Billionaire media monopolist Michael Bloomberg, the Silvio Berlusconi of America, recently had the law amended so he could run for a third term as mayor of New York this fall.
Bloomberg is now 67, so if he wants to take a shot at the White House, 2012 is his best bet because in 2016 he'll be two years older than John McCain was in 2008, which was too old.
Still, what could he run for President upon, other than his personal billionaireness and his popularity with the press? How does a billionaire connect with voters who don't trust Barack Obama?
How many voters across the country even know who Michael Bloomberg is?
And, yet, public ignorance could be a good thing for his political career because it allows him to forge an image suited to the emerging circumstances. Assume Obama has the high and low segments of the electorate locked up in 2012. What kind of image could galvanize the vast middle to show up at the polls?
The Vulcan Society case has dropped in his lap what at first glance appears to be an unfortunate hot potato. Because Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis excluded the firefighter's union from the case, the decision whether or not to appeal Garaufis's finding of racial discrimination in testing due to disparate impact appears to be almost solely up to Mayor Bloomberg (barring some creative legal reasoning).
The Bloomberg Administration has announced that it won't decide whether to appeal until after it finds out how much the damages will be. (One estimate was up to $20 million.) A very pragmatic and prudential course of action ...
What if, however, instead of passively waiting around to learn the dollar amount, then weighing it versus estimated expenses in legal costs and political capital, Bloomberg simply announced next week,
A divisive gesture, to be sure... Bloomberg's media admirers would be aghast.
Yet, re-inventing himself as the Battling Billionaire might be the only route to the White House available.
I think Harry Truman would have liked my political advice. "I've got it, Mr. President! You can catch up in the polls by challenging Dewey to a knife fight in the Jefferson Memorial, on tele-vision!"
Bloomberg is now 67, so if he wants to take a shot at the White House, 2012 is his best bet because in 2016 he'll be two years older than John McCain was in 2008, which was too old.
Still, what could he run for President upon, other than his personal billionaireness and his popularity with the press? How does a billionaire connect with voters who don't trust Barack Obama?
How many voters across the country even know who Michael Bloomberg is?
And, yet, public ignorance could be a good thing for his political career because it allows him to forge an image suited to the emerging circumstances. Assume Obama has the high and low segments of the electorate locked up in 2012. What kind of image could galvanize the vast middle to show up at the polls?
The Vulcan Society case has dropped in his lap what at first glance appears to be an unfortunate hot potato. Because Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis excluded the firefighter's union from the case, the decision whether or not to appeal Garaufis's finding of racial discrimination in testing due to disparate impact appears to be almost solely up to Mayor Bloomberg (barring some creative legal reasoning).
The Bloomberg Administration has announced that it won't decide whether to appeal until after it finds out how much the damages will be. (One estimate was up to $20 million.) A very pragmatic and prudential course of action ...
What if, however, instead of passively waiting around to learn the dollar amount, then weighing it versus estimated expenses in legal costs and political capital, Bloomberg simply announced next week,
"I'm taking this rotten ruling all the way to the Supreme Court to erase the insult to the honor of the Fire Department of New York. If the Obama Administration wants to defend this slur upon New York's Bravest, they can see me in court."
A divisive gesture, to be sure... Bloomberg's media admirers would be aghast.
Yet, re-inventing himself as the Battling Billionaire might be the only route to the White House available.
I think Harry Truman would have liked my political advice. "I've got it, Mr. President! You can catch up in the polls by challenging Dewey to a knife fight in the Jefferson Memorial, on tele-vision!"
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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42 comments:
WORD UP.
"How many voters across the country even know who Michael Bloomberg is?"
How many knew who Barack Obama was in 2005?
Seems to me like the mainstream news media is prepared to wage jihad, Operation Barbarossa, and Brezhnev's tanks in Prague - all rolled into one big ball of muckraking vindictive hate - on anyone who bears any sort of threat to their precious Messiah (for past recipients of the b.b.m.v.h. - see "Palin, Sarah").
Bloomberg'd might be renamed "Emmanuel Goldstein" before he even knew what hit him ...
I'm sure he doesn't want it that much.
Only problem is Bloomberg is part of the crowd that invented diversity and wants these neg. effects on whitey. Can't have it both ways.
Am I the only one who is growing sick and tired of Bloomberg's very public attempt to have Plaxico Burress thrown in prison?
First: Mayors of New York City do not get elected president.
Second: Steve, you don't understand the political cycle. This is going to play out in a very familiar pattern: a massive mud slide away from the Democrats in the 2010 Congressional election. A MASSIVE MUD SLIDE.
But Obama will probably tack toward the center in response [no matter how much he hates to do so] and be on an upswing and have the momentum again by 2012.
Hey, Steve, who did incumbent Clinton have to fight off in the 1996 Democrat primary? That's right. No one can remember.
The jackoff GOP will offer up Romney or Palin or [!] Bush Brother III or [!!] Powell the Magic Negro and it still won't be enough to beat a neo-centrist Obama.
The above events will play out unless ideologue Obama refuses to tack toward the center after the Great Wipeout of 2010. If Obama refuses to compromise he will have an approval rating down in the teens by 2012 and whoever is the small government POTUS 2012 candidate will win in a landslide. In that scenario Obama would likely go into a deep psychic depression and disappear from the public scene in the fourth year of his term. That is possible given his history of dealing with failure.
Anyway Bloomberg is the opposite of small government so he won't stand a chance in 2012.
Prediction: Obama will pull a Clintonesque remaking of his presidency after 2010 out of sheer necessity. He will compromise his ideological principles because what he most cares about is face time in the spotlight.
GW Bush lost a local election early in his career in Texas and swore never to be "out-rednecked by an opponent ever again".
Obama also lost early in his career in Illinois and probably took the same oath as GWB: Obama will do whatever it takes to win and if that means abandoning the platform he stood for in the past then so be it. Obama will rationalize his sellout and convince himself that he can strike a pose as a centrist while still making headway on his Black Liberation Theology agenda during 2012-2016.
Hello reliaS evetS, please come back to the planet htraE, your suggestion that the "neo-con" Bloomberg might go for the presidency running on an anti-AA platform, in the Deep State of America, raised a red flag here at sretrauqdaeh.
I see what you're saying, in theory it's a good idea, but maybe it's time we all be honest with ourselves and admit that America is not a real democracy, and that elected presidents don't actually do stuff outside of very narrow parameters.
I remember seeing a picture of Bloomberg and Tony Blair strolling at one of those Bildeberger-y get togethers in Idaho or something. Bloomberg was wearing white pants, a pink shirt, and had a pastel sweater tied around his shoulders. Blair was dressed similarly and only marginally less...how you say...gay.
I thought to myself "These homos are the masters of the universe? What the f*ck?"
Homocracy, it's a dictatorship of homosexuals. Whether Bloomberg has actual gay sex is nearly irrelevant, he dresses, and talks, and votes, and delivers public policy like a gay man and he is, for political purposes, at any rate, effectively, a homosexual.
I can't imagine Bloomberg doing that. It doesn't compute. His ethnic loyalties are exactly opposite to that.
Giuliani could have been imagined doing what you suggested, though. I can imagine Giuliani having family members who were cops or firefighters. Neighbors, friends, in-laws - stuff like that. He's from that milieu, and would have probably taken an attack on them personally.
If Republicans actually want to win in 2012 Bloomberg would be an excellent choice. As Steve has noted many times, the way Republicans win is to crank up their share of the white vote.
Given NYC's heavy minority population, Bloomberg must have gotten 80%+ of the white vote to win.
He'd also be good at the job!
Here is a long interview of him at Google, his intelligence and good nature is obvious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsRpYXJMGIg
Homocracy
Oh no, it's mini-Testy!
Well, at least his Theory of Everything is amusing.
~Svigor
"Oh no, it's mini-Testy!"
Up until a couple weeks ago I would have considered that an insult, but ever since ol' Testy has gotten off his neo-con jag he's been getting good wood on the ball.
I still think he's a "neo-con" just f***ing with us - we whites of mixed white heritage and modest ancestry don't refer to ourselves as "white trash" as he does, them's fightin' words, and we have no time for neo-con foreign policy - but there's no denying he has the root of the matter in him.
"Well, at least his Theory of Everything is amusing."
I'm not sure what you refer to here, but mine is, and has been for years: "Brown people, women, and homosexualists gang up on straight white males to steal their jobs and homes and cars and children and freedoms."
Straight White men of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose - except your jobs, your spouses, your savings, your pension, your kids, and your standing in society. Still, it's a hoot, a gas gas gas, in boomerese. Do it for the lulz if nothing else.
A BushIII GOP neocon of any strip is not going to bring out the mass middle class for the GOP in 2012.
The bomb, bomb, bomb Iran McCain drove them away from the polls in droves in 2008.
Bloomberg would siphon off a lot of Obama's early reelection fundraising money due to the Jewish Democratic factor. This would include Wall Street as well as the Jewish Illumaniti.
The Times today has a piece on Bloomberg's buying homeless people a ticket back to where they came from. It's a nervy policy--impossible to conceive of in the 80's and 90's, and analogous to Steve's suggestion for the US gov and illegal immigrants. I think that probably exhausts Bloomberg's political incorrectness quotient for a while, though.
This is an interesting comment by Bloomberg regarding "diversity":
Michael Bloomberg said today that in terms of hiring decisions for top-level staff for his administration, diversity factors have no impact. "None whatsoever," he said.
"I like to make sure we have as broad a spectrum of candidates for every job," Bloomberg said, before outlining the hiring process. A selection committee searches for and vets potential candidates, he said, then recommends three from which to choose.
"I do really think that if you expand your search, you get good diversity by picking the best person. But the public has the right to pick the best people and that's what they'll do. The diversity of our administration has not been as diverse as the city itself, but we're going in that direction, and we'll continue to reach out."
source
If I read that correctly, he's saying AA is good to expand the hiring pool, but should not be used to make the final decision. I'd say that's a fairly good policy in context of the current social culture. It could even be viewed as a pushback against the diversity mantra.
Or it could just be empty words from a politician.
remember when he floated the idea, the NY papers were peppered with feel good articles about he was the sort 'outsider' that bring 'fresh views' to DC.
Yeah, a wall street, open borders pro iraq war neocon, not enough of those in dC!
As a New Yorker, I can tell you one thing -the press- his buddies mort zukerman, shuzlberger et al gloss over his behavior - he is not 'good for business' he's good for his mostly jewish business connections and has been doing his utmost to smash the last of the working class/middle class white power blocks left in the city.
He'd be lucky to finish in the top 3 in either Iowa or South Carolina, and he can't beat Romney in New Hampshire. He doesn't have a chance. Cased closed.
This is actually a brilliant suggestion for Bloomberg. Whether he'll take it, and whether he actually wants to be President, are open questions. Bloomberg still enjoys some billionaire perks that he'd lose if he became President. For example, he is the first NYC mayor I can think of who decided not to live in Gracie Mansion, since it would be a step down from his current pad. He'd have to move to the White House, of course, as President, which would also probably be a step down for him.
Another example: Bloomberg likes to take weekends off to go to the Caribbean occasionally. He might not be able to do that as often.
It's worth mentioning though, for those of you who aren't in the New York market, that Bloomberg's reelection ad campaign is directed squarely at white middle class New Yorkers, who praise him on camera for how safe their neighborhoods are, how he's worked to improve the schools, etc.
Steve, I think the administration is going to put a contract out on you soon.
Seems to me like the mainstream news media is prepared to wage jihad, Operation Barbarossa, and Brezhnev's tanks in Prague - all rolled into one big ball of muckraking vindictive hate - on anyone who bears any sort of threat to their precious Messiah (for past recipients of the b.b.m.v.h. - see "Palin, Sarah").
Yeah, it seems like the MSM have very little confidence in their boy, and actually think he is pretty light weight.
Why else would they so fiercely protect him from criticism and questioning.
Actual conservatives(as opposed to partisan cheerleaders, mindless jingoists and ultra-Zionists) would probably be better off if the GOP collapsed entirely.
They could then operate as an issue-oriented faction within the DP and without the burden of the useless GOP leadership.
Joe Lieberman for Veep! We'll be nukin' Iran faster than you can say "Oy."
As a (relatively) new reader of this blog, I have to say the commentariat adds an impressive amount of information to Steve's excellent posts. Specifically, el Futurismo and the 4Chan reading Anon - well played. "Do it for the lulz!"
Bloomberg comes across as a nagging nanny weenie.
That's because he is.
He topped out on the Peter Principle at Bloomberg, Inc.
Only NYC would elect some so prissy, even though he is a cutthroat SOB underneath.
"...his intelligence and good nature is obvious..."
OK, I'm a New Yorker, so unlike some here, I actually have an idea of who he is. He's intelligent, cranky, easily annoyed, straight, and very very liberal. His voice mannerisms are unusual, but that's because he's a nerd, not because he's gay. Do Bill Gates and Kermit the Frog sound gay to you? If they do, you may have a real problem. NYC did have a crypto-gay mayor once though: Koch.
LOL as a New Yorker the idea of Bloomberg even running for president is priceless comedy. A short, anti-gun Jewish liberal from NY winning the nomination of a major party for the presidency?
On some issues, he makes Dukakis look conservative by comparison. Even if Bloomberg decided to fight Vulcan and the feds over this FDNY ruling head on, it wouldn't do a thing to lift his stature politically or physically(he's probably 5'5", not 5'8", the height he likes to pretend he is LOL).
A lot of New Yorkers are still up in arms over Bloomberg rewriting the rules on term limits so he could run for mayor yet again in New York.
All the major media(he either owns them or they are his friends) in NY love him for this, and would probably love him even more if he declared himself dictator of NY for life.
Of course his NY liberal and neo-con supporters would love it if Bloomberg decided to run for president, although he doesn't stand a snow balls chance in hell of getting very far. The reasons for this:
1) He's too short.
2) He's too ugly.
3) He's too liberal and anti-gun.
4) As hard as he tries, he lacks charisma.
5) Too Jewish.
6) Too old.
7) Very likely has a lot of skeletons in his closet, gay rumors, numerous affairs, etc. The local NY media has been doing everything they can to stop this from coming out, but the national media may not be so kind.
He would get slaughtered or may not win enough support at the national level.
Bloomberg is a liberal Democrat posing as a Republican due to NY City's electoral situation. Neither party would nominate him. A third-party run would be a joke for a philandering tax increaser who favors draconian gun control laws, same-sex "marriage," massive tax increases, and tax-funded abortions.
The height of his hype was in June 2007, when he and Schwarzenegger appeared on the cover of Time mag under the headline, "The New Action Heroes." The puff piece was about their battle against global warming and how they supposedly were leading us into a post-partisan era.
Since then, both have faltered under massive budget deficits caused by their own profligacy, leading to tax increases that made matters worse. And this year could turn out to be the coldest on record, chilling their scaremongering on global warming.
But I still hope Bloomberg runs because it would be amusing.
What if one is a white man who has already lost "your jobs, your spouses, your savings, your pension, your kids, and your standing in society"?
Answer: tell the truth as a last resort, and hope you ain't too late.
Yeah, just what we need, another open borders,anti-gun, pro Israel billionaire who made his money on wall street. Gosh knows they don't have enough of them in Government already.
I don't think Bloomberg will go any farther than Rudy did. Both for the same reasons -- the early primaries are loaded with social cons, Southerners (South Carolina), and folks who don't like Eastern Elites.
Romney is already being attacked for his Romneycare, a total failure, and lost despite his bucks to people who just did not like his class / Elite attributes. That won't change. Palin generates a lot of enthusiasm from middle class Whites, and older women, but is despised by younger women and younger men (for fashion reasons). I don't see her getting the nod. Sanford, thank god, is out. Dodged a grenade there. So too, Ensign.
Someone like Huckabee, or someone out of that model but not well known, could capture the nomination, after all he'd need to be seen as a possible winner, a social conservative (but not too much), and an upbeat personality. I don't like Huck but he's odds on favorite now I think.
I'm not sure Dems will be wiped out in 2010, there's a lot of fraud room to "win" through phony voting. Certainly Obama was as Joel Kotkin suggests, elected to provide patronage/spoils winnings to Blue State America (and Blue enclaves inside Red States) and mostly has not delivered. He's shot himself in the foot, stupidly, with Obamacare, a fight he started, that screws over Seniors, White Women, and a lot of government union employees, for the marginal aspect of enhanced patronage to Blacks and Hispanics. He's picking fights with allies, and embracing enemies (Mad Mel Zelaya in Honduras, Nutjob in Iran) for no good political payoff as the result is aggression in the face of even greater weakness than Carter.
Obama's model is Chicago: race bait, let the media provide air cover, intimidate via thuggery coupled with deniability, and "win." Unlike Chicago, however, Whites in the US have nowhere to flee to, no suburbs, and business has nowhere to go either. Obama with Obamacare and Cap and Trade Carbon Police gives most Middle Class Whites including his base of White Women (who detested Bush and anything military) a gigantic middle finger. Worse health care than before (particularly for White female government workers who get good health care exchanged for terrible care) with much higher taxes. Add to that niggling and enraging limits on every single activity and sky-high taxes on everything to provide Al Gore with more Carbon Credit money, and his patronage play is monumentally stupid.
The elites have made a good deal on bleeding ordinary people with wealth transfers that were not too onerous in good times. Now they're like vampires in a feeding frenzy, promising to kill the victim and turn it into an enraged zombie. I don't see economic recovery, Obama modulating his Chicago Way, or the media stopping air cover. Obama plans to "Rahm it through" on his elite plays to move money from the White Middle Class to his partnership of Dem Bigwigs and his cronies. He's never been punished for that, ever. Meanwhile weakness abroad invites attack or disaster.
My best guess is he gets to be the first President Impeached, as the race card gets played out and people react in survival mode.
"Specifically, el Futurismo and the 4Chan reading Anon - well played. "Do it for the lulz!"
Awesome, I'm not the only person here born after 1964!
Hey, let's bug the baby boomers, watch this:
*ahem*
Whatever, man.
"My best guess is he gets to be the first President Impeached"
You had me until this. The least scrutinized President ever who elicits the most nuthuggery from the "free" press imaginable will get impeached in an era when everybody is afraid to criticize a black man for fear of being called racist?
The possibility that he might get Michael Vicked (black savior sucks so badly that the system sends him to jail to cover it up and hopes we forget about all of the hype that preceded him) arises, I suppose.
"The local NY media has been doing everything they can to stop this from coming out, but the national media may not be so kind."
Well except for the Boston Globe, the press has been very kind to Obama for years now.
If 'they' want him, 'they' will make the press be kind to him because 'they' own the press.
Michael Bloomberg, the Silvio Berlusconi of America, recently had the law amended so he could run for a third term as mayor of New York this fall.
This makes him the Hugo Chavez of America.
All this speculation about Bloomberg, Romney, etc. is just a sideshow to Hillary's plan to leave the administration and challenge BHO for the 2012 nomination.
For she is the only politician in America who can beat him. Horror vacui.
Testy99/EvilNeocon,
Huck and McCain tagged teamed Rommney who would've defeated either one of them one-on-one. Huck stood no chance of winning and only stayed into screw the Mormon.
Huck had no future in politics which is why he became a TV pundit. He's an open-boarders zealot ("all God's children"), as socially liberal as any mainline Dem and a neocon foreign war adventurer. Finally, he has all sorts of dirt governing over the corrupt state of AK that the media hid to both eliminate Romney (the main threat to Obama) and shift GOP evangelicals further to the left.
Always with the insane ideas from planet Centauri. Obama being impeached... yeah, the elites are really going to do that...
I don't feel like looking it up now, but on CNN today they showed Bloomberg defending a plan to give homeless people a plane ticket out of NYC if they promised not to come back. David Frum was talking about it and he said that homelessness declined by 1/3rd in the Bush years. Some CNN anchor named Katty or Candy or something (she used to be like 600 pounds, but is now down to 300) said she was deeply offended. Frum said that this was based on compassion and good for the homeless. They ended the segment with Wolf Blitzer reminding us that they're human beings.
It sounds like I dreamed the whole thing, but I swear, it happened.
People focusing on Bloomberg's voice and his height are funny: as if the man can become a self-made billionaire and get elected mayor of the largest city in the country without being brilliant, charismatic, and a great salesman. I bet you guys thought tall, deep-voiced Fred Thompson was going to run away with the GOP nomination last time.
As for him being Jewish and being a Northeasterner, it really depends on how bad things are economically and how desperate Americans are. If unemployment is over 10% in 2012, and inflation is starting to creep up, Americans may want to elect someone who at least knows how to run a successful business. That would basically leave the field to Romney or Bloomberg. Maybe they could run on the same ticket?
"My best guess is he gets to be the first President Impeached, as the race card gets played out and people react in survival mode."
Good luck with trying to impeach a "black" prez. You'll have riots all over the US, Britain, France and Africa. Every white person in Africa will be hunted down by blacks for touching their messiah.
What freaks me out is that outfits like the NYT (TM:ST), who talk with an air of sophistry, have brought us into this lowdown ghetto level of running a country.
If I read that correctly, he's saying AA is good to expand the hiring pool, but should not be used to make the final decision.
Can either of you explain to me what that means?
~Svigor
"Scott said...
The Times today has a piece on Bloomberg's buying homeless people a ticket back to where they came from. It's a nervy policy--impossible to conceive of in the 80's and 90's, and analogous to Steve's suggestion for the US gov and illegal immigrants. I think that probably exhausts Bloomberg's political incorrectness quotient for a while, though."
Back in the early to mid 80s, some California cities were buying homeless guys one way bus tickets to Tucson, so it isn't new.
All this talk of Bloomberg not being PC is ridiculous. Have your heard anything he's said? Are you aware of the things he's done as mayor? He's a know-it-all rich-guy prick, who wants to ban or regulate those few remaining things which make life bearable in modern america - booze, smokes, and fatty food. And he would no more take the side of white "Old Americans" as would Obama.
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