Bloomberg may split conservative vote

Embattled New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is threatening to mount an independent bid for President. That's right, President. But all you can hear is me laughing.

Yeah, I know, I know. Bloomberg isn't as right-wing as the Republican Party whose banner he got elected under. But if you look at his policies against labor or the homeless, he's as economically conservative as can be. And even if he isn't, somehow I wonder if the media would have ever paid attention to him if he wasn't a multibillionaire and one of the richest people in the world.

It's kind of like what happened with Ross Perot. If someone just like Perot but of only average means tried to run for President, you know they wouldn't have attracted much attention. Furthermore, it's been said that Bloomberg might invest $1,000,000,000 (a billion) costly dollars of his own money in his presidential campaign. Who of average means can buy themselves the presidency like that?

What's funny about Bloomberg's potential candidacy is that it'll split the Republican vote more than it splits the Democratic vote. It'll split both far more than it'll split the Green vote, so this may be the best shot yet for the Greens to capture the White House or at least some lower offices with their coattails. You have to ask yourself, why wouldn't they? With the Democrats still inching to the right, and with a possible Bloomberg bid, conservatives may have 3 major candidates to split their vote, leaving everyone else to the Greens. It's only logical. Maybe not very likely, but logical. (Everyone laughed when I said the Democrats might regain both houses of Congress in 2006 - and guess what? So don't laugh too hard at my suggestion.)

But the New York Times reports that Bloomberg would promote himself as a "pragmatic, progressive centrist." Riiiiight. We'll see how "progressive" or "centrist" he is if we report more about his mayoral policies. I remember when Tommy Thompson, Tom Ridge, and even you-know-who were pumped up as "pragmatic" governors, and look how right-wing they got to be.

Look, if the pundits are gonna try to parlay someone from outside the two-party fold into a viable candidate, let's try to make sure they're not yet another conservative, which Bloomberg is. Every brand of conservatism is well-represented by the major parties already. It's the ideology that's agonizingly destroyed the country for the past 27 years, so why not try something different?

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/politics/31bloomberg.html)