On Tuesday I had some pretty positive things to say about Michael Bloomberg. But to me a candidate’s character matters. It matters a lot. One of the ways I can judge a person’s character is how forthrightly they can say they are sorry for something that did or said that they have come to regret.
Watch at 3 minutes to see how he dismisses the reporter who tried to ask him to be more specific about the language he used.
The NY Times reported that “As late as the fall of 2018, when he was laying the groundwork to run for president as a Democrat, Mr. Bloomberg told The New York Times that the policy had deterred crime without violating anyone’s civil rights, ignoring a court ruling to the contrary.”
Hmmm? Suggesting police throw kids (not people, mind you, kids) against the wall to frisk them isn’t violating their civil rights?
I don’t think so.
As a retired psychotherapist whose training and most of his practice was in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychology I believe that when you describe something like this it means at the least that as you uttered the words you had the mental image in your mind. It may not mean you liked the image, it only means you had it.
This is something a therapist whose training was similar to mine might, if relevant to a client’s gaining helpful insight, want to explore with questions like “what did you feel when you said that?”
Bloomberg was asked about stop and frisk at a campaign event in Tennessee:
At an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Wednesday, a reporter asked Bloomberg, "Why did you say what you said in that 2015 speech?"
Bloomberg responded, "I don't think those words reflect what, how I led the most diverse city in the nation. And I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused."
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The reporter followed up and asked, "But why did you say it?"
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"It was five years ago," Bloomberg responded. "And, you know, it's just not the way that I think and it ... doesn't reflect what I do every day. I led the most populous, largest city in the United States and got reelected three times, the public seemed to like what I do."
CNN
He didn’t answer the question:
But why did you say it?
What is the actual “it” that he needs to address? It is in the last sentence below, highlighted:
“Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is,” Bloomberg said.
And to "get the guns out of the kids' hands," Bloomberg says, police must "throw ‘em against the wall and frisk ’em.
Even if he didn’t want to get into why he uttered those words, he could have simply said he was sorry for putting it that way, adding that he regrets using a phrase that evokes such unacceptably violent imagery.
Why did he say “throw them against the wall? It is disturbingly similar to Trump’s offhand comment standing in front of a bunch of police officer supporters (with that stupidly grinning female cop behind him) when he suggested police not be so gentle when putting suspects into the back of their cruisers.
He described the precautions typically taken by police where they place a hand over a suspect's head while they're being put into a police car to protect them.
"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice,’" he said.
"When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head you know, the way you put their hand over [their head]," Trump continued, mimicking the motion. "Like, 'Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.' I said, 'You can take the hand away, OK?' ABC News
I don't know what Bloomberg’s answer would have been. All I know is that he didn’t answer it at all. I hate to agree with the New York Daily Post, but I’ll go them one further, he just didn’t side-step the question, he totally dismissed it with a rehearsed non-answer answer.
I still think he could beat Trump handedly, and perhaps his endorsement of racial profiling as a crime fighting tool could actually swing some bigoted Trump voters his way, but he still lacks the kind of candor about admitting that he was racially insensitive in what he said and unable or unwilling to give a sincere apology.
Related: Bloomberg Says He ‘Inherited’ Stop And Frisk. NYC Activists Recall A Different Story. HuffPost
On top of all this we have another recording that came out today with his comments about redlining, but this is yet another story. See HuffPost.
Not only that but a video of his speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention from when he was a Republican is being circulated or referred to by Bernie Sanders supporters like Amy Goodman in Bloomberg is a billionaire Republican who terrorized black and brown youth: Sanders’ supporters.
Maybe it will take a former Republican, then independent, turned Democrat to beat Donald Trump whose party affiliation is even more erratic (below).