TIME: Would Bloomberg Have a Chance?
Wednesday, Jun. 20, 2007
By MARK HALPERIN
....even Bloomberg's most ardent boosters recognize the daunting realities of the past (independents don't win the Presidency) and the future (if Bloomberg enters the race and looks like he might win, Republicans and Democrats would team up to try to destroy him).
Most of the obvious attacks on a Presidential candidate Bloomberg would come from the right. Conservative activists would assail his views on gay marriage, the death penalty, gun control and taxes as typical New York City liberalism. Both sides would say he lacked national security experience and explore his background, looking for business and personal vulnerabilities. Bloomberg would try to fight off the efforts to define him with hundreds of millions of dollars of television commercials, and would likely spend a similar amount trying to define the other candidates as out of touch and extreme.
Clearly Bloomberg does not plan to enter the race until he sees whom the major parties settle on as nominees, likely early next year. At that point, he would look to see how unfavorably those two candidates are seen, how sour the mood of the country is on politics-as-usual, and how open the electorate seems to a candidate Bloomberg himself describes as "a short, Jewish, divorced billionaire," one who has now turned his back on both the Democrats and the Republicans.
And here's the thing: Bloomberg will only enter the race if he believes he has a reasonable chance to win, but he almost certainly never will be the favorite to win, simply because as an independent he could not be expected to get more than, say, 35% of the vote at best, requiring the political equivalent of drawing an inside straight to win the necessary 270 electoral votes to take the White House....So the more urgent question is, which party would be more hurt by his entry into the race?...Despite Bloomberg's reformist views on welfare and education that put him more in line with conservatives, on a national level, he would almost certainly hurt the Democratic nominee more than the Republican....
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It appears that a massively funded Bloomberg candidacy would endanger more states won by Gore and Kerry than those won by Bush. On the other hand, if Bloomberg was able to pick off some electoral votes, he could theoretically throw the outcome into the House of Representatives, producing another set of complex what-ifs....
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1635241,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner
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