The country needs another buying his way into the presidency like a hole in the head. No, Mike, you already bought your way into a third term as mayor of New York City, and it was a disaster for the city’s working people.

This time around, your first public event after declaring your intention of seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination was not exactly a confidence builder. (I mean, currently you are a Democrat, right? I ask because you have been a Republican and also an independent, that is, you have changed colors so many times, that it’s really difficult to be sure where you position yourself politically these days).

I am referring to your appearance last Sunday at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn, where you apologized for your steadfast support of the racist “stop-and-frisk” policing strategy that you pursued for a decade, and as recently as January had refused to distance yourself from.

“I was wrong,” you declared with a straight face. “And I am sorry.”

Mike, I have news for you: no one believed your lukewarm apology reeking of opportunism. It was a shameful moment and it won’t do you any good with Latinos and Black voters. 

After all, according to the New York Times, “at the program’s peak, the racial disparities in its enforcement were jarring. Of 575,000 stops conducted in 2009, black and Latino people were nine times as likely as white people to be targeted by the police (even though, once stopped, they were no more likely to actually be arrested). In 2011, police officers made about 685,000 stops; 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino.”

Yet, I remember you saying those days that white people were the ones being disproportionately stopped by the police. Unbelievable. Can you be anymore blind or, I’m sorry to say, racist?

You may look good next to the current occupant of the White House. But then again anybody would. No, Mike, go home, the country doesn’t need or want you.