The Michael Bloomberg Thread

[The Senator]

OOPS! Bloomberg is adamantly Pro-Choice, not pro-life. My bad.

 

[StorminNorman]

With McCain as the candidate for the GOP - there is no way Bloomberg can enter this election.

He has no base to appeal to.

 

[Matt]

I'm not sure about that Norman. While he is socially liberal and also pro-war, he is also very fiscally conservative and can play that to his advantage.

 

[EdRyder]

With McCain as the candidate for the GOP - there is no way Bloomberg can enter this election.

He has no base to appeal to.

Id question that.
Look how tight Florida was..,wheres the base that McCain appeals to?

 

[The Senator]

Id question that.
Look how tight Florida was..,wheres the base that McCain appeals to?

The left-leaning Republicans who want to vote for anyone but Clinton or Obama, the Republicans who support the war in Iraq, the Republicans who support McCain's immigration policy...

Basically, Republicans who like McCain are McCain's base.

 

[Raiden]

I'm not sure about that Norman. While he is socially liberal and also pro-war, he is also very fiscally conservative and can play that to his advantage.

I agree. If Bloomberg does run, I think he'd give both parties' candidates a run for their money. Whether he will win, though, is another question.

 

[Matt]

Of course he will not win. But he could put up pretty good numbers for a third party. I mean, think about it...a third party candidate who appeals to BOTH sides (Unlike Nader who only appeals to the extreme left and Perot who only appeals to the far right) and unlike most third parties, also has limitless funds. He could put up huge numbers.

 

[EdRyder]

The left-leaning Republicans who want to vote for anyone but Clinton or Obama, the Republicans who support the war in Iraq, the Republicans who support McCain's immigration policy...

Basically, Republicans who like McCain are McCain's base.

You think his base is the "blind party allegiance crowd"?
For a man who doesn't practice blind party allegiance himself?...
(one of the few things I actually like about McCain)

 

[The Senator]

You think his base is the "blind party allegiance crowd"?
For a man who doesn't practice blind party allegiance himself?...
(one of the few things I actually like about McCain)

Did I say that? I said his base were the people who like McCain and would vote for McCain. I used the Republicans in Florida as a lead in.

And yes, there is blind party allegiance with McCain. I know a few strong Republicans who supported Huckabee, Giuliani and Thompson, but switched over to McCain after it appeared he was likely to become the next nominee. There are people who will vote for McCain simply because he is a Republican. The Republicans who won't vote for him are the conservative extremists who hate him because he won't equate gay sex to man-on-dog sex or doesn't support torturing our enemies or doesn't support gunning down the entire Hispanic population because of a few illegal immigrants. But because the Republican party has been hijacked, actual Republicans have been silenced in favor of ideologues like Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum. And because they're the most vocal, and say the most outrageous things, they automatically become the voice of the party, which is stupid.

It looks like the Republicans are taking back their party, and I have a feeling 80% of the Republican Party-- if not more-- will support McCain in the general election.

 

[EdRyder]

Dude ,what crawled in your butt today? It was a simple question.I think you're reading a tone in my posts that isnt there.

As for the "Republicans taking back their party " quote-The turnout for Super Tuesday would say different.

 

[The Senator]

As for the "Republicans taking back their party " quote-The turnout for Super Tuesday would say different.

It doesn't matter how many people voted in the primary. It matters which percentage of voters voted for whom. In this case, 52% of Republicans who voted for McCain did not identify themselves as conservatives. I think that says something substantial about which direction the GOP is going in.

 

[EdRyder]

Ok but,Republican conservatives are the traditional 'base'.
Again,There is no 'Base' for McCain.
If you want to say he creates his own base"People who like McCain and would vote for McCain",..have at it.Taking back the party and recreating the party are two different things.

Im pretty sure StorminNormin meant the traditional meaning of the phrase 'base' when he said it.

 

[The Senator]

Ok but,Republican conservatives are the traditional 'base'.
Again,There is no 'Base' for McCain.
If you want to say he creates his own base"People who like McCain and would vote for McCain",..have at it.Taking back the party and recreating the party are two different things.

Im pretty sure StorminNormin meant the traditional meaning of the phrase 'base' when he said it.

You misread what I said. I said the party was hijacked by Christian Conservatives, and it has been under their control for the past eight years. The last real Republican who received his party's nomination for President was Bob Dole.

Republicans support limited government, lower taxes, and a strong national defense, among other things. They don't support tacking the Bible on to the Bill of Rights, going to the border and shooting illegal immigrants, or oppressing homosexuals solely on the merit of religious beliefs. Certainly, religion has played a role in Presidential administrations, but Christian voters have not been the sole target demographic of the Republican Party until recently. Catering to one demographic doesn't work alone (the fact that Bush was a strong Christian didn't get him elected; it was his status as a strong leader). John McCain is bringing the party back to where it was in the 1980s and 1990s-- and that's where the true base of the party lies.

 

[EdRyder]

You misread what I said. I said the party was hijacked by Christian Conservatives, and it has been under their control for the past eight years. The last real Republican who received his party's nomination for President was Bob Dole.

Republicans support limited government, lower taxes, and a strong national defense, among other things. They don't support tacking the Bible on to the Bill of Rights, going to the border and shooting illegal immigrants, or oppressing homosexuals solely on the merit of religious beliefs. Certainly, religion has played a role in Presidential administrations, but Christian voters have not been the sole target demographic of the Republican Party until recently. Catering to one demographic doesn't work alone (the fact that Bush was a strong Christian didn't get him elected; it was his status as a strong leader). John McCain is bringing the party back to where it was in the 1980s and 1990s-- and that's where the true base of the party lies.

Making a play for the 80's base of consevatives by painting yourself as the "Reagan candidate" and at the same time trying to spin it as if "Reagan wasnt all that Conservative anyway"..It defies logic itself.

You brought up Christian conservatives as Bush's base.But he makes appeals to them as well.Claiming that somehow all the sneak attack, black baby, Karl Rove bs was somehow the fault of his own campaign.

I give him the credit for being able to scrape up voters outside the traditional base but,he cant keep reconfiguring himself as a different McCain of 2000.My memory is still good.

When you have to keep reminding your own party that you are a republican something isnt right.

 

[The Senator]

Making a play for the 80's base of consevatives by painting yourself as the "Reagan candidate" and at the same time trying to spin it as if "Reagan wasnt all that Conservative anyway"..It defies logic itself.

You brought up Christian conservatives as Bush's base.But he makes appeals to them as well.Claiming that somehow all the sneak attack, black baby, Karl Rove bs was somehow the fault of his own campaign.

I give him the credit for being able to scrape up voters outside the traditional base but,he cant keep reconfiguring himself as a different McCain of 2000.My memory is still good.

When you have to keep reminding your own party that you are a republican something isnt right.

John McCain is more like Reagan than any of the other Republicans who ran. Because of that, he doesn't need to invoke Reagan as some sort of *********ory messiah like Romney did. So, because McCain didn't remind the Republicans every ten minutes that he worked closely with Reagan's administration, that his policies are very similar to Reagan's, he suffered in the middle of his campaign, and he's currently being forced to suffer at the fatty hands of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wingers.

Now, it's true that he's reconfigured himself to a different version of who he was eight years ago. But hey, that's politics, and obviously it's worked throughout this primary.

 

[Genesis 1.0]

Bloomberg? Riiiight.

The last third-party candidate who got anywhere near the presidency was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and he had been President before. Since then, four third-party candidates have gotten more than 5% of the vote. And each of them had something Bloomberg lacks: a popular issue that the major parties wouldn't touch. In 1924, the gop ran Calvin Coolidge, the most conservative President of the 20th century, and the most boring. But his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, was pretty conservative too. And so Robert La Follette, the only progressive in the race, won 17% of the vote. In 1968, the Democrats were pro civil rights, and the Republicans were still largely persona non grata below the Mason-Dixon Line. So George Wallace, running against black rioters and white hippies, won five Southern states.

Wallace's slogan was "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties," if I'm not mistaken. which is pretty much what Ross Perot said in 1992. And on the issues Perot took up—the budget deficit and NAFTA—he had a point. With Americans angry about the economy and angry at Washington, Perot made NAFTA, which both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton supported, a symbol of the public's discontent. Perot won 19% of the vote, mostly among downscale Republicans and independents who had backed Reagan during the cold war but by then feared Mexico almost as much as they had feared the U.S.S.R.

The third-party candidate with the best chance in 2008 would be a saner Perot. As in 1992, the GOP coalition is cracking along class lines. Many working-class Republicans and independents who backed George W. Bush because he was tough on al-Qaeda now want a President who is tough on globalization. Illegal immigration has supplanted terrorism on the list of concerns for the American right. And at the party's grass roots, voters are turning hard against free trade. Last fall a Wall Street Journal poll found that nearly twice as many Republicans think trade deals hurt as think they help.

John McCain is too pro-immigration for these latter-day Perotistas. And Mitt Romney is too hedge fund. If either of them won the Republican nomination, a souped-up Perot could win over downscale Republicans who like Mike Huckabee's anti-corporate populism. And he might pick up a few John Edwards supporters as well—white male union types who think Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are too pro-immigration and too NPR.

There's a name for this new-model Perot: Lou Dobbs, CNN's red faced, loudmouthed scourge of lawbreaking immigrants and job-shipping CEOs. Bloomberg, by contrast, would be the most pro-immigration, pro--free trade, pro--Wall Street candidate in the race. The third-party candidate he would most resemble is John Anderson, the fiscally responsible, culturally liberal Republican who ran as an Independent in 1980. Anderson won 7% of the vote, mostly among the young, educated and secular. But today those people are partisan Democrats. After Ralph Nader, there's simply no way that liberals are going to take a flyer on a candidate like Bloomberg, who is almost ideologically identical to their nominee but lacks a D next to his name.

Bloomberg has money, but American politics is littered with millionaires who couldn't translate their cash into votes just like Romney. And he has competence, but competence works only when it's connected to a compelling ideological vision. Ask Michael Dukakis.

Heh, Richard Hofstadter compared third parties to bees. They inject a new perspective into the political mainstream, and then they die. If Michael Bloomberg runs for President, he'll skip the first step.

 

[\S/JcDc\S/]

What an incredible waste of money it would be if he ran.

 

[The Senator]

What an incredible waste of money it would be if he ran.

What's $500 million of your own money if you have $11.5 billion anyway?

 

[\S/JcDc\S/]

What's $500 million of your own money if you have $11.5 billion anyway?

An incredible waste of money.

 

[The Senator]

An incredible waste of money.

Well, God forbid someone runs for President who doesn't belong to the two parties.

 

[ShadowBoxing]

I think Michael Bloomberg needs to take a page from ole' JLU Lex Luthor's handbook: "President? Do you know how much power I'd have to give up to be President?"

 

[The Senator]

I think Michael Bloomberg needs to take a page from ole' JLU Lex Luthor's handbook: "President? Do you know how much power I'd have to give up to be President?"

Well, his term as Mayor will be up in two years anyway, so he doesn't have anything to lose except $500 million he doesn't have use for. If I had that much money, I'd run, even if I was to end up a fringe candidate.

 

[StorminNorman]

I'm not sure about that Norman. While he is socially liberal and also pro-war, he is also very fiscally conservative and can play that to his advantage.

Most moderate democrats that would consider voting for a pro-war candidate would vote for McCain - the Primaries have shown that.

The moderate Republicans LOVE McCain - the Primaries have shown that.

The Conservatives of the Republican party can live with McCain - the Primaries have shown that.

The Hard Core Conservatives hate McCain - but they are not going to support a candidate that is even MORE liberal than McCain.

There is NO Appeal what so ever for a Bloomberg candidacy with McCain as the GOP choice.

McCains two glaring weaknesses (amongst Republican voters) are:
Immigration - Bloomberg wants Amnesty...
and
Party Loyalty - Bloomberg...would be running third party.

If Thompson was the GOP choice - Bloomberg had a shot.
If Mitt Romney was the GOP choice - Bloomberg MAY have a shot.
If McCain drops dead and Huckabee is the GOP choice - Romneys face will be so red! - AND Bloomberg MAY have a shot.

But with McCain Bloomberg has no appeal - I think even the majority of New Yorker's have said they wouldn't support him as President...

 

[The Senator]

From MSNBC:

Bloomberg: I won't Run
NEW YORK - After two years of playing coy about his presidential ambitions, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared in a newspaper editorial Wednesday that he will not run for president as an independent and said he might support the candidate who "takes an independent, nonpartisan approach."

The 66-year-old billionaire businessman, who aides had said was prepared to spend $1 billion on his own independent campaign, wrote in an opinion column posted on the New York Times' Web site that he will be working to "steer the national conversation away from partisanship and toward unity; away from ideology and toward common sense; away from sound bites and toward substance."

Bloomberg, who has almost two years left in his second term at City Hall, had publicly denied any interest in running for president since one of his political advisers first planted the seed more than two years ago.
Story continues below

But his denials grew weaker in recent months as aides and supporters quietly began laying the groundwork for a third-party campaign.

"I listened carefully to those who encouraged me to run, but I am not — and will not be — a candidate for president," he wrote.

Among his biggest obstacles was getting on the ballot, a process that varies wildly from state to state and would have required him to obtain hundreds of thousands of signatures according to a timetable on which the first key date is March 5.

Bloomberg did not say why he had decided not to run and was critical of the Republican and Democratic contenders, saying they appeared afraid to "level with" voters on many important issues such as trade, the environment and immigration.

"I believe that an independent approach to these issues is essential to governing our nation and that an independent can win the presidency," he wrote. "I have watched this campaign unfold, and I am hopeful that the current campaigns can rise to the challenge by offering truly independent leadership.

 

[jaguarr]

He doesn't say anything about a VP slot, though. I wonder if that's by design or just coincidence?

jag