We still seem to be dealing with the question of whether or not there’s anyone in the country who was excited about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg throwing his hat in the 2020 Democratic ring. (Well, aside from his family and staffers, of course.) If the billionaire candidate was counting on the support of his successor, current Mayor Bill de Blasio, he’s going to be disappointed. It turns out that Hizzoner wasn’t very impressed with Bloomberg’s performance in office. In fact, he came out this week and said he’s spent six years trying to fix his predecessor’s screw-ups. (The Hill)

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called out Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s previous support for stop-and-frisk policing, saying Bloomberg is “out of touch with what Democrats are looking for and talking about right now.”

“This is a guy who really reinforced the status quo every chance he got in New York City and I have spent literally six years undoing what Michael Bloomberg did, and stop-and-frisk is one of the most obvious examples, but there’s a lot of others” de Blasio said Monday in an interview with The Young Turks.

Speaking of a distinct lack of self-awareness, de Blasio went on to say that Bloomberg’s policies (specifically stop and frisk, along with broken windows) were “creating a rift between police and community.”

I don’t know if the Mayor has looked out his window recently, but he’s been in charge for six years now and every Friday night in New York City there are large crowds marching in the streets. And what are they saying? “F*** the Police.” People are brazenly dumping buckets of water on cops when they try to make arrests.

What was that you were saying about rifts between the police and the community? If your policies were so much better, shouldn’t things have improved by now?

On top of that, the new policies aren’t doing much for law and order. While the NYPD has managed to keep murders down near record low levels, assaults and property crimes have been steadily rising during de Blasio’s tenure. At the same time, police are reporting that morale is at an all-time low, with too many officers feeling “the Pantaleo effect.”

But even if we can dismiss de Blasio’s complaints about Bloomberg’s policies, this really wasn’t an unexpected response from the Mayor. Like many Democrats, he was never going to be a Bloomberg fan because his predecessor was a Republican before he was an independent before he was a Democrat. And the Republicans who may have been fans previously aren’t going to forgive him for switching teams.

Throughout his time in New York City, Michael Bloomberg has worn whatever party tag suited his needs at the moment. He was never really loyal to either party or bound by their platforms. But in the harshly divided national political climate of 2019, that sort of shifting loyalty doesn’t play very well. Bill de Blasio won’t be the only Democrat coming out against Bloomberg and he probably shouldn’t be looking for many other high profile endorsements from his current party either.