Bloomberg: Obama Needs More Suits In His Circle
Mayor Bloomberg took at shot at President Obama’s cabinet - and his own - today, saying the President needs more business expertise.
“We can all use better advisors. I can use some too,” he said [as two of his top aides exchanged a look of dismay].
“One of those things that I’ve urged the president to do is to get some business people in his close, tight circle,” Bloomberg said of the president. “I think business is—one of the president’s job is to promote American business around the world, sell our products around the world, get people from around the world to come and invest here. That’s a big part of the job.
That’s our tax base. That’s how Americans earn a living and I don’t think he has enough advisers.”
Bloomberg was responding to a question about comments he made about the president in the December issue of GQ Magazine in which he accused the president of breaking campaign promises.
"The president, I think, needs some better advisers," Bloomberg told GQ in an article that named Bloomberg one of its men of the year for being "the most interesting—and most fearless—politician in America."
"He campaigns, 'I'm gonna do A,' and then he doesn't do it. Now he's pissed off the supporters and the opponents."
The mayor did not name any specific promises Obama had broken.
Bloomberg has adamantly denied rumors that he plans to challenge Obama in 2012 but he’s been openly critical about some of the president’s efforts.
His comments today came just minutes after he refused to weigh in on whether the House should censure Charlie Rangel.
“You have to ask the members of the House. I don’t know what the procedures are,” Bloomberg said when asked about Rangel. “I shouldn’t be criticizing. I don’t want them to come to the city and try to tell us how to run New York City.”
Leader: Michael Bloomberg: The Most Interesting & Most Fearless Politician In America
In a year when Democrats became the party that dared not speak its name and Republicans would not shut up, one diminutive New York mayor stood tall. Once the GOP made a national issue of whether or not a mosque (actually part of an Islamic community center) should be allowed at Ground Zero (actually two long blocks away), Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the one politician who spoke to his city—and the country—in a way that made a citizen proud.
He delivered a beautiful, and beautifully straightforward, speech that embraced the idea of the community center and dared to evoke the firefighters, police, and emergency workers who made the ultimate sacrifice on September 11: "We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights—and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked."
Bloomberg is surely the most intriguing politician in America today, by turns earthy and high-minded, funny and dismissive, modest and self-congratulatory. Scorned by right-wingers for his social liberalism, reviled by some liberals for his avid support of developers, he is a one-man party of the "sensible middle" that so many voters and commentators claim to want.
They won't get it, as American third parties never emerge from the middle. Instead, Mayor Mike, a Massachusetts native who speaks with fierce pride of his adopted city, a rich man who takes the subway twice a week (even if he takes an SUV to his stop), a leader who can see the practical benefits of the First Amendment, is likely to remain sui generis. And that's fine by us.
First, as somebody who has lived in New York for almost thirty-five years, I have to say your stand on the non-mosque that's not at Ground Zero marked the first time I've ever written a mayor to say thanks for doing the right thing.
It's a First Amendment issue. About a month ago, my girlfriend, [financial-services manager and public activist] Diana [Taylor], and I were at J.G. Melon, 74th and Third, great hamburgers, and a big hulking guy comes up to me. I have a rule with my security guys: Anybody can come up to me. Now, if you shoot me, you won't get away, but I should be accessible to the people—that's the job.
You don't want to run the risks, get out of the kitchen. Anyway, big guy comes up to me, says, "Can I talk to you?" I say, "Sure." I've got a hamburger in one hand, I got a glass of beer in the other one, and I said, "Whaddya wanna talk about?" He says, "The mosque," and I'm thinkin', Ah shit, I don't need this. But he said, "I just want to say, I just got back from two tours in Afghanistan, and a couple of my friends never came back. You get out there and keep reminding everybody why we're fighting."
Your speech did a great job of tracing the fights for immigrants' rights, the fights for religious freedom in New York, all the way back to the Flushing Remonstrance of the seventeenth century. Is New York City the place, more than any other, where we have fought it out over who gets to be a full American and what that means? Is the Islamic community center the latest chapter in that fight?
I don't know that it's as big a battle as the others you describe. I think it's fair to say that the mosque as an issue goes away on November 3 [the day after election day]. Keep in mind these guys don't have the money to build a mosque and there's already a mosque down there.
This is an issue on the stump, in the polls, with the op-ed writers. We don't man the barricades and burn torches. There are a lot of cities in the world that are as diverse as New York: London, Singapore—cities that have been welcoming to immigrants and where they speak 150 languages and all that sort of stuff. But New York is different, because we live as a mixture and they live as a mosaic.
In London, there is an Arab quarter, if you will, an Irish quarter, a Roma quarter, whatever. In New York, in one block you have signs in Arabic and in Korean and in Spanish and English.
New Yorkers, I don't know that they like each other or socialize together, but they go down the same steps to the subway, they hail a cab at the same corner, they buy their coffee at the same Starbucks, their newspaper at the same kiosk—and so people who look different, act different, sound different, smell different, dress different, whatever, they are not threatening, because you are next to them all the time. That gets people to work together in a way here that's not true elsewhere.
You're saying this is an issue manufactured by politicians, and very much the kind of thing people hate about politics nowadays?
A hundred percent. None of this stuff is done on a rational basis. It's all in the world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and of the blogs, and also the economics of the news business. You know the old joke: "If it bleeds, it leads." Well, the news business is so tough that if today it's not bleeding, they take a knife to it.
So in standing up to that, does that make you the model for the twenty-first-century American politician—somebody who understands the political news business but whose independence nevertheless lets him be the sort of leader we like to say we all want?
It's pretty hard for me to say no to that! Although if, in my daily press conference, I stood up and described myself the way that you just did, the blogs here would probably rip me apart.
I am a believer that the public is a lot smarter than the press—that they don't read the press, listen to the press, remember what the press wrote. If you go out in the street and say, "Who is Monica Lewinsky or Gary Condit?" a lot of people wouldn't know. And the public wants somebody they believe is genuine. I've always believed that George W. Bush was elected and reelected not because people agreed with him but because people think [he] believes in something.
Bush ran against Gore and he ran against Kerry, and people never believed that either of those two guys stood for something. They thought they flip-flopped and looked for the right issue all the time. George W., if you call him today, he would say he did a good job, he did what was right. And you may find that so laughable, you don't agree with that at all, [but] the Bushes believe.
Is that an ongoing problem with Democrats? Do you think that's also the case with President Obama?
Listen, the last thing I'm ever going to do is criticize the president. I think we should work very hard to make this president a good president, even if you would prefer somebody else. The time to prefer somebody else is two years from now, not while he's president.
We need him to be good, for our country, for our kids. But I think that it is too easy to let your political guys set your agenda; you'll never do anything if you have your political guys that close. It is too easy to look at the polls and lead from the back. I have always said what I believed, even when it's not popular, and the results are that today if you did a poll in New York City, after the mosque, after nine years in office, we'd have a 65 percent approval rating. I think the ways to be popular are to say what you believe.
Watching you up close at a couple of political functions, I don't think I've ever seen a major politician less worried about whether people liked him, whether they're reacting well to him.
No, but I care as much as anybody else. You know, if you don't want people to like you, you should see a shrink. The first day I ever campaigned was on South Beach in Staten Island. And this nice little old lady with white hair comes up to me and she said, "Oh, I'm glad you're running. You're a breath of fresh air. I'm going to vote for you. All my friends are going to vote for you. Anybody that wants to run against you is going to drop out right away."
And I'm thinking, "Shit, this is easy. First day and I'm elected." Then she looks up at me adoringly and says, "And I'm so glad you're pro-life." And I remember for a billionth of a second in my mind: What do you say? Do you lie? You want someone's vote. She's got all her friends; she's influenced the whole city already the first day! I don't wanna piss her off. But I said, "Well, I'm so sorry, I happen to be very much pro-choice. I'm not in favor of abortion, but I do think it's totally up to the woman's right to choose." And I will bet you anything that I got that woman's vote.
Consistency is paramount?
It's the old saying: You dance with the one that brung ya. The president, I think, needs some better advisers. He campaigns "I'm gonna do A," and then he doesn't do it. Now he's pissed off the supporters and the opponents. You go for it.
Do you have any ideas for better advisers?
No. I don't know. David Axelrod, when I've talked to him, he seems very smart, and Rahm Emanuel, who I've known forever, he is very smart. [But] you know, if you're going to stand up for the mosque Friday night, you don't walk away from it Saturday morning.
Who has been the past New York mayor you admire most or are most interested in, or who had to deal with problems that are most similar to yours?
I have a friend, David Rockefeller; he's 95 years old. My father, if he were alive, he wouldn't find my success fascinating. He would have found fascinating the fact that I can tell you David Rockefeller is a friend on a first-name basis. That would have been something. But David's first job was as secretary to a mayor. And the mayor was Fiorello La Guardia, and his job was to walk around and write down everything that La Guardia said.
And La Guardia said, you know, "There's no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage." La Guardia did what he thought was right; he was not afraid of anybody. That is, I'm sure he was afraid of people, but he never let it show. And he was willing to tackle the big things. He had a good feel for people. He wanted to help the less fortunate, but he understood you needed a tax base. And I think, you know, he's as good an example as any. And we're the same height, I think.
Is there a big, transformative idea you could imagine getting behind, for the city and/or the country, or is the job of the mayor just the daily grind, getting it done?
Collect the garbage, educate the kids, and keep it safe. That's why mayors never go on, incidentally, to higher office—I prefer to call it "other office," I don't think it's higher. The mayor's job is not to cave in, and just as we've resisted those wages and benefit increases for city workers that we can't afford, we've also resisted tax cuts that businesses and conservative ideologues may want but that we can't afford.
So you're not running for "other office," including president?
I've said many times, I have no intention of running for president or any other office.
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Sources: GQ, Huffington Post, NY Daily News, Youtube, Google Maps
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