I was just thinking how nice it was that the persistent and unrealistic third party hype had finally died down, but then I read Richard Cohen and got annoyed all over again. Yes, he eventually allows that it is unlikely Bloomberg could win the presidency, but the whole column is still absurd:
The equilibrium of ineptitude -- fools at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue -- is not lost on the American people. They award Congress even lower approval ratings than they do the president, about 20 percent in the case of the Hill, about 30 percent in the case of George W. Bush. What they think of the crop of presidential candidates is not yet clear, but I, for one, pick up the paper in the morning and read that the economy is sinking, that oil could top $100 a barrel and that a pandemic of house foreclosures is sweeping our nation of sweet cul-de-sacs -- and the people who want to be president have precious little to say about any of these issues.
Enter Mike Bloomberg. He is the mayor of New York, endowed with near-universal support in his city and about $13 billion in the bank. Intimations of his presidential ambitions are getting stronger. He cooperated with a Newsweek cover story that, whether he intended it or not, left the clear impression that he can hardly be restrained from running. More to the point, his associates and friends do not, as you might expect, caution me against believing that a presidential run is under consideration. On the contrary, they fairly drool like Pavlov's famous mutts when the words "White House" are mentioned.
How such a feat can be accomplished -- how the electoral college can be won and how an independent can govern with a Congress composed of Democrats and Republicans -- is not the issue for the moment. Instead, what animates and energizes the hope of a Bloomberg candidacy is the utter failure of the current political establishment to deal with, not to mention solve, the immense problems facing us.
Michael Dukakis ran for the presidency partially on a platform of competence. The American people took one look at him in a battle tank and concluded that someone else should be commander in chief. Yet things may be different for a different Mike from, of all places, Massachusetts (Bloomberg grew up in Medford).
A glance at the sky shows more than winter's coming -- maybe a recession, too. All sorts of things are going wrong and some of them, like the crisis on Wall Street, cannot even be gauged. Just who will be stuck owning worthless paper based on worthless mortgages secured by nearly worthless houses is still unknown. Not even the financial institutions -- Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, etc. -- knew what was happening or know, will you believe, what is now happening. Bad times -- probably very bad times -- are coming.
So competence will have a certain charm. (And Bloomberg is not short on actual charm, either.) These circumstances, not to mention an ability -- if not a determination -- to spend maybe $1 billion on a campaign, could radically change American politics. The chances of this happening are not great, I know, but Ross Perot did get 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 (nary a vote in the electoral college, though) and he was perceived as a bit weird and totally unsuited for the presidency. Bloomberg is a different story altogether.
Will Mayor Mike run? He might. Can he win? I still doubt it. But my doubts are nothing compared with my chagrin when I read an op-ed by Karl Rove with which I keep nodding in agreement. It takes a pretty broken system for Rove to be right. Maybe it will take a Bloomberg billion to fix it.
Unfortunately for the Cohens and Broders of the world, "competence" -- which is code for their brand of establishment centrism -- is not an issue that will overthrow the two-party system.
The parties are also susceptible to the "Save us, billionaire, save us" syndrome.
Posted by: | November 15, 2007 at 01:02 AM