Could Mike Bloomberg MAKE Sarah Palin PRESIDENT?

[Segami]

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" In New York magazine, John Heilemann presents an elaborate scenario under which Sarah Palin secures the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 and then claims the White House, thanks to a third party candidacy from Michael Bloomberg:


By the accounts of strategists in both parties, Bloomberg—especially with the help of his billions—would stand a reasonable chance of carrying New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, and California. Combine that with a strong-enough showing in a few other places in the industrial Northeast to deny Obama those states, and with Palin holding the fire-engine-red states of the South, and the president might find himself short of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win.


As far-fetched as it seems, Heilemann makes a decent case. Palin, after all, has been acting more and more like a candidate this year, casting doubt on the initial conventional wisdom that had her passing on a White House bid because a loss would destroy her marketability. As Heilemann notes, she seems to have the bug -- and rational concerns about protecting her brand may not matter much to her. And when you see candidates like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller winning Republican primaries, and when you consider how wide-open the GOP field for '12 seems -- well, is it really that hard to imagine candidate Palin winning Iowa and South Carolina, then sweeping through the South, winning a bunch of caucuses and seizing the nomination?


And if Palin can win the nomination, the odds of a third party candidacy will increase, with a Bloomberg bid a real possibility. He was interested in running in 2008, but concluded that the opening just didn't exist. But if the GOP were to pick Palin and the economy were still in rotten shape, there could be more room in '12.



cont'


<http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/10/25/bloomberg_palin_2012>


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[gateley]

1. Seriously, don't these people have anything better to do than

"what if"? IF it happens, we'll deal with it then.

I guess I don't have anything better to do than post my unsolicited remarks, come to think of it. :7

[Kalyke]

8. Yeah - because if that happens, then Salon would need

to start reporting on the mass exodus of Americans leaving to go to Canada, Mexico, South America and Europe.

I'd become an illegal alien in Ireland and then claim asylum. I mean, wouldn't having to live under Sister Sarah's reign be akin to other atrocities that have resulted in mass immigrations?

[monmouth]

10. Ireland for me too. Grandmas was from Mayo so I think I'd be alright..LOL...n/t

[niyad]

12. I may have to leave a lot sooner than that, if buck and tancredo win in this incredibly

backward state, and if props 60.61, 62 and 101 pass

this state will not be fit to inhabit then

[Segami]

14. There are definitely a lot of big ' IF ' scenarios that need to be addressed or materialize.

" The emotions here are diametrically opposed but based on a shared conviction: that Palin, whose national approval rating in a CBS News poll this month stood at a lowly 22 percent, is irredeemably unelectable, and thus her nomination would essentially guarantee Obama a second term.


Or would it? In a two-way contest, almost certainly. But what if a Palin nomination provoked a credible independent candidacy? What if the candidacy in question was that of, oh, Michael Rubens Bloomberg? What would happen then?


That’s a lot of ifs, I hear you saying, and you are not wrong. Yet none of these twists is actually all that implausible. In fact, the likelihood of Bloomberg’s running is just as great as, if not greater than, it was when he considered taking the plunge in 2008—and that specter is very much on the minds of Obama’s people. In the past few months, the White House has made a gaudy show of sucking up to the mayor: inviting him to play golf in Martha’s Vineyard with Obama, floating his name as a potential Treasury secretary, dispatching Joe Biden and Tim Geithner to have breakfast with him and seek his economic counsel. The motivations behind the blandishments are many, but not the least is to blunt the Bloomberg threat—to keep him on the sidelines in 2012, where he and his billions would pose no danger of redrawing the electoral map in unpredictable and perilous ways.

<http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/69130/>

[JustAnotherGen]

2. Heard the talking heads

Discuss this article this a.m. -

It seems like another Florida race - what gets me? How they can't paint it as Bloomberg spoils Sarah's chances.

I live in NJ and I don't see us going for anyone other than Obama. Especially someone who can be easily painted as "Buying His Seat Over The Bridge". I also don't see the Democrats in Western NY going for Bloomberg . . . I lived there for 30 years prior to moving here in 2006.

[FSogol]

3. Dream on little Freepers.

:rofl:

[Cosmocat]

4. OK ...

Palin HAS to run BECAUSE of her "brand."

If she sits out the presidential, she gets tuned out for two years and is a second tier republican profiteer ... She runs in the presidential she either wins the nomination (not likely) or loses and gets to play the victim card she has perfected ... The evil liberal media that in reality fawns over her, will have treated her unfairly ...

As for Bloomberg ... Honest, I know it is asking a lot, but I think he is a good person, and honestly, I think if he saw the specter of a Palin presidency, he would do the right thing ...

[napi21]

5. I don't think so. IF anything, he'd assure Obama's reelection. nt

[spanone]

6. these people are completely out of the frickin' minds

[DrDan]

7. implausible . . . but possible

and not surprising that this scenario would rise from the depths of horror around Halloween.

[Parker CA]

9. Anyone who thinks CA would vote for Bloomberg over Obama is smoking crack. nt

[MineralMan]

11. Oh, FFS!

That's just silly. Palin sells clicks. You can write any damn nonsense about her and people will click on it and link to it and more people will click on it and link to it and so on and so on.

This is one of the stupidest things I've recently read.

[baldguy]

13. What's in it for Mike?

Why would a popular, intelligent, incumbent politician ditch it all to play second fiddle to a loser like Palin?

[Soral]

15. As someone who lives in the NYC area, and follows Bloomberg

Bloomberg would carry a lot of the Northeast.

That said... how it would help palin doesn't make any sense to me.

Even split 3 ways, you still need 270 electoral votes, which in this case, nobody would get... Palin would come in 3rd.

[JackRiddler]

Read the Constitution (or remember 1800 and 1877)

An electoral college deadlock (no one has a majority of votes there) would throw the decision to the House, where (and this is really absurd) each state delegation votes on how to cast their own state's single vote, i.e. each state has one vote whether it's California or Wyoming. If this had for example happened in 2000 in a hypothetical in which Florida electors were disqualified, Bush would have been the winner in the House.

[No DUplicitous DUpe]

16. I really don't think Sarah will run...

And if she does, she will lose badly.

She may be vain, but I'm pretty sure she does not want a hard job, when she is making easy money now.

[HipChick]

22. I don't think she'll take a massive paycut and a hard job

It's easier for her to run and fail, and more profitable to keep playing the victim

[robertpaulsen]

17. California my ass! I don't anyone around here who likes Bloomberg.

California is for Obama in 2012 all the way!

[jmowreader]

18. There are a couple problems with that theory

Problem 1 is, why would the King of New York agree to do such a thing?

Problem 2 is the numbers. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida and California alone will give someone 135 votes--exactly half of what you need to take the election. I also think in a three-way between Obama, Palin and Bloomberg, if West Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Michigan went away from Obama they'd go for Bloomberg, not Palin. Right now we're looking at 200 electoral votes for Bloomberg. There are only 538 electoral votes out there and, as we all know, you need 270 to win the election. Therefore, if Bloomberg took the ten states I named, and ONLY the ten states I named (I think that, given the choice of Palin or Bloomberg a LOT of the flyover states would go Bloomberg--he is a better Republican than she is) you've got 338 votes remaining. President Obama is going to get more than 68 electoral votes in the next election--you'd have to go all the way back to Jimmy Carter to find an election where the incumbent president got stomped that bad, and Reagan had Walter Cronkite reminding the electorate how many days the hostages had been in Iranian captivity, which Obama does NOT have.

What my point is, if Michael Bloomberg ran a third-party campaign, it would lead to a runoff election rather than a Palin coronation.

[n2doc]

19. I think that "buying the election" thing has been tried

And e-Meg is going down, Scott (Fl) is likely to go down. I think that the freepers are going to have a hard time voting for a ticket with a Woman at the top and a jewish member of the financial Banking class as VP.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

20. Whenever articles like this come out

it usually seems to be an expression of what some people would like to see happen rather than an accurate (or even likely) outcome.

Obama would have to have "2nd-term Bushian" approval numbers to allow for a Bloomberg "opening" IMHO first of all and if Obama ever got down to that level of approval, he'd probably not even win re-nomination, so we'd probably have ourselves a stronger candidate in a general election though I honestly can't imagine this happening absent some catastrophic political event, so lets move on......

I don't know much about Bloomberg but I think that he would probably have to think that he had a REAL shot of actually winning- not just being a "spoiler"- before sinking his considerable fortune into a race for the Presidency of the United States. Given that he's more of a moderate (former) Republican, would he actually want somebody like Palin to become POTUS? :shrug: Would he have widespread name recognition and appeal outside New York? I'd also wonder about how many votes he'd draw from both parties? Would it hurt Obama (in a hypothetical matchup) or the Republican candidate more? What would he bring to the table that would draw voters to him instead of Obama, who is quite similar to him politically in some ways, and/or the Republican candidate whoever he/she may be?

As far as Sarah Palin goes, she would first have to actually WANT to run, which I seriously doubt she will given her apparent love of money, attention, and ego stroking, as well as her apparent DISLIKE of actual WORK. If she couldn't or wouldn't finish a single four-year term as Governor of Alaska, there's no way she will last an entire year as POTUS. Maybe she'd even drop out of the running if she did run. :shrug: Of course, anybody running for POTUS on the Republican ticket is either going to have the unenviable job of having to appear moderate enough to win indies but bat-shit insane conservative enough to win over the teabaggers (if they're still around by then, of course). I just can't think of any candidate currently that might be able to pull that off AND successfully squash Obama in a debate.

[RagAss]

21. Could the 1985 Bears beat the 2005 Patriots?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

23. Bloomberg Wouldn't Carry One State

However he would split the left of center vote, state by state, easing the way for any Republican.

[Lord Magus]

24. Why do the empty-head talking heads think Bloomberg wants to be President?

These same twits were convinced he'd run as an independent in 2008 if you'll recall.

[bemildred]

25. Could little pink pigs fly out of your butt? nt