From the midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, a bit of skepticism that a Bloomberg endorsement would be worth the effort for the Romney campaign:
Hey, Let’s Court That Trans-Fat-Banning Anti-Gun Ex-Republican!
Am I in too much of a right-wing bubble to see the benefit here?
John McCain is trying to convince Mayor Bloomberg to support Mitt Romney’s bid for president.
McCain — the GOP Arizona senator who lost to President Obama in 2008 — visited the mayor at City Hall yesterday to talk up the likely Republican nominee.
“I just came in to pay my respects to the mayor. He and I are old friends from many years back,” McCain told The Post as he left City Hall. “I told him that I just spent last weekend with Romney and I thought that Romney was on message . . . and tried to convince the mayor that we’ve got a winning campaign.”
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said, “Any day Sen. McCain has time to stop in at City Hall is a great day for us.”
Dan Amira at New York magazine calculates:
While Bloomberg hasn’t been a big fan of President Obama, and you could see how he’d appreciate Romney’s business background and technocratic instincts, it’s not totally clear that his endorsement would actually be much of a benefit to the Romney campaign. Bloomberg has been one of the nation’s foremost proponents of gun control, an avid pursuer of nanny-state health initiatives, and an outspoken defender of gay marriage and the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.
. . . However, Bloomberg also had a +12 spread among moderates, and those are the voters that Romney would likely hope to impress with the Bloomberg seal of approval. Additionally, Bloomberg, you may recall, is a very wealthy person. We don’t really see him throwing millions away on a super-PAC donation when it could be going to, you know, saving people’s lives in Bangladesh, but if he were so inclined, Bloomberg could part with Adelson-type money without ever noticing it was missing.
I should note, some of the more apolitical folks I know in the New York area have warm and fuzzy feelings for Bloomberg. I suppose the city seems relatively safe, there haven’t been any successful terror attacks, the Giants and Yankees are winning, Lin-sanity has overtaken the Garden, etc. Of course, to feel those warm and fuzzies, you have to ignore the fact that he buys elections, turns away food from the needy because he deems it insufficiently nutritious, and refers to the New York Police Department as his “own army.”
By the way, regarding healthy eating, Bloomberg’s an epic hypocrite:
HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot.
And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has become New York City’s nutritional nag, banning the use of trans fats, forcing chain restaurants to post calorie counts and exhorting diners to consume less salt. Now he is at it again, directing his wrath at sugary drinks in a new series of arresting advertisements that ask subway riders: “Are you pouring on the pounds?”
But an examination of what enters the mayoral mouth reveals that Mr. Bloomberg is an omnivore with his own glaring indulgences, many of them at odds with his own policies. And he struggles mightily to restrain his appetite.
. . . Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.
. . . For New York City’s richest man, his table manners are surprisingly relaxed: he is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (“Delicious,” he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)
“Relaxed.” What a fascinating term to describe a grown man who takes food off the plate of staff and strangers. If you try that with me, I’ll go after you with a fork like you’re the President of Paraguay.
UPDATE: Some readers are getting a repeat of Monday’s edition today instead of the new stuff; some are getting today’s edition. I have notified the Powers That Be, but I have no idea why this is happening.