Can we stop pretending billionaire Michael Bloomberg — who is reportedly exploring an independent presidential run in the United States — has a chance to win any national election, let alone this one? He is the perfect storm of everything that voters find repugnant.
For progressives and the large swaths of the public who are sick of the very wealthiest concentrating their power, he is a plutocrat; the ultimate creature of Wall Street, who relentlessly defended and befriended the largest and wildly unpopular major banks, after they tore down the economy and resisted any effort to tax the wealthiest 1 per cent. To Republicans — from whom he would have to steal large chunks of votes to win — his stances on gun control and social issues are far too liberal to garner any support among the conservative rank and file beyond those who work at Goldman Sachs. He is radioactive to supporters of both parties.
Yet, here he is again. It has become a perennial ego-stoking exercise for one of the world’s largest egomaniacs, the former mayor of New York City, where every four years he pretends he’s “thinking” about running for president as an independent while coating his “decision” in a glaze of anguished patriotic responsibility. Afterall, he inevitably keeps the doors open for a run that will never actually happen for several rounds of high-profile, fawning media speculation. It’s so predictable that members of the media are known to joke-guess about when it’ll happen in the election cycle.
Well, whoever guessed the third weekend in January won the pool, because Bloomberg’s people unveiled his latest go-around in the New York Times last Saturday while attempting to portray this time as the ‘Most Serious Ever’. Right on cue, the major network Sunday shows — Bloomberg’s key and only constituency and ground zero for DC conventional wisdom — were aflutter with Michael Bloomberg talk
Narrow victory
The fact is, a third party candidate — no matter how many billions they have — is a virtual impossibility, thanks to electoral politics and the 12th Amendment. Candidates need to win a majority of electoral votes allocated to the states (that is, not a plurality). An election with anything less isn’t decided by the person with the most votes; it gets thrown to the House of Representatives, where an independent candidate will almost certainly come in last place as Democrats and Republicans vote for their own candidate.
But even to get that far, you’d need to be a popular independent candidate, which Bloomberg most certainly is not. He wasn’t even well-liked in his last election as mayor, where he vastly outspent his near-unknown Democratic rival 14-1, yet escaped with only the narrowest of victories on election night. (When in office, he was even better at buying off his critics.)
It’s ironic that he may be financing a run now, given the sudden popularity of Bernie Sanders, like that’s a signal that the poor, confused voters need him. He is exactly the type of politician who makes Sanders’s message so resonant. What more could prove Sanders’ point that America is currently living in an oligarchy than running against not one, but two billionaires?
And let’s not forget: In a year where criminal justice reform has become a bipartisan consensus issue, Bloomberg is the living embodiment of everything wrong with the criminal justice system. He was the leading proponent of the New York Police Department’s discriminatory ‘stop and frisk’ policy, which ensnared hundreds of thousands of hispanics and African Americans in unconstitutional searches (it was finally curtailed by a judge). Bloomberg’s allies predicted a calamity for crime rates, which of course never occurred; crime continued to fall.
He also was a staunch defender of the police department’s suspicionless spying programme aimed at the entire Muslim-American community living in New York, that was not only totally offensive and completely useless, but was also dismantled by another court settlement last month.
The idea that the Bloomberg candidacy will be any more than a fantasy is just that — a fantasy. Please remind anyone who takes it remotely seriously.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Trevor Timm is executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
