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No yearning for Bloomberg |
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By Byron York
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Posted: 06/22/07 06:34 PM [ET] |
Can anyone show me evidence that Americans are hankering for a Michael Bloomberg presidential candidacy?
I know the poll numbers in which about 70 percent of the American people say the country is headed in the wrong direction.
And I know the numbers that say most Americans disapprove of the job being done by both Republican George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress.
Those certainly suggest that voters aren’t happy with either party. But the throw-the-bums-out mentality is a fairly common one at any time, although more widespread these days, in the fifth year of the Iraq war.
In any event, do the polls suggest that any significant number of voters wants the current mayor of New York on the presidential ballot as an independent?
John Zogby, the pollster, says, “After more than a decade of harsh wrangling, likely voters tell me they are tired of the vicious partisanship. In a national telephone poll last month, 80 percent said it was ‘very important’ that the next president be a person who can unite the country, and 82 percent said the same about the need for a competent manager.”
Bloomberg, Zogby concludes, “wins on both counts.”
But weren’t voters in 2000, after the Lewinsky scandal and the Clinton impeachment, telling pollsters that they were tired of the partisanship in Washington? In large part, George Bush based his campaign on that unhappiness.
And didn’t those voters then split in almost identical numbers between the Republican and Democratic candidates?
OK, you say, what about the polls showing that Republicans are unhappy with their choices for president?
That, fortunately for Republicans, appears to be changing.
In April, NBC and The Wall Street Journal found that just 53 percent of Republicans surveyed said they were happy with the field that included Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
But this month, when the NBC/Journal poll included Fred Thompson in the list of candidates, 73 percent of Republicans said they were happy with the field.
For their part, Democrats have long been pretty satisfied with their choices.
And by the way, why is Bloomberg an independent? We know that he was never really a Republican. He only took the label to run for office after Giuliani.
But why not run for president as a Democrat, since Bloomberg was a Democrat for all his life before running for mayor? As it is now, for the second time, he appears to be changing his political affiliation solely for the purpose of running for office. Not a terribly attractive trait.
After Bloomberg’s party switch, The New York Times editorial board said it was a “relief to stop watching Mr. Bloomberg pretend to be a Republican.”
“We were glad to hear Mr. Bloomberg say the presidential candidates should be talking about how to move forward in Iraq, which applies to those who take cover behind President Bush’s policies as well as those who believe, as we do, that the focus should be on ending the war,” the Times continued.
“Mr. Bloomberg was right when he said Americans care ‘about who’s going to pay their Social Security; they care about who’s going to pay their medical care; they care about immigration, about our reputation overseas.’ And, unlike politicians in both parties, he talked about America’s out-of-control gun problem.”
What is the Times saying? Are the presidential candidates in both parties not talking about a way to move forward in Iraq? About medical care? About immigration and our reputation overseas?
Come on.
It is true, however, that Bloomberg could become the only candidate to make a big deal of the gun issue, which Democrats have repeatedly found is a big loser at the polls. Go on, Mr. Mayor. Give it a try.
Now, let’s not shortchange Bloomberg. It should be said that he did a good job safeguarding some of the breakthrough accomplishments of Rudy Giuliani’s term as mayor.
That’s not nothing; under different leadership, the city might have done some serious backsliding after Giuliani.
But if you view things that way, why not just vote for Giuliani himself?
The obvious conclusion from all this is that there is no truly compelling reason for Bloomberg to run. If he chooses to go ahead, he’ll rely not on a groundswell of public opinion, but on his personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, to make it possible.
York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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