Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is again considering a run for the presidency. In other words, 2020 is just two years away. He has openly toyed with presidential runs in each of the last three cycles. But these quadrennial flirtations can’t go on forever. He is 76.
This time, he wants to run as a Democrat, on the grounds that “I don’t see how [I] could possibly run as a Republican.” A fair point. Bloomberg is a solid liberal, but he is famously noncommittal on partisan affiliation. He was a Democrat in the 1990s, ran and won as a liberal Republican for mayor of New York in 2001, then switched to Independent in 2007, during the second of his three terms. In the early 2000s he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the New York GOP. This year he pledged $80 million to help Democrats take control of Congress in the midterm elections. When he’s talked about presidential runs in the past, he’s said he would run as a Republican, as a Democrat, and as an independent.
We have unbridgeable differences with Bloomberg on policy, but we hope he’ll run, all the same.
He has liabilities, to be sure, and not just owing to his ideological incongruities. Bloomberg’s record as mayor was not a stellar one. He ran as an education reformer, but overall student performance in New York City did not improve much during or after his mayoralty. Property taxes skyrocketed during his three terms and other taxes went up, too. He was famous for pursuing idiotic economic-development boondoggles like the mercifully failed West Side Stadium project, which would have given the New York Jets a $2 billion stadium in Manhattan. Bloomberg also increasingly gave into a kind of fundamentalist nanny-state lunacy, banning flavored tobacco products, trans-fatty foods in restaurants, loud music, sodas larger than 16 ounces, and many other innocent enjoyments.
Still, no three-term mayor of New York City can easily be dismissed.
Bloomberg managed to keep in place the crime policies of his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and so kept the city from returning to the chaos to which left-liberal crime policy had committed it for decades. He was not afraid to risk the ire of the city’s powerful and easily provoked race-grievance industry. We regard his fixation on gun-control as deeply misguided, but it’s popular with the Democratic base he must now pursue.
Consider, too, the state of the Democratic bench. A recent poll of registered Democrats on who the party should nominate in 2020 had Joe Biden in first place with 32 percent, Hillary Clinton in second with 18 percent, and Bernie Sanders running third with 16 percent. Joe Biden, 77, is even older than Bloomberg but more familiar and less interesting. The thought of the candidate who couldn’t beat Donald Trump running again in 2020 fills us with horror and delight. Bernie Sanders is unelectable because, unlike Barack Obama, he is honest about what he believes.
Nor are the younger 2020 contenders any more impressive: California senator Kamala Harris is as vicious and off-putting as she is extreme, and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, a.k.a. Spartacus, can’t stop talking long enough to hear sensible advice.
An unpredictable liberal could find a middle path between aged-out establishmentarians and ambitious hucksters in 2020. Run, Mike, Run.
