Michael Bloomberg Is My Republican-of-the-Week!

This lifelong member of the Democratic Party decided in 2001 to run for mayor as a member of the Republican Party.

Michael Bloomberg had a long and excellent career as an entrepreneur in the field of financial software and data services. A lifelong member of the Democratic Party, he decided to run for New York City's mayor as a member of the Republican Party in 2001. With a huge spending advantage, Bloomberg won by a margin of 2%.

Tuesday night, during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, Mayor Bloomberg suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War - facing a determined band of insurgents. This comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.

Attacking the Bush administration, he said,

We're the British. I'm not suggesting the motives are the same. But I'm just pointing out that this was an insurgent kind of attack on trained, disciplined, uniformed soldiers who fought in a rigorously planned way. And we're trying to adjust to that. . . we're in big trouble . . . Somebody's got to pull it out. There is an arrogance and willingness to go it alone that quite understandably I think doesn't play well around the world.

For demanding more analytic reporting of the news from Occupied Iraq, Michael Bloomberg is Friday's Redeemable Republican of the week.