I have a filthy, embarrassing little secret: I like Mike Bloomberg. He’s smart, he’s tough, he’s an able manager. As mayor of this little village on the sea, he drove down crime and hugely improved public education by ramming through the teachers unions to create space for charter schools, which now educate more than 100,000 New York City kids. He understands how the city works and boosted the real estate industry and Wall Street. Oh, and he bulldozed those smelly Oberlin twerps out of their little Occupy Wall Street performance-art playground, which was not only the right policy decision but also hugely entertaining.

Bloomberg doesn’t get enough credit for this — as far as I can tell, he gets no credit whatsoever for this — but he is probably more responsible than any other human being on Earth for getting people off cigarettes and consequently saving untold numbers of lives. When Bloomberg banned smoking in bars and restaurants in 2003, everyone thought it would kill New York City social life. New York would stay home and drink boxed Chablis and eat Lean Cuisines! Every restaurant manager and barmaid in the city pleaded with him not to destroy their business.

Instead, they got to breathe fresh air. They got to take a shower the next morning without setting off the smoke detector. And everyone kept going out to eat and drink. Some smokers learned to go outside when they wanted a ciggie, grudgingly admitting that this was better for everyone than stinking up every pub, and it helped them reduce their consumption. Others simply gave up and quit, especially when Bloomberg drove up the price of a pack of Marlboros to approximately the level of a Toyota Celica.

Because New York City is to Europeans what Paris is to Americans, Europe got interested. Ireland banned smoking in restaurants in 2004. France followed in 2006, England in 2007, Spain in 2011. Anyone familiar with the bar culture in any of these countries around the turn of the century would have said they were more likely to outlaw sex or soccer than smoking. But they did, because New York proved to them that a sophisticated, world-class city could do fine without it.

Even Bloomberg’s strange crusade against large sodas and his misguided yearslong attempt to waste what is now the Hudson Yards neighborhood on a stadium for the Jets strikes me as merely eccentric, not actually alarming. (And Big Gulps would not have been banned anyway, due to a loophole.)

Now Bloomberg is testing the waters as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. But there’s a reason no New York City mayor gets to move up to a higher office, ever, and Bloomberg embodies it: He has annoyed far too many people. My fellow conservatives despise him because of his loud support for abortion and gun control and his unabashed nanny-statism. (Bloomberg cheerfully played Mary Poppins at the Inner Circle show for politicians and journalists.) Meanwhile, liberals hate him because of his loud support for stop-and-frisk programs and because he loves capitalism and Wall Street, not to mention the Iraq War.

Furthermore, in a Democratic Party that genuflects before the altar of political correctness, he seems almost Trumpishly insensitive. When he attempts Spanish, he mangles the language so badly he provides a trove of comedy material for the Twitter parody account ElBloombito. He used to say things like, “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s,” a joke that might have gotten laughs in 1936, when he first told it, but sounds a bit off in a country where three out of five college degrees go to women. Columnist David Dayen labeled Bloomberg “almost surgically designed to repel practically every American voter on some level.”

Bloomberg is a radical moderate in a country where all of the political energy — the organizers, the donors, the people on the talk shows — is coming from true believers who want their candidate to pass every single ideological purity test. He’s a conservative Democrat. He’s a liberal Republican. He’s a man without a party. This is a country where that matters. He has about as much chance of being elected president of the United States as El Chapo.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.