say that voters are not simply angry; they want solutions to problems, and that the mayor represents a government that, by all accounts, works well. Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a Democrat who won the mayor’s backing for re-election this year, said voters were “sick of partisanship and they want us to deliver.”
“Mayor Bloomberg speaks to that desire in a powerful way,” he said.
Mr. Sestak said he hoped the support of a mayor who values an apolitical style would prompt Pennsylvania voters to question the Tea Party’s brand of elbows-out conservatism. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Let’s think this through,’ ” he said, adding, “There is too much extremism right now.”
Candidates across the country are pursuing the mayor. In Connecticut, both nominees for governor have sought his assistance. One Congressional candidate offered to fly to New York to be photographed with him.
In the interview, Mr. Bloomberg radiated enthusiasm about his chance to have an impact on national politics and reveled in his own status as a rare popular incumbent. (A recent New York Times poll showed that nearly 60 percent of city voters approve of the job he is doing.)
In Providence a few days ago, Mr. Chafee’s campaign treated Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement like a visit from a head of state. A ballroom at the Biltmore Hotel was booked for the event, and the mayor was given a police escort.
Even if Mr. Bloomberg never runs for president, an ill-fated quest for several New York mayors, he remains enough of a force — especially in the business world — that senior White House officials seem determined to co-opt him, through flattery and attention.
Asked about the wooing by the White House, Mr. Bloomberg suggested that the Obama administration, in publicly reaching out to him, was trying to telegraph its understanding of voter unrest and disgust with party bickering.
The mayor, who started out as a Democrat, then became a Republican and later an independent, said Mr. Obama was seeking “to be seen to be, if not reaching across the aisle, at least reaching out for an independent view.”
“It was a good time to be a Democrat at one point, and it was a good time to be a Republican at one point,” he said. “Today, it’s a good time to be an independent.”
Relishing his access to Mr. Obama and the status it has bestowed on him, Mr. Bloomberg added, “He doesn’t invite very many people to play golf.”
Asked to grade Mr. Obama’s leadership and his record in office, the mayor was careful to not criticize the president directly. “He’s had a tough row to hoe, in all fairness,” he said. But he hinted at the resentment of his fellow corporate chieftains toward government officials like Mr. Obama, who have questioned Wall Street compensation.
“I feel very strongly we should not be — success should not be frowned on, and I have lots of friends, wealthy people, made a lot of money, were big Obama supporters, gave him money, raised money for him, who are not happy now,” he said.
“They all say the same thing: ‘I knew I was going to have to pay more taxes. Somebody’s got to do it, and I’ve got the money,’ ” he said. “ ‘But I didn’t expect to be vilified.
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