Bloomberg Raises \'Socialism\' Label in Discussing Warren

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has just started a new “super PAC,” did not reserve his strong words to President Obama and Mitt Romney during his 40-minute interview with The New York Times on Friday. Speaking at the uptown headquarters of his private foundation, he also discussed the Massachusetts Democrat running for the Senate, Elizabeth Warren, in the context of communism, his support for the man she is seeking to unseat, Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican, and a range of other issues.

The Brown-Warren Race

“What I've tried to do is find liberal middle-of-the-road Republicans and Democrats. In the Senate, Scott Brown, who single-handedly stopped the right-to-carry bill. You can question whether he's too conservative. You can question, in my mind, whether she's God's gift to regulation, close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we'd all bring socialism back, or the U.S.S.R.”

“But the bottom line is Scott Brown single-handedly stood up when we needed him to stop the right to carry on campus and in the streets of our city and our state and our country. And I said to him ‘You do that, and I'm going to support you.' Now, I don't have to agree with him on a lot of other things, although he's certainly no crazy right-wing â€" he's just more conservative than I am â€" but here's a guy that really made a difference, and if we don't support people like that, nobody's going to take risks.”

President Obama and Health Care

“It's not clear to me that the health care law is an intelligent way to get costs under control and improve the efficiency of health care.”

“And I think one of the mistakes that the Obama administration made â€" and I've said this before as well â€" is that whether it was health care or Dodd-Frank or the debt ceiling, they let Congress write the legislation. I know of no time in history before that where any president would ever do that. The president sends a bill and then fights for it.”

On Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

“I do think that Romney's business experience would be valuable, but I don't know that running Bain Capital gives you the experience to run the country. The skills to manage Congress, which is your fundamental job as president, aren't necessarily the same.”

“Executives, it's generally you have to make a decision - yes or no. We're going to go or not. We're going to buy it or sell it, or whatever. And it's a different mind-set and a different set of skills.”

Starting His Super PAC

“I happen to think that we have a two-party system more and more people don't think either party is representing them or willing to face the tough issues in this country: immigration, and guns, and choice, and gay rights, and health care costs, and alloc ating care, and deciding who gets what. Those kinds of things. And that's the gap I'm trying to fill.”

On the Bush Tax Cuts

“I particularly don't like a step function where anybody over or under ‘middle class' - I don't know what middle class is. But it's different in every part of the country. It's easy for me to say ‘You should live this way.' But he shouldn't, or I shouldn't.”

On Politicians and Powerful Lobbies

“Let's assume the N.R.A. is putting pressure on them. There has to be something more important than winning an election. I mean, if I stood up and said ‘I don't care about people's lives, let's them kill them. I care about my job I want to get re-elected,' I would make the front page of The New York Times, The Post and The News, a trifecta. That's in fact what they're doing, knowing full-well the carnage in the streets from guns, or the number of people who are getting killed f rom coal-fired power plant pollutants.”

China and the Candidates

“You cannot expect them to say how you would negotiate with China, but just China-bashing doesn't make a lot of sense, given that's the market for American manufacturing in the future.

“China's the boogeyman for all of this. And yet if you stopped imports from China, the shelves of our stores would be empty.”