Bloomberg Time!?

rumors are he'll throw his $1 billion into the race...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?pid=168566

Loose Talk about Bloomberg -- by Nicholas von Hoffman

Preceding every candidacy are the rumors. And there are rumors aplenty blowing around New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In no particular order they are:

1. He has decided to run for president.

2. Although a nominal Republican and previously a life-long Democrat, the talk is that Bloomberg would be a third-party man. Should Rudy Giuliani find a way to steal the Republican nomination, the country would have one ex-mayor and one sitting mayor of New York going against each other. If you doubt that Giuliani is a plausible Republican candidate, please take a gander at this:

3. Somebody from Goldman Sachs has been dining out on a story that Bloomberg has been re-arranging his vast fortune to make a presidential run.

4. Loose talk has it that Mayor Bloomberg has decided he will pay for most, if not all, of his campaign expenses, which could run as high as one billion bucks. Yes, he has the money. Bloomberg's fortune is estimated to be at the $5 billion level. Forbes magazine has him pegged as the 34th richest human being in America.

The last big businessman to be president was Herbert Hoover. Like Bloomberg, he also made the money himself. Harry Truman tried his hand at being a businessman (haberdashery) and went belly-up.

5. Third-party candidates usually have a tough time getting on the ballot. (In America, ballot access is more or less controlled by money, in contrast with Iran, where it's controlled by the Ayatollahs.) The gossip has it that with his money Bloomberg can wait as late as March of 2008 to jump in and still get on the ballot in all fifty states.

Most candidates must declare early in order to build their money-raising operations, something Iron Mike need not bother himself with. Thus he can watch the others destroy themselves and each other for a year before he needs put himself in the line of fire.

The last significant third party candidate was H. Ross Perot in 1992. Perot was loaded too. More significantly, he was even more articulate then Bill Clinton. He had a startling ability to connect with people via TV, he was funny, a real phrase-maker, dynamic and persuasive and might have won had he not gone nuts in the middle of the campaign. All of a sudden he began babbling about people from other planets and lesbians infiltrating his daughter's wedding or something like that. Even so, the SOB got almost 20 percent of the vote.

If he does prove the rumors true, Mike Bloomberg is not going to lose it. This is one tough hombre who got it together a long time ago and keeps it that way. That's the plus side. The minus side is he has exactly none of Perot's pluses.

A grindingly dull speaker capable of raising goose bumps only among his fellow plutocrats, at this juncture Bloomberg would only have two things to offer the voters:

1. Compared to himself, his opponents are jerks, if they turn out to be jerks.

2. He is competent.

But in the entire history of the United States, no one has ever been elected because he was competent.