If we’ve learned anything at all from 2016 — which, well, TBD — I hope it’s to not just sneer when a post-retirement-age, party-jumping New York City billionaire with a flimsy medical excuse for skipping the Vietnam War, a long history of locker-room talk and a penchant for naming everything after himself says he’s thinking about running for president.
Look, Mike Bloomberg is no Donald Trump. Bloomberg is a real billionaire and a self-made one, for starters, not to mention a three-term mayor of New York City and one of Americas’s biggest philanthropists. And it clearly hurt Bloomberg to see a low-rent hustler like Trump ride his I’m-too-rich-to-be-bought political pitch all the way to the White House.
So after his Hamlet acts in the 2008 and 2016 presidential races, Bloomberg put out word that he might run in 2020, and then that he would not run, and now that he just might run in the Democratic primary after all because he’s worried that Joe Biden is too weak to win it, and that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would be too radical to beat Trump (not to mention how their policies might cut into his bottom line).
But if the center won’t hold, it’s not for a lack of options. Bloomberg would join Bennet, Biden, Booker, Bullock and Buttigieg among just the Bs bumping into each other in the middle lane. What would a 77-year-old billionaire who ditched the Democratic Party nearly 20 years ago to dodge its mayoral primary have to offer its voters now?
And why would Bloomberg — who hit a longshot $74 million bet on himself in 2001 with help from unforced errors from his Democratic opponent, a racist New York Post cartoon, 9/11 and then the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani weeks after Oprah Winfrey named him America’s Mayor — expect to get that lucky again?
Betting on some such sequence of events putting him over the top in 2020 is like reinvesting your Lotto winnings in Lotto tickets. Clearly, these dreams die hard for our mayors, what with how David Dinkins, who turned 92 this year, is now the only living mayor with the grace not to have assigned himself a weird role in the 2020 presidential sweepstakes.
“I alone can fix it,” Trump said when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It’s a sentiment Bloomberg knows something about. After all, asked what New Yorkers unhappy with his policies could do during his second term, after he’d spent $84 million running up his margin of victory to look presidential in 2008 and term limits had made him a lame duck in City Hall, he snapped: “They can boo me at parades.”
After giving up on his plans to run for president in 2008, Bloomberg used Lehman Brothers’ collapse that year to insist he’d become the indispensable mayor, the only person who could save New York from financial ruin. So he met with the owners of the city’s biggest papers, whose editorial boards (including this one) reversed themselves to support changing the law, on a one-time basis, so that he could run for a third term.
As he ran in 2009, Bloomberg kept touting how the economy had already turned around on his watch. My friend Azi Paybarah, then a City Hall reporter at Jared Kushner’s New York Observer, asked him if that didn’t undermine his rationale for extending term limits.
“You’re a disgrace,” the mayor hissed, as he went on to spend $106 million to eke out a win for what proved to be a disastrous third term.
The disgrace now is that Bloomberg could easily spend a billion dollars supporting his preferred presidential candidate and candidates down the ballot who would support that president’s agenda. He could also share the valuable voter information his political operation has harvested over the years in preparation for a Bloomberg run.
The only thing stopping Bloomberg from stopping Trump just might be Bloomberg’s need to have his name at the top of the ticket.