On Feb. 6, 2008 the mayor of New York will wake up to a country that will likely have settled on its Republican and Democratic nominees for president. Like many Americans, he probably will not be entirely happy with either candidate. Like many Americans, he will probably wish there were some other choice.  
But like no other American, Michael Bloomberg may be able to do something about it.

Given that Bloomberg built what is  estimated to be a $12-billion fortune largely on his media and marketing savvy, some see a plan, fashioned and fine-tuned by his political mastermind, Kevin Sheekey. Some see that plan leading right to Bloomberg being elected the next president of the United States.
The way a lot of experienced political observers see things, that plan seems to be running exactly according to schedule.

This is what happens next.



According to several experienced campaign observers, Bloomberg has a few months to continue laying low, periodically bursting into the news and then issuing his presidential denials. He cannot be coy, and he cannot let the anticipation morph into expectation. There is much he can learn—though he probably does not need to be taught—from the experience of Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and Law & Order district attorney, who toyed with the idea for so long that the story had already become stale by the time he declared.

Bloomberg and his advisors know something about marketing. If he does run and intends to win, he will need to sell himself as the fresh alternative. Products cannot be sold as new for 12 months. Bloomberg and those around him with their marketing expertise would understand this. Even if Bloomberg has definitively made up his mind to run, part of the way to win would be to keep things under wraps for now.

By the beginning of next year, if they are planning to sell a Bloomberg campaign, his stance on some major presidential campaign issues which he has not yet addressed will need to be clear. With his record in office, he has well-established stances on education, guns, immigration, fiscal policy, environmental sustainability and, to an extent, homeland security. If he wants his potential as a credible independent presidential candidate to remain high, he will need to fill in the gaps—especially on foreign policy, particularly on the Iraq War.

He already made motions in this direction when speaking with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union Sept. 25.

“There’s no good choices here,” Bloomberg said, when considering what to do about Iraq. “I find it distasteful that everyone always talks about how we got here when you ask them what we should do.”

But though he mused on the importance of the United Nations and the imperative to repair America’s reputation in the international community, and reflected on how the Iraqi insurgency paralleled the American Revolution, he did not make any specific proposals for addressing the situation in Baghdad. As we approach the end of year five of American involvement in Iraq, this is a topic that Bloomberg the prospective presidential candidate will need to tackle more directly.

If Bloomberg is running for president, there will be more speeches on this and other topics he has stayed away from as mayor, like universal health care, a proposal he all but endorsed in another portion of the Cooper Union discussion.

Then comes Feb. 5. As of now, eight states will have already voted by the time the new Super Tuesday dawns, and by the time polls close that evening,
delegate-heavy behemoths like California and New York will be among the 19 to join them. The Democratic and Republican nominations will likely be set.
With a full seven months until Election Day, Americans will be left with two people whose presidential ambitions they will have at that point already been hearing about for at least a year. With voter turnout always low in primaries, realistically, most people in the states which have weighed in by Feb. 5 will not have voted, and none of the residents of the remaining 23 states will have voted at all.

Especially if the candidates are particularly polarizing figures with high negative ratings and they have been through bruising primaries, Bloomberg may have an opening.

Angus King hopes so. An independent elected to two terms as governor of Maine in the 1990s, King is a member of the board of directors of Unity08, the movement to transcend the two-party system. The site has, at last count, attracted about 113,000 people to register as members.

“Come January or February of ’08, when the primary system has almost already run its course, the people are going to be saying, ‘Look, isn’t there another choice? I didn’t really have any say in this.’ And I think that’s where you’re going to see Unity08 take off,” said King. “In one sense, the parties have played into our hands by starting this process so early.”

As long as Bloomberg keeps denying his interest in the race, if he announces his candidacy in February, he could be the gust of fresh air that King and others believe the national electorate will be gasping for by then.

And if the moment is right, Sheekey believes, none of Bloomberg’s denials will matter.

“The thing about running for president is: it makes sense if it makes sense,” he said. “If there’s a reason to run, and there’s a constituency calling for you, and you have real ideas, then people will support you. And if not, they won’t. I have not heard anyone in six months run around talking about Barack Obama saying, ‘You know, he swore he wasn’t going to run.’ Because no one cares. They care about what he’s going to do for the country.”

If that constituency calls and Bloomberg decides to answer, the first and largest issue will be ballot access. Each of the 50 states has a different and uniquely convoluted process for putting candidates on the presidential ballot, and finding lawyers and activists in each state familiar with the rules will be no small task.

However, for a candidate of Bloomberg’s financial resources, this will not be an insurmountable one, explained Micah Sifry, the author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America. He does not think Bloomberg will run, but he thinks that he could easily take care of the mechanics if he did.

“It’s really a combination of money and people power,” he said. “But certainly for somebody with a checkbook as big as Bloomberg’s, getting on the ballot in all 50 states is basically just an expensive irritation.”

Coming off the first-ever national Independence Party convention, chairman Frank MacKay said that members from all across the country are excited by the prospect of a Bloomberg bid, and are committed to taking the steps toward getting an independent 2008 presidential candidate onto all 50 states’ ballots.

“If Mayor Bloomberg chooses not to run, we feel that there are other choices out there that may emerge. But we’d be lying if we said there’s someone more popular than Mayor Bloomberg in the party,” he said. “Michael Bloomberg is the dream candidate for the independent movement.”

Suddenly, the single greatest obstacle to an independent presidential candidacy is off the table. If Bloomberg began running shortly after the Feb. 5 primary glut, he could probably have the whole question of ballot access wrapped up by Leap Day.

Along the way, the petitioning effort could help kick off the actual campaigning, organizational structuring and voter outreach.

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“Come January or February of ’08, when the primary system has almost already run its course, the people are going to be saying, ‘Look, isn’t there another choice? I didn’t really have any say in this.’ And I think that’s where you’re going to see Unity08 take off,” said Angus King, a former independent governor of Maine and an advisor to Unity08. “In one sense, the parties have played into our hands by starting this process so early.”

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By March he could be firmly in the race, propelled by the tremendous amount of media coverage a serious independent presidential candidate would inevitably attract. A clearly articulated message about his vision for the country and mission to do something different would help keep this kind of coverage coming.
Though informed observers disagree about whether Bloomberg will actually get in to the race, they agree that if he does decide to run, he will be out to win. To do that, he would need to quickly propel himself to equal standing with the major party candidates.

Fortunately for Bloomberg, said political consultant Ed Rollins, the mayor has the resources and method to be able to do just that.

Rollins has some experience in this area. In addition to managing Ronald Reagan’s unprecedented Electoral College blowout in 1984, he was, for a time, Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign manager.

Rollins suggested Bloomberg adopt a tactic employed to some success by Perot: buying major chunks of airtime across the country not for standard 30-second campaign spots, but for substantive addresses to voters on major issues for a minute or two at a time. These advertisements could run from March through August, Rollins said, beginning right as the major party candidates are retooling and refilling their emptied campaign coffers in preparation for the general election.
With the minimum $1 billion Bloomberg is rumored to be willing to commit to a presidential campaign and most expect he would spend, he could buy a lot more airtime than Perot ever did. Bloomberg blanketed the airwaves in New York City in 2005. Within a few short months, he went from having an approval rating in the 40s to winning 59 percent of the vote.

Sheekey acknowledged that the money made victory possible in the mayor’s races, and that only through massive spending would Bloomberg have a chance to win a presidential election, should he decide to run.

“I don’t kid myself and tell you that if Mike Bloomberg wasn’t a billionaire, he was going to get far in the mayor’s race,” Sheekey said. “Mike Bloomberg had to break in. And he had to break past politics. And he did it with money.”

If employed correctly, Rollins believes Bloomberg’s money could take advantage of the compressed election cycle to establish his candidacy by the fall.
“Because of the idiocy of the calendar this year, you’ve got this big six-month period where you can run up the middle and really dominate the airwaves,” Rollins said.
“Once you come into September, then you’re in a three-way race, and you’re being compared equally to the other two.”

Back in 2004, George W. Bush and John Kerry spent and had spent on their behalf about $500 million each. In his 2001 race for mayor, Bloomberg took no donations and spent $74 million of his own money to win. He spent $77.8 million on his reelection, giving him the record for spending the most personal money on a race in American history.

He is estimated to be worth about $12 billion these days. Dropping a billion of that to get elected president of the United States, especially after spending almost a tenth as much to get elected mayor, does not seem so far-fetched.

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“The thing about running for president is: it makes sense if it makes sense,” said Kevin Sheekey. “If there’s a reason to run, and there’s a constituency calling for you, and you have real ideas, then people will support you. And if not, they won’t. I have not heard anyone in six months run around talking about Barack Obama saying, ‘You know, he swore he wasn’t going to run.’ Because no one cares. They care about what he’s going to do for the country.”

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But as much money as he has, the mayor has never been known to toss dollars nonchalantly into the wind. Even his charitable donations tend to be directed toward established organizations, making for safe philanthropic investments. Since then he has said repeatedly that he intends to follow up his time in City Hall with a career in giving away his fortune. If he feels he can make more of an impact by being in the White House, maybe he would put $1 billion toward a campaign rather than his foundation.

If he is performing well by October, the Democrats and Republicans will have no choice but to include him in the debates, giving him a forum to discuss his management competence and record, while letting the two other nominees jab at each other for partisan points. Two or three debates, coupled with his ongoing barrage of advertising and outreach, and Bloomberg will no longer be the other guy. He will be one of three. And at that point, going into Election Day, he will be a candidate who can win, and a man who may have changed the course of American politics along the way.

The absolutely unique circumstances surrounding Bloomberg mean that he needs only to keep doing the job of New York City mayor to stay very much in the public spotlight and needs only to make sure his accountant is not a master thief to keep the interest growing on his massive fortune. And, of course, he will need to keep consulting with Sheekey to make sure the plan is progressing.

Hank Sheinkopf, the political consultant who ran Mark Green’s losing campaign to Bloomberg in the 2001 mayor’s race, says there is every reason to take the prospect seriously.

“He is in complete control of his destiny,” said Sheinkopf. “He’s got all the time in the world.”

Sheekey and Bloomberg, along with First Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris and the others in the inner circle who helped make him mayor, have the skills to make a real presidential race, Sheinkopf said, and Bloomberg’s billions have the power to make the candidacy possible.

“We have never experienced the kind of campaign that Michael Bloomberg could run if he decides to participate,” Sheinkopf said. “We have never experienced the kind of resources a Michael Bloomberg could bring to the campaign.”

As for whether the campaign could be politically viable across the country, attracting enough support to earn Bloomberg the minimum 35 percent plurality in enough states he would need to come out on top in the Electoral College, Sheinkopf said the idea is just crazy enough to work. The big city billionaire mayor, Sheinkopf said, could go exactly counter to conventional wisdom to become the most appealing presidential candidate nationwide.

“Who else but a billionaire could go to the working class and tell them he can help them? Nixon went to China. Sadat went to Jerusalem. Bloomberg,” he said, “could go to Detroit.” 

eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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Laying the Groundwork

John Anderson, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who ran as the independent candidate for president in 1980, believes in the power of a Bloomberg presidential campaign.

“I think he has to get in and suggest that there is a third way appearing at a unique moment when people can see the failures first by the administration that is in power, and now by the Democratically-controlled Congress,” Anderson said.

But the official line from Bloomberg, repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam, is that while all the speculation is flattering and certainly makes his 98-year-old mother Charlotte happy, there is nothing more to be said on the topic. He is not running for president, has no plans to run for president, he says. He is, to judge by his public comments and manner when making them, exasperated that reporters will not let the question rest.

Nonetheless, among New York political observers, some see a telling sign in the fact that he has kept his main presidential promoter, Kevin Sheekey on the payroll, and has not, according to Sheekey, told him to stop promoting an idea he himself has dismissed.

Sheekey is not the only one. All around New York and all across the country, people are talking intensely about a Bloomberg presidential campaign. They are dreaming of having him in the race, fantasizing about pulling the lever for him next Nov. 4.

Desperate for hope and information, maybe they turn to the internet. On a whim, they type in www.bloomberg08.com. Or maybe www.mikebloomberg08.com. Neither loads. Instead, the URL redirects to www.mikebloomberg.com, the mayor’s campaign site for his citywide runs, which, when relaunched in May, prompted a stir of stories about his future political plans.

Speaking on behalf of the mayor’s website operations, Robert Lawson of Rubenstein Communications explained that the purchases were nothing more than “an effort to prevent cybersquatters,” pointing out that both www.bloomberg07.com and www.mikebloomberg07.com redirect to the personal site as well. Meanwhile, www.mikeforpresident.com redirects to a porn site and www.bloombergforpresident.com, which was registered on Oct. 21, 2005--two weeks before Sheekey first floated the presidential possibilities--and last updated this past Sept. 12, is owned by someone who has asked Register.com to conceal his or her identity. There is no content on the site.

And that is just the most subtle of things he has been doing that, in one way or another, have made people believe in the stealth Bloomberg campaign.
On April 22, he unveiled PlaNYC. On May 10, he relaunched his website. On June 19, he announced he was quitting the GOP. Woven in between each were trips to potential swing states, each of them prompting a little more speculation.

The summer was slow. Then on Sept. 25, he was sitting with Tom Brokaw for the third in the Cooper Union Dialogue Series, conceived as a forum for presidential candidates. The conversation was supposed to cover three topics: poverty, education and environment. Though they touched on each, Bloomberg spent much of the hour going into depth about his thoughts on the Iraq War--a topic he had previously resisted discussing publicly, arguing that the conflict was beyond his purview as mayor. The next week, he was in Paris and England, 10 days after former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani crossed the Atlantic to shore up his own foreign policy credentials as he battles for the Republican presidential nomination.

The groundwork, many agree, is carefully being laid. Whether or not Bloomberg actually gets into the race, the campaign has already begun.

—EIRD
eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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Ticket Takers

If he runs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg will need to pick a running mate. Ballot laws will let him hold off on doing so until late summer, an option he may well exercise if he is spending the time until then introducing himself and his candidacy to the nation.

The name most often mentioned is Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican who has become one of the leading critics of the Iraq War and President George W. Bush’s management of the military. Hagel’s background as a Vietnam War veteran and champion of veteran’s rights has given his war critiques added weight.
Hagel could add conservative credibility to the more liberal-leaning Bloomberg, but he could provide two other important balances as well. An immensely popular Midwesterner, Hagel won his second term in the Senate in 2002 with 83 percent of the vote. A better geographical counterpart to the mayor of New York would be hard to find.

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“I think it would be revitalizing, and I think it would be a renewing time for American politics, to shock the two major parties a bit. And I think that’s what this country wants.” -- Sen. Chuck Hagel, on the possibility of an independent presidential candidacy.

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Perhaps more importantly, Hagel has extensive experience in Washington and in foreign affairs as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As Bloomberg’s vice presidential candidate, he could give the ticket the international relations heft Bloomberg will be unable to provide.
And the two do seem to agree on the broad strokes of the foreign policy challenge for the next administration. Speaking at Cooper Union Sept. 25, Bloomberg touched on the topic.

“This country’s in big trouble and somebody’s got to pull it out. We’ve lost our relationships with the world,” he said. “Somebody’s got to go out and rebuild those relationships.”

Delivering the Sidney Shainwald Public Interest Lecture at New York Law School Oct. 11 on “Re-Introducing America to the World,” Hagel spoke about the need to do just that.

And, Hagel said, an independent presidential candidacy might be the way to get this and other national priorities restored in a country he says has been off-balance since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I think it would make sense,” Hagel said. “I would welcome a strong, viable, accomplished independent candidate into the race.”


Asked whether he thought Bloomberg made sense as the candidate to fit this bill, Hagel spoke of the mayor’s prospects with great enthusiasm. “I think he’d be a very good president,” Hagel said.

He praised Bloomberg’s record in business and government, and noted the power his personal fortune could have.

“That doesn’t qualify him to be president, but it certainly helps him get there, because you need those kind of funds to do it,” Hagel said. “I think it would be revitalizing, and I think it would be a renewing time for American politics, to shock the two major parties a bit. And I think that’s what this country wants.”

Several other possibilities have been floated, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A popular, moderate Republican with clear campaign appeal, Schwarzenegger has developed an alliance with Bloomberg on environmental initiatives and a push to get things done by states and cities, instead of waiting for the federal government to act.

His celebrity, though, might be a drawback, as he could potentially overshadow the less bombastic Bloomberg on the campaign trail. And though the votes he could help deliver in California might be a draw, his Austrian upbringing would not. Though he may well be able to serve as vice president and be skipped over in succession if Bloomberg cannot complete the job, the legal question is unclear. And that kind of Constitutional debate would be an unwelcome distraction to a campaign trying to establish itself.

“Traditionally, you try to balance the ticket geographically,” said Ed Rollins, a political consultant who served as campaign manager to Ronald Reagan and Ross Perot.

But referring to Bloomberg’s limited experience in foreign policy, Rollins said, “I think he needs to put someone on who has the credentials that he doesn’t have.”
Some believe that candidate will be Sam Nunn, a moderate conservative Democrat who served four terms as senator from Georgia and chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee. But Nunn has already been out of the Senate for a decade, and is hardly well known any more.

Hagel, who recently announced that he would not seek election to a third term in the Senate, may be the right man at the right time, if Bloomberg is looking for a running mate next August.

Hagel did not deny that the idea of joining Bloomberg on an independent ticket had crossed his mind, but he insisted that things had not gone further.

“I have not had any serious conversations with Mayor Bloomberg on this,” he said. “We’ve talked, we’ve had dinner, but we’ve never gotten down into depth with that.”

Asked whether he would accept if asked, Hagel said he does not deal in hypothetical questions.

“I don’t anticipate that I’ll be on any ballot for any office next year,” he said. “But this is an unpredictable business.”

—EIRD
eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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Feeling the Draft

Karin Gallet has been convening the members of Draft Bloomberg for months on Tuesday evenings at the Old Town Bar on East 18th Street. A health care administrator with no previous political experience, but a deep admiration of the mayor, Gallet says she is being assisted by political professionals who have taken pity on her. They have launched a website, www.Bloomberg08nyc.com, and registered an accompanying Political Action Committee with the Federal Elections Commission. They are scouting spots for a fundraiser.

She is organizing the volunteers to show up at Bloomberg’s public events with signs encouraging him to run, and even to wait outside the WABC studios from where he broadcasts his weekly radio show, hoping to demonstrate to him the strength of his support.

“Our main goal is to make our presence known, show ourselves to the mayor and not get arrested,” she said.

She advises the group on how to make supportive comments on political blogs and is coordinating a letter-writing campaign to encourage Bloomberg to run. Sample letters are available on the group’s website, she told the six people who gathered for their Oct. 2 meeting. Encouraging them to spread the word, she dangles a prize in front of them: she expects to be able to deliver the letters to Bloomberg in person in City Hall’s Blue Room, and says the top three letter collectors will get to join her.

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“I believe there is a quiet wedding by the end of the year, or at least a quiet engagement. That, to me, is the strongest indication that he’s running.” -- Draft Bloomberg head Karin Gallet.

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Envisioning “a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment,” Gallet said, “It’s not going to matter if it’s a hundred. It’s not going to matter if it’s a thousand. It’s only going to matter if it’s several thousand.”

Gallet and the others in the group have thought through every eventuality, every possible scenario that favors or hobbles the prospects of a Bloomberg for president campaign. “We can’t have a president who is shacking up with his girlfriend,” she said, referring to how Bloomberg lives in his East 79th Street townhouse with his companion, Diana Taylor. “I believe there is a quiet wedding by the end of the year, or at least a quiet engagement. That, to me, is the strongest indication that he’s running.”

She says the mayor’s staff is happy to have them making the push.

“They clearly are supportive in spirit, even if they can’t do it actively,” she said of people in the Bloomberg administration. “No one ever says, ‘You should give it up.’”

And though she will not name names, she says she is in reasonably regular contact with “someone who’s not in Kevin Sheekey’s circle, but in the next circle out.”

However, according to Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser, no one from City Hall is in contact with Gallet or the Draft Bloomberg effort. Loeser did, however, acknowledge that standing on the street after Bloomberg appeared at Cooper Union Sept. 25, chief Bloomberg presidential prospect cheerleader Kevin Sheekey recognized Gallet’s picture from her Facebook page and introduced her to the mayor for their first-ever meeting. That, however, is the extent of the contact, Loeser said.

She and others whisper about the help they have been getting, claiming that efforts are being coordinated from within the Bloomberg camp. There are rumors of consultants who worked with Bloomberg in the past effectively placing themselves on hold for the presidential race, still waiting to hear whether he will make the race. But they guard the details very closely.

Loeser said that while all the talk was flattering and understandable, and while Sheekey continues to speak about his hopes Bloomberg will run, neither the mayor nor anyone else in his administration has anything to do with the effort.

As for the involvement of advisors and supporters who used to work for the mayor but no longer do, Loeser said he could not speak for them.

“It’s not surprising that people who worked to build the largest and broadest coalition in New York history are still supportive of the mayor,” Loeser said, “and some of them are going to be involved with Draft Bloomberg.”

—EIRD
eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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How He Wins

Michael Bloomberg has the potential to overcome many of the obstacles that conventional wisdom puts in the way of an independent presidential campaign.
They may both be billionaires, and Bloomberg may seem poised to become the latest independent presidential candidate to self-finance, but Bloomberg is not by any means Ross Perot.

The Texas businessman seized on an odd political moment in 1992, riding widespread discontent with the economy to what was at one point a top position in the polls. But his decision to drop out of the race and then get back in months later, coupled with his somewhat manic behavior, led many to question his credibility.

“Obviously, he was a very naive candidate and turned out to be a nutcase,” said Ed Rollins, who helped manage the campaign. “But it was a phenomenon, and a lot of people who wanted an alternative to the two-party system looked to him, and they were very disillusioned.”

Rollins recalled arguing with Perot about an advertising budget, among other fights which he said revealed the candidate as completely unfamiliar with what a political campaign requires.

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“He had a total naïveté about the political system,” said Ross Perot's former campaign manager, Ed Rollins, of Perot.  “Obviously, Michael Bloomberg doesn’t, and neither do the people around him.”

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“He had a total naïveté about the political system,” Rollins said. “Obviously, Michael Bloomberg doesn’t, and neither do the people around him.”

Bloomberg has proven his political potential by winning two terms as a Republican mayor of ultra-Democratic New York. He has proven his management and governing potential, covering everything from turning around the post-Sept. 11 economy to beginning to reform the public schools. Going into the 1992 race, Perot had neither.

John Anderson, the former Republican congressman from Illinois and 1980 independent presidential candidate, said that distinction will be essential.

“He didn’t have what Bloomberg has,” Anderson said, referring to Perot. “He didn’t have a record of accomplishment in public office, of actually solving problems as a day-to-day administrator of government. I think Perot, even though he poured a lot of money into his campaign, he didn’t measure up to the mark that I would establish for someone to run a government.”


But enter the realists: Bloomberg is a short, Jewish billionaire divorcé from New York. Just about any political consultant in the country would say that any one of those factors would be enough to knock him out of contention.

But then look at the rest of the field. There has never been a female president in the 230-year history of this country, nor even a serious female contender in the top spot. Plus, as those familiar with the conventional wisdom know full well, sitting senators rarely win the White House—that has happened only twice in history, and not for almost half a century.

And yet Hillary Clinton is the candidate of the Democratic establishment, and, for most watching the developing race, the favorite to win it all. 

Then there is former Vice President Al Gore. Rarely in history has a party nominated an unsuccessful candidate again. Rarely in history has the man who won the popular vote not won in the Electoral College. But then again, only once in history has the Supreme Court decided an election. Now the reinvented Gore has a Nobel Peace Prize to put on his shelf next to his Oscar and Emmy. A latecomer campaign would probably not be the strangest thing in American political history, but it certainly would not be steeped in conventional wisdom.

Things look even stranger on the Republican side. Forget about how the twice-elected vice president is not even in the running, or that a two-term administration has failed to produce any clear political heir. The party which has for years been a coalition of social conservatives, Christian activists, hardline right-wingers, gun rights advocates, foreign policy hawks and the urban-suspicious seems ready to anoint Rudolph Giuliani, the thrice-married, pro-choice lapsed Catholic who endorsed Mario Cuomo and stricter anti-gun provisions while mayor of New York and appeared on Saturday Night Live, among other places, in a dress.

The old white establishment Protestants, the ones who fit the mold of our 43 presidents to date, sit in the back of the pack, watching the race whiz by them.
So there is no rule book. Not for 2008, anyway.

But if he does decide to take on the major party nominees, Bloomberg will be able to learn from Perot’s run. The results of the 1992 race, when Perot spent $65.6 million dollars of his fortune to win 19 percent of the vote but not a single stake in the Electoral College are often used to discredit the prospects of a Bloomberg presidential run. But Bloomberg spent more than Perot did on each of his mayoral campaigns, and has indicated that he could commit $1 billion to running.
So the better comparison from 1992 might be to Bill Clinton, who got 43 percent of the vote, and then 370 votes in the Electoral College. Clinton was the Democratic nominee, but his campaign cost only about $130 million.

Bloomberg could easily spend 10 times as much, and he only needs a 35 percent  plurality against two candidates in a handful of states to win. With the possibility that the Democrats and Republicans could face a challenge from another candidate representing the far reaches of his or her party’s ideological base, the likelihood of this increases.

Micah Sifry, author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, does not believe Bloomberg will run, but sees how victory might be possible.

“Could he win? Of course. If Giuliani’s the Republican nominee and Hillary’s the Democratic nominee, the New York thing is neutralized. All the regional things about him coming from New York are neutralized, because they all do,” he said. “It’s anybody’s guess what the dynamics would be, but starting out, certainly he has a shot.”

In fact, said Angus King, the former independent governor of Maine and member of the board of directors of Unity08, the Electoral College system could work in favor of an independent candidate, particularly one with the funding Bloomberg would be able to provide.

“The idea that this is some sort of crazy idea that can’t happen, I don’t think makes any sense,” he said.

But, King said, Bloomberg must wage a national campaign, competing in states across the country. 

“If you’re a national candidate with appeal across the country that has a reasonable chance of winning a majority in a lot of states, what the heck?” he added. “I don’t think the Electoral College is a problem.”

—EIRD
eidovere@manhattanmedia.com