Bloomberg for President?

SuburbanTurkey said:
Yes, Bloomberg is very polite about his implementation of systematic racism through targeted civil rights abuses.
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Last night I saw multiple airings of a commercial talking about how much he had worked to improve educational opportunities in African-American neighborhoods.
It wasn't damage control. Honest.
 
Armitage72 said:
Last night I saw multiple airings of a commercial talking about how much he had worked to improve educational opportunities in African-American neighborhoods.
It wasn't damage control. Honest.
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He did that with school choice, vouchers, and charter schools. That's unlikely to be a plus in the Dem primary.
 
I would vote for Bloomberg in the primaries, but he is running in the wrong party. He would be the best Republican to choose from, but he doesn't even make it onto the map as a Democrat.

Just wait until he gets on stage and the other candidates get to thank him for the Senators he has supported in the recent past. The only one I've heard about voted to confirm Justice Beergoggles to the Supreme Court, but I'm sure there are others.


ETA: He only apologized for stop n frisk after he decided to run. Not after the Supreme Court told him it was unconstitutional. After it became political baggage.
 
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Dr. Keith said:
I would vote for Bloomberg in the primaries, but he is running in the wrong party. He would be the best Republican to choose from, but he doesn't even make it onto the map as a Democrat.

Just wait until he gets on stage and the other candidates get to thank him for the Senators he has supported in the recent past. The only one I've heard about voted to confirm Justice Beergoggles to the Supreme Court, but I'm sure there are others.


ETA: He only apologized for stop n frisk after he decided to run. Not after the Supreme Court told him it was unconstitutional. After it became political baggage.
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Support for "stop and frisk" will play well for him in the suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Miami. Areas that we need to win decisively.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Since the current Republicans would never nominate him, perhaps it is time to change party vote this once.
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I can't quite follow what you mean.


Aside from that, as I mentioned upthread, there's a decent argument that he could do more damage to Trump by running in the Rep primaries. He should run in both. Use all the same ads, "Vote for me because Trump sucks!" and see what happens.
 
Bloomberg can't even theoretically win against Trump when running as a Republican - he would split the vote, making a D win extremely likely.
And it requires a special kind of voters (cough* Libertarians *cough) to vote for a clear loser to elect the party you don't want.
 
Distracted1 said:
Support for "stop and frisk" will play well for him in the suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Miami. Areas that we need to win decisively.
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Do those really matter if you lose most minority voters?

Why not pick someone who has a chance to pick up both?

ETA: If we are so worried about centrists we could always ask Bush to run as a democrat. He may like a second library.
 
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Dr. Keith said:
ETA: He only apologized for stop n frisk after he decided to run. Not after the Supreme Court told him it was unconstitutional. After it became political baggage.
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Yes, and in his apology he gave a false narrative where he decided to stop doing stop-and-frisk after he realized the effect it was having, blah blah blah.

In reality, he fought tooth and nail against the courts in favor of the policy, and the only reason he stopped was because he lost the appeal. And still actively defended it until he decided to run for president.

I wouldn't vote for him if he was on fire and I had flame-retardant votes.
 
Dr. Keith said:
Do those really matter if you lose most minority voters?

Why not pick someone who has a chance to pick up both?

ETA: If we are so worried about centrists we could always ask Bush to run as a democrat. He may like a second library.
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I am not so sure we will lose minority votes.
In fact, doesn't Bloomberg poll second only to Biden with minorities currently?
 
I’m not sure why anyone is suggesting he should have run as a Republican. “Stop and frisk” aside, on the current US political spectrum he’s a mainstream Democrat not a Republican.
 
applecorped said:
"you can just Xerox (copy)” the description of male, minorities 16-25 and hand to cops." Bloomberg
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The full quote is
“it’s controversial, but first thing is, all of your — 95 percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25. That’s true in New York. It’s true in virtually every city. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...hael-bloombergs-major-stop-and-frisk-problem/

He also said this:
We want to spend a lot of money, put a lot of cops in the street, put those cops where the crime is, which is in the minority neighborhoods. So this is — one of the unintended consequences is, people say, “Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.” Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is.

And the first thing you can do for people is to stop them getting killed. Now we did a calculation of how many people who would have been dead if we hadn’t brought down the murder rate and gotten guns off the streets. And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw 'em against the wall and frisk 'em. And then they start — they say, “I don’t want to get caught,” so they don’t bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.
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Not to be tactless here, but is he right? There's no excuse for harassing innocent people, but if the demographic is consistent, it makes sense to focus police attention on that one over others. Wall Street brokers might be committing crimes, but they're not shooting each other in the streets. Note that his goal was to save victims' lives at a time when the crime rates were soaring in NYC.

I dunno if "racism!" is all that's going on here.
 
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Stop and Frisk has been shown not to work. By design it targeted minorities and did nothing but drive a wedge between police and the community.

Crime was not soaring in NYC.

S&F might not be as blatant as yelling the N-word randomly, but it is institutionally racist.
 
Bob001 said:
The full quote is

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...hael-bloombergs-major-stop-and-frisk-problem/

He also said this:


Not to be tactless here, but is he right? There's no excuse for harassing innocent people, but if the demographic is consistent, it makes sense to focus police attention on that one over others. Wall Street brokers might be committing crimes, but they're not shooting each other in the streets. Note that his goal was to save victims' lives at a time when the crime rates were soaring in NYC.

I dunno if "racism!" is all that's going on here.
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Harassing innocent people is how the program is supposed to work. The whole idea is that the high frequency of causeless searches would discourage the carrying of firearms. If everyone is getting searched, it eliminates the ability to "fly under the radar". The vast majority of stops produced nothing, and that was by design.

It would be one thing if Bloomberg had advocated increasing a police presence in high crimes neighborhoods. That isn't what he did.

He had a policy of subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to unconstitutional searches simply because they lived in poor, minority communities.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
He had a policy of subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to unconstitutional searches simply because they lived in poor, minority communities.
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I wonder if that might actually help attract some erstwhile Republicans.
 
lomiller said:
I’m not sure why anyone is suggesting he should have run as a Republican. “Stop and frisk” aside, on the current US political spectrum he’s a mainstream Democrat not a Republican.
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This was the criticism he used to get from the right. It was certainly true prior to the last 6 months.

The only reason I think he should run as a Republican is because I don't think he can win the Dem om and it stands a better chance of hurting Trumps chances. Well, it stands a chance anyway, where running as a Dem stands the chance of hurting the eventual Dem nominee.

Granted that's mostly just speculation on my part and probably just marginal differences if at all.
 
Bob001 said:
The full quote is

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...hael-bloombergs-major-stop-and-frisk-problem/

He also said this:


Not to be tactless here, but is he right? There's no excuse for harassing innocent people, but if the demographic is consistent, it makes sense to focus police attention on that one over others. Wall Street brokers might be committing crimes, but they're not shooting each other in the streets. Note that his goal was to save victims' lives at a time when the crime rates were soaring in NYC.

I dunno if "racism!" is all that's going on here.
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The SEC has always been much more likely to targeted rich white men with it’s investigations. Likewise this is the group the IRS is most likely to target with an audit.

The problem with stop and frisk isn’t necessarily that it’s wrong to target the group/groups most likely to commit the crime you are dealing with, it’s that the policy is ultimately carried out by people who are putting inordinate focus on skin color when defining that group. The result is that ordinary people in ordinary clothes doing ordinary things are prone to be stopped simply because they are black.

In the worst case you get situations like the one the Daily Show defenced back in the Jon Stewart days. They were filming a segment and had interns in grubby mismatched clothes carrying expensive television equipment out of an upscale office building and the only person who police stopped was a black prodder in a well made suit heading into the building.

It doesn’t matter if the underlying idea is ok, if it can’t be implemented fairly it’s still a problem, Bloomberg would be far from the first rich white guy to mistakenly assume that because police had always treated him fairly that everyone else was also being treated fairly.
 
ahhell said:
The only reason I think he should run as a Republican is because I don't think he can win the Dem om and it stands a better chance of hurting Trumps chances. Well, it stands a chance anyway, where running as a Dem stands the chance of hurting the eventual Dem nominee.
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This makes no sense. He can’t run as a Republican unless he wins the primary and replaces Trump as the Republicans candidate. Even if the Republican primary this year wasn’t a simple rubber-stamping of Trump, where no one else is even allowed on the ballot in many states, there would be almost no chance of him winning the Republican primary because he’s a mainstream Democrat, not a Republican.
 
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