New York, NY – Is Mayor Bloomberg An Honest Politican?

New York, NY – One of the first issues Mayor Bloomberg is going to have to reckon with if he goes public with the presidential campaign he has been nursing, is why he has decided to deny for so long that he was going to run. Mr. Bloomberg himself has been truculent, even abrasive, in denying his interest in the White House.

The risk is particularly great given Mr. Bloomberg’s history. He ran for mayor of New York promising not to raise taxes, and once he got into office, he raised nearly every tax he could — on property, on income, on cigarettes, on sales. This raises policy issues — would a President Bloomberg respond to a national economic downturn the same way Mayor Bloomberg responded to New York’s economic downturn, by raising taxes? As president, Mr. Bloomberg wouldn’t have anyone to bail him out with complementary tax cuts, the way President Bush did to New York. But it also raises — well, the prospect that a hardball-playing opponent of Mr. Bloomberg could come at the mayor the same way that Governor Huckabee is going at Governor Romney in the attack commercial that Mr. Huckabee showed to reporters in Iowa but did not put on the air: “If a man’s dishonest to obtain a job, he’ll be dishonest on the job,” the Huckabee attack advertisement said.

In our own dealings with the mayor we haven’t seen anything but integrity enough to suggest that the Eagle Scout adheres to the first element of the Scout Law, “A Scout is Trustworthy.” Certainly Mr. Bloomberg is so rich that a lot of the integrity issues that normally crop up with politicians — taking money for self-enrichment, doing favors for rich campaign contributors politicians hope to work for later on — do not apply.

If the mayor does run, he may say he genuinely was not planning to run and just changed his mind when he saw the Republican Party’s turn toward anti-immigrant demagoguery and the Democratic Party’s turn toward foreign policy defeatism. [nysuneditorial]