[lbo-talk] TNR: Bloomberg for President

[Doug Henwood]

The New Republic - July 10, 2006

BLOOMBERG FOR PRESIDENT.
Third Way Out
by Ben Smith

On June 11, the shoe designer Stuart Weitzman held a $1,000-per-plate  
fund-raiser for the local Republican representative, Chris Shays, in  
the garden behind his Greenwich, Connecticut, home. The main  
attraction was Michael Bloomberg, the charisma-free media mogul who  
has emerged as a surprisingly popular mayor of New York; he strolled  
in with his girlfriend, Diana Taylor, who apologized smilingly that  
she hadn't worn Weitzman's shoes. But the mayor didn't disappoint.  
For weeks, he'd been publicly dismissing talk that he might run for  
president in 2008. At Weitzman's house, his denial took on a more coy  
tone. "Absolutely not," Bloomberg replied to a question about his  
presidential aspirations. "And anybody who's running will say exactly  
that."

This isn't the first time that Bloomberg has privately flirted with a  
2008 bid. But what makes a Bloomberg candidacy look increasingly real  
is that he has also begun to think about the mechanics of running.  
New York p.r. eminence Howard Rubenstein recalls Bloomberg putting a  
price tag on his Oval Office ambition at a dinner party in April: "I  
could easily put up half a billion," the mayor had said, naming a  
figure over one-third higher than the Bush campaign's spending in 2004.

Perhaps it's no surprise that Bloomberg is making noises about a  
presidential run. In a heady, recovering city that the World Trade  
Center attack finally made part of the United States, who isn't? But,  
unlike Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and George Pataki--and like  
another diminutive self-made billionaire--Bloomberg is thinking of  
running as an Independent. There's a case to be made that 2008  
presents a rare, promising moment. Almost three-quarters of voters  
would, in theory, like a third-party alternative in the 2008  
election, according to a new poll commissioned by Unity '08, a group  
that aims to create a bipartisan "unity ticket" though an online  
political convention. But, as Bloomberg steps into this Ross Perot  
moment, will the enthusiasms of Greenwich and the Upper East Side  
equal those of America?

The original source of the Bloomberg-for president buzz is a soft- 
spoken 40-year-old deputy mayor named Kevin Sheekey. Sheekey has been  
Bloomberg's closest political adviser since the media mogul hired him  
away from Senator Pat Moynihan in 1997. One of that happy class of  
Irish-American operatives who never seem to be working terribly hard,  
yet always win, Sheekey earned Bloomberg's respect with a series of  
Washington coups, including seizing for Bloomberg LP host privileges  
of what had been the fabulous Vanity Fair White House Correspondents'  
Dinner after-party.

Soon after Bloomberg's reelection last fall (a monument of overkill  
in which Sheekey spent $84,587,319 of Bloomberg's money), Sheekey  
started telling reporters that he'd be seeing them in New Hampshire.  
At the time, the line was universally taken as a joke. But, since his  
reelection, the mayor began seeking platforms to take stands on  
national issues. In Baltimore, he pressed for stem-cell research and  
attacked "political science." Back home, he convened a national  
summit of mayors to press for tighter gun control. He laid out an  
immigration-reform proposal of his own in The Wall Street Journal,  
and, in Chicago, he denounced partisan squabbling, adding that "both  
ends of the political spectrum share the blame. And both seem  
unwilling to change."

Bloomberg has suggested that, if he runs, it would be on a new party  
line of his own creation. No cold days in Iowa, no small rooms in New  
Hampshire. He could afford, like Ross Perot, to set up a petition  
drive to secure ballot status in late 2007 after the Republican and  
Democratic candidates were clear. (Bloomberg is unlikely to run if  
John McCain, who supported him for mayor, becomes the Republican  
nominee.) Playing to his strengths as a technocrat, he would run on  
competence and nonpartisan management--the style, over the substance,  
of his politics.

In e-mail and telephone conversations (conducted, ironically, as he  
shuttled Democratic Party officials around the city to convince them  
to hold their 2008 convention here), Sheekey recently gamed out a  
third-party Bloomberg campaign. A Bloomberg bid, Sheekey explains,  
could come as the antidote if the candidate with the most appeal  
across party lines (McCain) has been taken out by the conservative  
wing of his own party and the Democrats nominate a certain someone  
with a well-known electability problem. "If John McCain gets beaten  
to the right--which is possible in a conservative Republican primary-- 
and, if Democrats elect someone through a primary who Democrats  
generally view as unelectable, there's a large segment of the  
American electorate that is looking for something different, and that  
could be 36 percent of the vote in enough states to give you an  
electoral win," he says.

Bloomberg's friends--or at least the members of his East Side dinner- 
party set, who have enjoyed the city's economic resurgence--have been  
eager to convince the mayor that he has what it takes. "My wife asked  
a direct question to the mayor about him running for president,"  
recalls Rubenstein of the dinner at his apartment in April. Around  
the table were the top executives of L'Oréal, Miramax, Pfizer, and  
Commerce Bank, along with Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief John Huey and  
News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch.

The mayor hedged, and "people around the table were saying, 'You  
know, it's a pretty good idea,'" says Rubenstein. "The people that I  
know, they would welcome his run."

The people who study third parties, however, are skeptical that  
Bloomberg would resonate with the typical third-party voter--not a  
New Yorker who likes his mayor but a voter in Utah or Maine (the two  
states where Perot finished second) who is suspicious of her  
government. According to Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone, authors of  
a new study of Perot's politics, Three's a Crowd, Perot's appeal came  
as much from his specific positions that had been abandoned by both  
parties--he was for a nationalistic cocktail of isolationism,  
libertarianism, budget-balancing, and rolling back free trade--as it  
did from his outsider, reformist stance. But the kind of third-party  
discussion that animates Manhattan dinner parties has, oddly, ignored  
the one issue that candidates actually have failed to address. "The  
issue of immigration is the issue on which a third party could form,"  
Rapoport says. "The third party on immigration is the party which  
says, 'Send them back.'"

That's hardly Bloomberg's line. The nativism that helped animate  
Perot--not to mention his most successful recent predecessor, George  
Wallace--is precisely the opposite of what made Bloomberg a national  
figure in the first place: his global financial information business.  
Writing in The Wall Street Journal last month, Bloomberg called for  
immigration reform that gives "those already here the opportunity to  
earn permanent status and keep their families together, provided they  
pay appropriate penalties." And his political instincts on other  
national issues are very, well, New York. When Zacarias Moussaoui was  
sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist plotting, Bloomberg was  
not among the Americans outraged that he hadn't been given the death  
penalty. Sounding presidential only by Upper West Side standards, he  
told reporters he hoped Moussaoui would spend his life in "as un-nice  
a jail as the law would allow."

"That's the Bloomberg predicament," says Rapoport. "He doesn't have  
any real issues." That is to say, Bloomberg's stances may be out of  
line with his Republican affiliation, but you don't have to leave the  
two-party system to find politicians who favor stem-cell research,  
free trade, abortion, gay rights, and gun control. They're called  
Democrats.

Sheekey insists that a Bloomberg bid could actually help the  
Democrats. "The truth is there hasn't been a Democratic candidate  
since Jimmy Carter who's won a presidential race with 50 percent of  
the vote," he says, arguing that almost anything that alters the  
electoral playing field is good for the Democrats. But the Democrats  
who have begun to pay attention to the emerging possibility of a  
Bloomberg bid are less sanguine, particularly those around Hillary  
Clinton. "It's insane," says Howard Wolfson, a Clinton adviser, who  
thinks Bloomberg couldn't win but could spoil. "He would end up doing  
a lot more damage to a Democrat than a Republican." Wolfson adds that  
he's starting to think Bloomberg may run.

Rapoport's candidate of choice, meanwhile, wouldn't do quite so well  
as Bloomberg on the Manhattan social circuit. "If you were going to  
ask me who represents the Perot voter," he says, "Lou Dobbs comes a  
lot closer than Bloomberg."

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Ben Smith is a political reporter for New York's Daily News.