Michael Bloomberg for president?

New York Magazine

Featured Topic | Posted 26 weeks 4 days ago

Michael Bloomberg for president?

Buoyed by the still unsettled field, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of launching an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run. How would another New York mayor in the mix affect the 2008 presidential election?

It will be fun watching him lose

Jonah Goldberg/National Review Online

The more I think about it, the better I feel about a Bloomberg third party candidacy. I think it is obvious he can't win. And while I understand the argument that he could siphon off more GOP votes than Democratic ones, I'm increasingly skeptical that that's how it would work out. By November 2008, I simply don't think that the election will be anything like the referendum on Bush the Democrats want it to be.

Bloomberg's day

Micah Sifry/The Nation

Merely by toying with a run, Bloomberg can force the major candidates to pay attention to issues dear to his heart. Fortunately, many of them are sensible, like gun control, progressive immigration reform, reducing carbon emissions, trying new ways to break the poverty cycle and transparency in government. We could do a lot worse, given how many megalomaniacal billionaires this country seems to produce.