Podcast: A New York Mayor Goes Up the Middle

Podcast:
A New York Mayor Goes Up the Middle
By SAM ROBERTS
January 4, 2008, 12:00 pm

Following is the script of the weekly “Only in New York” audio podcast.

David Boren insisted the other day that he had one motivation and only one for inviting fellow Democratic and Republican elder statesmen to Oklahoma on the first weekend of 2008: To forge a coalition against partisan gridlock in Washington.

“It’s not,” Boren told me, “some clandestine ‘Bloomberg for President’ thing.”

Boren, a Democrat and former Oklahoma senator, was right about the clandestine part. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nascent presidential campaign is becoming less and less of a secret.

“I have no doubt that he wants to run,” says Howard Rubenstein, the New York public-relations executive. “I think the stars are aligning where he might very well decide to. There’s a greater chance of him running than there was two months ago.”

The formal process for launching independent campaigns begins March 5, when candidates can begin circulating nominating petitions in Texas.

But Bloomberg’s cadre of advisers has been aggressively preparing for an independent presidential campaign and meticulously calibrating his political tiptoeing for months.

Even his formal shift in party enrollment last June — a Republican former Democrat who officially became an unaffiliated independent — was timed to meet what some advisers believed were the qualifications for filing as an independent presidential candidate in Colorado next June 17.

Last year alone, Bloomberg visited China, Mexico, Paris, London, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle and St. Louis.

He is mulling other high-profile trips this month and next.

Expect, also, to see ads from civic-minded business leaders and others urging him to declare his candidacy.

So the real question is not whether he’s running. It’s whether he’ll still be running two months from now.

Two months ago, it seemed as if consensus candidates were emerging in both major parties. Today, the field seems more fluid. Or, as Rubenstein described it, like a waterfall.

It’s quite possible, of course, that by the end of February, primary and caucus voters will have anointed the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees.

If so, the overarching question facing Bloomberg will be whether those candidates are poles apart ideologically, or are freighted with so much baggage that they would be vulnerable to a third-party challenge by a pragmatic, progressive centrist who can finance his own campaign — a challenge that, no matter how viable (given Bloomberg’s personal fortune and a volatile electorate) has never before succeeded in modern American presidential politics.

Bloomberg would have to weigh some other hefty intangibles, too:

Can he run for president and continue serving as mayor of this combustible city? (He believes he can and would not resign as mayor to run.)

Would he run just to help define a national agenda? (No, one person close to him says. “He’s only going to do it if he thinks he can win.”)

Does he want to be president badly enough to sacrifice his zealously guarded personal privacy? (He’s not completely convinced.)

Does he want to be remembered for his legacy as an accomplished, popular two-term mayor or as a billionaire spoiler — a rich Ralph Nader — who cost a more viable candidate the presidency in a watershed political year? (Good question.)

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a conduit for hundreds of millions of dollars of Bloomberg’s putatively anonymous philanthropy, says that apart from the mayor’s personal fortune, he would be a “formidable” candidate for other reasons: he could forge a bipartisan coalition; he could also craft a platform well before the major party candidates whose nominations need to be ratified next summer at national conventions.

Doug Schoen, the pollster who helped engineer Bloomberg’s mayoral elections and is completing a book about the potential influence of independent voters, says, quote, “I think there are unprecedented levels of cynicism toward the two parties and American institutions.”

And Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real estate developer, told me: The more the major party candidates pander “to their base, the more they will be perceived as being a part of that base, both on the left and on the right. And it is that public perception that will provide Bloomberg with the biggest opening in the middle.”

If that middle turns out to be the gap between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, their matchup could inoculate Bloomberg against being dismissed as a Northeastern liberal.

There’s not much love lost among them, either. Giuliani’s endorsement was critical to Bloomberg’s election in 2001, but it was bestowed begrudgingly and at the 11th hour. And Bloomberg has never completely forgiven Senator Clinton for endorsing a fellow Democrat, Fernando Ferrer, against him in 2005.

If Clinton and Giuliani are not the nominees, Bloomberg would have to grapple with still another intangible: Is the country ready again for a New Yorker?

Once upon a time, any prominent New York politician was automatically considered presidential timber. Among the New Yorkers, by one definition or another, who got to the White House were Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt. Eisenhower and Nixon were living in the city when they were elected, too.

The list of would-be presidents is even longer: Al Smith, who would have been the first Catholic president; Tom Dewey, who first ran when he was not yet governor, but still the Manhattan district attorney; Dewey’s successor as governor, Averell Harriman; Harriman’s successor, Nelson Rockefeller, who finally was appointed vice president by Gerald Ford; and Rockefeller’s successors, Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.

But the reality is, New York has been bereft of a successful presidential candidate since Franklin Roosevelt won his last term in 1944. No New Yorker has been nominated by his party for vice president since Jack Kemp, a Buffalo Republican, in 1996, and Geraldine Ferraro, a Queens Democrat, in 1984.

As Senator Boren says, perhaps wistfully, these may not be ordinary times. And the Massachusetts-born Bloomberg isn’t your ordinary candidate.

When he invested $160 million of his own money in his two mayoral campaigns, New Yorkers seemed unfazed by the suggestion that he was buying their votes. He could spend $2 billion on the presidency.

And, you could even argue that his chances of running for president may be better than they were of getting elected mayor.

Just by running, Bloomberg would be challenging history. By winning, he would be defying it — yet again. He would be the first elected mayor of New York City in nearly 140 years to be elected to another office.