Bloomberg would be another Democrat in the race

NY Times:

Hundreds of miles from the hustings of New Hampshire lurks a possible presidential candidate who supports gay marriage, abortion rights and stricter regulation of handguns. Who doesn’t mind taxing the rich on their income or big companies on their carbon emissions. Who says that deporting illegal immigrants would destroy the nation’s economy. And who is not necessarily averse to adding more bureaucrats to the government payroll.

That politician — Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York — has spent months laying out his vision for a post-partisan approach to politics that would take the best from left and right.

Yet a close reading of the policies Mr. Bloomberg has promoted during his mayoralty suggests that Mr. Bloomberg actually has a lot in common with one party’s leading candidates — the Democrats — and not so much with the other’s. Indeed, on issues like gay marriage and gun control, Mr. Bloomberg stands well to the left of top-tier Democratic candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Mr. Bloomberg has long coyly denied rumors that he would undertake an independent bid, even as some of his aides have laid the groundwork for one. On Sunday in Oklahoma, Mr. Bloomberg was scheduled to meet with a bipartisan group of elder statesmen to discuss ways of defeating “partisan polarization,” according to organizers, and to urge the creation of a national-unity government. But judged strictly on the issues, it is hard to discern the grounds on which Mr. Bloomberg might midwife a new kind of fusion politics, even if he wants to.

“If you want to place him in the spectrum of American politics, he’s a liberal Democrat on all the major litmus test issues, and he’s a liberal Democrat on taxing and spending,” said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs. “I don’t see the product differentiation, except for the $4 billion bank account and the aura of the philosopher-king.”

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“He may not have an ideology about political parties, but he definitely has an ideology about government — that it has a progressive role in our lives,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger, executive director of the Drum Major Institute, a New York-based liberal research group. “The idea that he’s some kind of middle-of-the-road candidate doesn’t do justice to his own values.”

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Bloomberg and his fellow Democrats meeting in Oklahoma want to get back to the "old bipartisanship" where Republicans mount no serious disagreement with their agenda. That is what he really means by "post partisan" government. In fact Bloomberg is probably more liberal than most of the Democrats at the meeting. He has Chuck Hagel tagging along to give the meeting an air of bipartisanship, but it is about as fake as Hagel's claim to being a conservative.

I have maintained all along that a Bloomberg candidacy will help Republicans by splitting the Democrat and liberal vote. The NY Times is finally seeing that too, and it does not even mention the war in Iraq where Bloomberg is as bad as the MoveOn Democrats. He would be a gift to the Republicans and conservatives on that issue.