New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg weighed in on President Obama’s “charm offensive” this weekend, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer that the president should be taking people out to dinner every night and golfing every weekend.
Schieffer: And good morning again. Well, you can agree with him or not, but you can always count on the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to answer the questions, which is what he did in our wide- ranging interview. He vowed to continue his fight for better gun laws and defended his ban on big, sugary drinks. But we start with his thoughts on the sequester and the president’s charm offensive.
Bloomberg: Bob, you know, I think it was Winston Churchill that once said, “You can always depend on America to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.”
And my late mother used to tell me — she said, “You know, the good old days were never the good old days.” We’ve had a democracy for 235-odd years and it works in the end, and that’s what’s in important. In terms of a charm offensive, look, the president’s job is to lead Congress. And I find it fascinating people criticize him for taking people to dinner. He should be doing that every night. They criticized him for going and playing golf with people who he’s got to deal with. He should be doing that every weekend. You always can work better with somebody that you have a chance to build a social relationship with. Sequestering is here. It will go on for a while. It’s not going to be the end of the world as we know it. And everybody was saying, “Oh, we’re going to — the worst-case scenario is exactly what we’re going to implement.” And now they’re into the real world and they’ll try to find ways to do more with less, and then hopefully Congress will come together and modify sequestering to cut things back where we can afford it and where we — not where we can’t. And keep in mind, no program to reduce the deficit is — makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can’t touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that.
