Bloomberg Parses the Iowa Results
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg continued to stay mum this morning on his own political aspirations, but continued to assert that the leading candidates for president had failed to be specific enough in their proposed solutions for the nation’s problems. Mr. Bloomberg spoke about a University of Oklahoma conference he plans to attend this weekend, at which participants expect to call for the candidates to renounce what the mayor called “partisan bickering.”
In his weekly radio call-in program on WABC-AM, Mr. Bloomberg was asked by John Gambling, the host, for a response to the results in Iowa.
In his answer, the mayor did not mention by name either Barack Obama, who won the Democratic caucuses, or Mike Huckabee, who won on the Republican side. Mr. Bloomberg said:
It’s the beginning of a long process. I have no idea who’s going to I win. I’m not in the business of handicapping, but I think it shows that democracy is alive and well in America, that you have a diversity of candidates from different backgrounds and different views, and I would just like to get them to address the important issues with more specificity of what they’d actually do to solve the problem of who’s going to pay for health care, and what are we going to do overseas, and how are we going to keep our economy — which seems to be slowing down — how we’re going to get that going again, and how we’re going to make sure that everybody shares and that the tax burden is fairly distributed.
And everybody has different ideas, but the process I don’t think has forced, or maybe the press is at fault — my company’s in that same business so I’m not pointing fingers at others — somehow or other we’ve got to get the candidates to answer specifically. And I’m going out to Oklahoma on Sunday to meet with a bunch of about 15 other basically independent people — some registered as Democrats, some registered as Republicans, some as independents, as I am — but all of whom have had experience either in the legislature or in the executive branch of government. And the issue is how do we get these candidates to really address the issues. And it’s not a partisan thing. This thing in Oklahoma is not designed to advance any particular agenda, other than the agenda of openness and giving the public the information they need to make intelligent choices. I think the people there, I can’t speak for all of them, but generally they would probably agree with me to say that there’s been much too much partisan bickering. Nobody wants to give anybody else an advantage.
They’re unwilling to face the big issues, and take the risks and give it straight to the public. And that’s not good for democracy, and it’s certainly not good for America.
The mayor continued by saying that too many politicians shied away from offering real answers to difficult problems:
I don’t want to disparage anything, but let me say this: If you have complex problems, there probably are no simple cost-free solutions to them, because if there were, somebody would have solved them. … You have to have the opportunity to describe what you’re going to do at length. You’re going to have to be able to explain it to the public. It is going to be a complex and difficult process to explain to the public, and somebody is going to have to pay. None of these problems come without costs, whether those costs are costs in terms of dollars out of our taxpayers’ pockets or whether or not it’s costs in terms of restricting what we can do — for example, smoking is clearly something it restricts what you can do. There’s nothing without cost that is facing us. And it’s just. You know, the people running for office always say: “I don’t want to bring that up now. If I do, I won’t get elected. But if I don’t mention it and get elected, then I can do the difficult stuff.”
Such an approach, the mayor said, means that problems do not get addressed until they assume crisis proportions.
The mayor hinted that he did not think the presidential nominations were by any means decided yet:
I’m not here to handicap. I think you can’t read an awful lot into any one state’s election. The dynamics and, in fact, in the case of Iowa, the process is very different from anywhere else. What is clear is that the candidates in an abbreviated form did try to address issues and the public did get a chance to quiz them on it. It gives the people of New Hampshire next, I guess, some information to make their informed choices, and then South Carolina and Florida.
He added that the process “could very well go off into March.”
Despite Mr. Bloomberg’s call for specific solutions to the nation’s problems, he offered a generic and somewhat vague answer when Mr. Gambling asked him about defense policy:
We are a superpower, and I don’t think anybody questions that we should have a strong, well-paid, well-supplied, well-led military. The debates would be about when and where it’s appropriate to use them, in what situations you deploy your forces. But America doesn’t have any choice. We have to have a military that can defend us from terrorist attacks or attacks from other countries — a lot less likely in this day and age just because the consequences of war are so severe. But history shows we don’t go many years without having our military someplace in the world, whether it’s peacekeeping, trying to stop genocide, fighting terrorism or fighting real wars. The techniques and tactics change, but we have to have a strong military. The debate is not about that. It’s about what to do with it.
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