Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who at one time fancied himself a Republican) hasn’t made any secret of the fact that he’s thinking of running for the Democratic nomination in 2020. As America Rising noted this week, he’s heading out to Iowa to test the waters and see if he can’t gin up some support for a presidential bid. But Iowa is going to be an interesting test for Bloomberg. He has a history of opposing mandatory ethanol blending as a foundation of American energy policy and that doesn’t tend to sell well in King Corn’s court.

As 2020 hopeful and billionaire Michael Bloomberg heads to Iowa today to talk about energy policy, it’s important to note his opposition to corn-based ethanol in the past:

BLOOMBERG: “Subsidizing corn may be good agricultural policy, I’m not an expert on that, but it is bad energy policy. We are subsidizing ethanol, corn-based ethanol 50 cents a gallon and we are penalizing, tariffing sugar-based ethanol, which is a lot better for the environment, 50 cents and it just doesn’t make any sense. Unless what you’re trying to do is to help the people in Iowa and I don’t, that may very well be a good idea but you can’t do it as part of the environmental part of policy, you should be doing it as part of our agricultural policy.”

America Rising has more quotes where those came from. He’s blamed corn ethanol for people starving in other parts of the world. He also described government subsidization of the ethanol industry as “moral bankruptcy” in Washington.

If he plans on running against a field of liberal Democrats and socialists who are generally all-in on ethanol mandates, you can be sure that those remarks will come back to haunt him. Few ever stand up to King Corn for long in presidential politics and live to tell the tale. Heck, we couldn’t even convince Trump to cross the ethanol lobby.

The real shame here is that Bloomberg is absolutely correct on this issue. But the question is, will he stick to his message on the campaign trail, assuming he’s really going to run? He’s always been a vocal critic of other politicians, including Donald Trump, for inconsistencies, any lack of transparency, or hypocrisy. Now we may find out if he practices what he preaches and he’s willing to anger the Corn Gods in Iowa as part of a presidential bid.