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Over on the home page, we're taking a look at Michael Bloomberg's potential run for president. A lot of the analysis -- once you get past the horserace stuff -- questions the rationale of a Bloomberg candidacy. Why, exactly, do we need Mike Bloomberg for president.

Well, we probably don't. But Bloomberg's presumably a smart man (he's a self-made billionaire, after all) and a businessman to boot. So I'm guessing he thinks he's spotted a niche in the market that's otherwise going unserved.

Bloomberg would be running a "bipartisan" campaign that aims to unify people from the right and left under the umbrella under an as-yet undefined brand of centrism. A lot of folks on the left who are tired of Broderism think that's a cop-out. They even welcome polarization. Take Matt Yglesias, for example:

Pushing things further, though, I would make the case that polarization is a good thing. Polarization means you know, as a citizen, how to translate political activity -- voting, volunteering, donating -- into policy results. If every Democrat is to the left of every Republican on some issue, then if you want to move the status quo to the left you support Democratic candidates but if you want to move it to the right you support Republicans. Under conditions where there's very little polarization, like the congressional politics of civil rights in the 1950s, you get chaos. Perhaps a certain Democratic incumbent is slightly better on civil rights than his Republican challenger. But the Republican ranking member on some key committee may well be better on civil rights than is the Democratic incumbent. Thus it's possible that backing the incumbent is good for civil rights unless beating the incumbent would cause the balance of power to shift and bring the Republican ranking member into the majority. What's a voter to do? Who knows?

And that's fair, as far as it goes. Polarization brings clarity to the voting process, no doubt about it. And I like that clarity: To me, the Democrats generally have a much better platform to run on -- better on the use of force abroad, better on building a social safety net and, by default, better on civil liberties.

But the last couple of elections have swung on the preferences of those people in the middle -- people who perhaps don't have such clarity in their political outlook. They might be pro-war AND pro-choice (or, at least, conflicted about such issues) and I suspect that, to such folks, all the yelling to their left and right is somewhat exhausting. That's Bloomberg's market niche. And Democrats who want so badly to capture the White House ignore that market at their own peril.

How do you appeal to those folks and stay true to your principles? That's another blog post.

Final point: Ralph Nader made a big dent in the 2000 election on a platform that suggested Democrats and Republicans were too much alike. (And Steve Clemons points out there's still such a sentiment out there, calling for a "dissident ticket.") Bloomberg would be running on the exact opposite belief.