I was having dinner at a favorite New York restaurant when a friend came to the table with an emphatic plea. “Tell your old boss he should run for president,” he said. “The country could use him.”
My response: “Are you on crack?”
This was in January 2006 – barely two months after Mike Bloomberg won a landslide re-election to a second term as mayor of New York City and two years before the first votes were to be cast in the race for the White House. Yet Tuesday’s announcement that Bloomberg is ditching the Republican Party was another sign that my prescient friend might not be cracked after all.
The question of whether Bloomberg will run for president is posed to me a lot because I was a policy adviser to the self-made billionaire in his 2001 mayoral campaign, and I was an informal adviser during his 2005 re-election bid. (I wasn’t in journalism at that time.)
Sure, Bloomberg has scrambled the 2008 race with his departure from the GOP. My shock on Tuesday lasted for only a moment. Bloomberg has long been a firm believer in non-partisanship. In 2003, he pushed for a change in the New York City Charter to scrap party primaries. Announcing the move in a May 28, 2003, speech to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Bloomberg said, “Fiorello La Guardia once famously observed that there is no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage – just the right way.” (The measure was defeated even though the mayor spent $7.5 million of his own money trying to get it passed.)
Bloomberg reiterated his non-partisanship mantra in his statement on his move to non-affiliation. “A non-partisan approach has worked wonders in New York: We’ve balanced budgets, grown our economy, improved public health, reformed the school system and made the nation’s safest city even safer.” As a Republican in a 5-to-1 majority Democratic city, Bloomberg had to work across party lines to get all of that done. And he eschewed the tradition of patronage hiring, which gummed up the government with hacks, opting for competent professionals who wanted to – and could – get things done.
This is why my friend and other New Yorkers are eager for him to bring his brand of party-blind leadership to Washington. If you believe the polls, the American public seems to want the same thing. Pollster John Zogby noted in an opinion piece in Thursday’s New York Daily News: “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. . . . Fifty-eight percent said it was `very important’ the next president be able to cross party lines to work with political opponents.”
Lost in the hullabaloo over Bloomberg bouncing from the Republican Party was his stinging speech Monday at the “Ceasefire! Bridging the Political Divide” conference in Los Angeles. He slammed the inability of federal officials to get anything done on a host of issues, from health care to immigration to global warming. “Washington is sinking into a swamp of dysfunction,” he said, because the capital is lacking in the “five values of leadership that have the power to bridge the partisan divide”: independence, honesty, innovation, teamwork and accountability.
That’s sure to be music to the ears of folks like my New York friend who are weary of Washington’s incessant partisan battles. But Bloomberg is going to need a lot more than anger at the paralysis gripping the capital – and a reported willingness to spend at least $500 million of his own money – to be successful. No third-party candidate has ever won the presidency. Ross Perot pulled in 19 percent of the vote in 1992 against President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Ralph Nader has been called a spoiler who took enough votes away from Vice President Al Gore to allow George W. Bush to win the presidency in 2000, and Bloomberg would run the risk of doing something similar in 2008.
Still, what he says is needed in Washington would require a self-assured, unbeholden and fearless man or woman in the White House, one willing to walk through the meat grinder of highly organized special-interest opposition to make the tough decisions the American people are clamoring for. The 108th mayor of New York said once again on Wednesday that he does not intend to try to become the 44th president of the United States. We’ll see how long that lasts. I know I’m not the only person unconvinced that it will.
Jonathan Capehart is a member of the editorial page staff at the Washington Post.
