Yesterday, Michael Bloomberg decried “partisan warfare” in a speech to the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce:

Both parties follow the mood of the moment — instead of leading from the front. They incite anger instead of addressing it — for their own partisan interests.

But when Bloomberg ran for mayor of New York in 2001, he indulged in some partisan warfare of his own. His aide, Bill Cunningham, accused the Democratic candidate, Mark Green, of “praising Joseph Stalin.” Bloomberg himself called Green “a very liberal, leftist kind of guy.” An odd line of attack, for Bloomberg had identified himself as a “liberal” at a press conference with George Pataki earlier that year. The then-Republican piled on Green:

“He has never been pro-business, and he has never been pro-law enforcement, and the record shows that and he may be trying to reinvent himself to something he isn’t.”

When the mayor ran for reelection in 2005, he eschewed labels — probably because his Democratic adversary, Fernando Ferrer, tried his damnedest to tie Bloomberg to George W. Bush. In a debate, Ferrer asked Bloomberg if he were proud of Bush. Bloomberg dodged the question, saying he supported Bush when he was right and opposed him when he was wrong. The mayor elaborated:

[Fiorello] LaGuardia said there’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. . . . We have to have a bipartisan approach. You can’t go out and yell at people and then expect them to help you. You’ve got to work with everybody.

Soon, however, Bloomberg took renewed pride in his party. “I couldn’t be prouder to run on the Republican ticket and be a Republican,” he told Manhattan Republicans in 2006. The next year, he dropped his affiliation.

Despite his aversion to labels, Bloomberg seems to find them helpful for understanding his fellow politicos. In 2009, the New York Times reported:

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”)

And he stumbles in his political analysis without them:

That’s what the Tea Party is. It’s funny, it’s not a political movement. They don’t, they’re not pro-choice or pro-life. They’re not pro-gun or anti-gun. They’re not pro-gay-rights or anti-gay-rights. They’re not with any of the social issues. . . .
“And so they cast out,” he said, “and in many cases they, their casting out may be irrational in terms of the direction they go, but there is the argument that they’ve listened to both Republicans and Democrats again and again saying, ‘If you elect me I’ll fix it.’