There was plenty of speculation over the summer about whether NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg might run as an independent candidate for president. He’d deny interest, but then tease reporters with some kind of ambiguous answer about intentions. This went back and forth for a while, until in August, Bloomberg stopped being coy.
Asked by Dan Rather if he might run, Bloomberg said, “No.” Asked if there were “any circumstances” in which he would launch a campaign, the mayor added, “Oh, I don’t know. Any — the answer — if I don’t say no categorically you’ll then read something into it. The answer is no.”
Three months later, there he is on the cover of Newsweek, alongside a headline that reads, “The Billion-Dollar Wild Card.” So, did the magazine uncover some new details about Bloomberg’s intentions? Actually, no.
The subject of a Bloomberg presidential bid is on a lot of people’s minds, including the incumbent’s. Landing at the Wall Street heliport earlier this year, after the mayor announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent, President Bush gestured to Marine One and told Bloomberg: “That bird could be yours.”
The odds against an independent bid for the White House are long, but if Bloomberg’s life tells us anything, it is that he is often more motivated, and more successful, when other people say he cannot do something. “Stubborn isn’t a word I would use to describe myself; pigheaded is more appropriate,” Bloomberg wrote in his memoir. “To a contrarian like me, constant advice not to do something almost always starts me quickly down the risky, unpopular path.” He loves defying conventional wisdom, and like the Revolutionary luminaries he admires, he would like to mount up and ride through what Longfellow called the gloom and the light, playing the hero’s part, leading the way, making a difference.
The piece goes on and on (and on). Indeed, it’s a 7,000-word magnum opus about Bloomberg, which manages to be a nice personality profile of a popular mayor — without adding any news insights whatsoever.
To be sure, Newsweek treats a Bloomberg candidacy as a genuine possibility. But the article does so to justify itself, not because the facts warrant it.
Exactly a year before the 2008 presidential election, Bloomberg is a billionaire wild card, a centrist who has the means to make one of the most significant third-party bids for the White House in American history. Worth an estimated $13 billion or so, he has more money than Theodore Roosevelt or Ross Perot, and he also has something no other plausible 2008 independent has: a strong resume in the public sector. A rich man with a record of service and seemingly limitless ambition, Bloomberg represents a formidable threat to the traditional party nominees. “This is a billion-dollar campaign,” Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s chief political adviser, told Newsweek aboard Bloomberg’s Falcon 9 jet flying from Washington, D.C., to Seattle late last week. He then amended the declaration — slightly: “If it happens, it’s a billion-dollar campaign.”
If it happens. What would make it happen? In Sheekey’s view — on the record, Bloomberg himself answers questions about his White House ambitions by saying he has 790-odd days to go as mayor, and that he could not be happier — the two major parties may wind up nominating candidates with negative ratings at or above 40 percent. (According to a September Gallup poll, Hillary Clinton is at 49 percent, Rudy Giuliani at 38.) And if polls show, as they have in the recent past, that 70 percent or more of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, then there may well be an opening for Bloomberg. “You have to have opponents the country is basically unhappy with, at a time when the country is basically unhappy,” says Sheekey. In what he calls, only somewhat ironically, “The Sheekey Master Plan,” he believes that the hour of decision will come not after Feb. 5, when 21 states hold their primaries, but on March 5, the day after the Texas primary. (Sheekey thinks it possible that the GOP race will not settle down until Texas.) Ultimately finding a place on all 50 ballots is clearly within reach, Sheekey says: “It’s something you can do with resources.”
History is full of examples of third-party candidates who ran to force an issue forward, or to register a protest against the status quo. Bloomberg, however, will not run unless Sheekey can convince him that winning the necessary 270 electoral votes is not only possible, but likely. The mayor would not be a vanity candidate, nor does he want to be a spoiler. If he runs, he will run to win, and there is a good case that Perot’s 19 percent in 1992 is, in Sheekey’s phrase, “the floor for an independent, not a ceiling.”
Here’s the thing: Sheekey has been talking like this for a year. He wants Bloomberg to run, and has been making pitches like this to any reporter who will listen. What does this have to do with the likelihood of an actual campaign? Not a whole lot.
So what are we left with? An extremely long cover-story about a candidate who isn’t running, with no news to the contrary.
Note to Newsweek: there’s quite a bit of interesting news to cover among the actual candidates. Devoting 7,000 words to someone who has ruled out a campaign doesn’t make a lot of sense.