Bloomberg: A viable third option?

Life’s different when you’re a billionaire, said David Remnick in The New Yorker. While other candidates for president have been slugging it out on the frozen doorsteps of New Hampshire, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been relaxing in the warmth of his $13.5 million Manhattan townhouse, playing a coy game of “presidential footsie.” The tycoon, who’s been a highly popular and feistily independent mayor, continues to deny he’s a candidate, yet was guest of honor last week at a Unity ’08 forum in Oklahoma, organized by disaffected Republicans, Democrats, and independents who want to see a third-party candidate for the White House. Bloomberg’s non-partisan, managerial style of government has won him a lot of fans, and aides say he might spend $1 billion out of his own pocket if he decides to run. He sure sounds like he’s considering it, said Kirsten Danis in the New York Daily News. “People have stopped working together,” he grandly told the crowd. “Government is dysfunctional. America is being held back.”

If Bloomberg runs, it’s the Democrats who’ll pay most dearly, said Harry Siegel in the New York Post. The mayor has virtually no chance of winning, and instead would play a spoiler role, like H. Ross Perot. As a socially liberal, secular Jew, Bloomberg’s candidacy would almost certainly siphon more votes from the Democratic candidate than from the Republican one. Indeed, Bloomberg might “be the one man in America who could make Mike Huckabee president.” Don’t be so sure of that, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In these three-way races, the “spoiler” usually ends up drawing most of his votes from the weaker of the two other candidates, whichever their party. In this case, Bloomberg might “end up spending $500 million just to elect a Democrat he probably would vote for himself if he stayed out of the race.”

His timing sure couldn’t be worse, said The Christian Science Monitor. The whole point of a third-party candidacy has been to offer voters something they can’t get from the two major parties. In Bloomberg’s case, this would apparently be a promise to transcend the partisanship and bitterness of Washington and help “bridge America’s red-blue divide.” But in the past week we’ve seen Barack Obama emerge as a likely Democratic nominee, with promises to “end political polarization” and restore civility to national politics. With Obama as the Democratic nominee, and either the populist Mike Huckabee or maverick John McCain as possible Republican choices, “it doesn’t look like another entrant is necessary.”

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