President Bloomberg?

By David Mixner -



Bob Shrum has written one of the more insightful columns of the election season. In his latest column for "The Week" he writes of a potential Mayor Michael Bloomberg candidacy as an independent candidate for the President of the United States. Most political experts and seasoned reporters have failed to grasp the disillusionment with both parties and the desperate desire for a "Third Way." Shrum, a committed Democrat, brilliantly outlines how Mayor Bloomberg, with the right set of circumstances, could end up sitting in the Oval Office.

In his article "Bloomberg's Road To The White House", Shrum writes:

The quiet, consequential, and largely uncovered story of this campaign is this: An independent challenge for the presidency in 2012 is both probable and viable. 

Shrum opines about what this election really could mean for 2012:

None of this will be a headline on Election Night 2010, but it could be a harbinger of Election 2012. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has the resources and the increasingly evident ambition to run for president as an independent. The White House knows it — and the incumbent president has been personally courting the mayor with calculated but not necessarily availing care. Meanwhile Doug Schoen, Bloomberg's pollster (and Bill Clinton's in 1996), has written a book titled Declaring Independence, in which he bluntly declares "the beginning of the end of the two-party system." It's clear who he thinks can finish the job. Aides like Bloomberg strategist Kevin Sheekey are ready to go; Hillary Clinton's 2008 communications chief Howard Wolfson probably hasn't enlisted as Bloomberg's deputy mayor out of an abiding passion for municipal issues.

Bloomberg is obviously smart about money. And he's no Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who led both Clinton and George H.W. Bush by a healthy margin in the late spring of 1992 but wouldn't spend — and wouldn't listen. In the three most expensive mayoral races in world history, Bloomberg's mind has been as open to advice as his wallet has been to political reality.

That's why he'll run — but only if the trends of 2010 extend or accelerate toward 2012. Bloomberg could position himself as uniquely equipped to fix a sluggish recovery or respond to a double-dip recession.

He closes his article with:

This is the one scenario — and not an unlikely one — in which Bloomberg could actually get elected president. In a three-way race, he could carry states that would otherwise reject him. Despite, for example, his adamant support for gun control, he could win a Pennsylvania, an Ohio, even a Montana with 35 percent or 37 percent of the vote. The Perot campaign had a plausible path to 270 electoral votes until the candidate, stingy and arrogant, vacillated, withdrew, and re-entered. We've seen enough of Bloomberg in the arena to know that if he runs for president, he won't cut and run. He can appeal to business, to suburban Republicans, and even to core Democratic constituencies. One of the country's most influential gay leaders estimates that if Bloomberg is on the ballot, Obama might be left with only 30 percent of the LGBT vote.

That suggests danger for the country as well as for Obama. Bloomberg might draw many more votes from Obama than from the Republican, transforming an otherwise unelectable mess like Palin or Gingrich into the next president of the United States.

The president will do all he can to avert this scenario — to pump up the economy despite the intransigent GOP, to push off the Republican far right, and to keep Bloomberg far away from the 2012 campaign. But the mayor's already on the practice field. And while politics ain't beanbag, it is bucks — and Bloomberg has at least 16 billion of them. He could spend a billion and not miss it; he'd make more than that in the same year. What does he have to lose? If the independents and insurgents of 2010 are any guide, he just might win.

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