Room For Another

Watching America has a nice translation from the German Financial Times Deutschland about the possibility and implications of Bloomberg’s entering the race for the presidency under the headline “Room For Another”

In New York, Bloomberg is viewed as a decision maker, who masters day-to-day business as well as crisis situations. In the middle of his second term of office, his popularity in the Metropolis is unbroken.

The great thing about business is that you can’t fake it for long. These pesky things called numbers and dollars tend to have the last word. It doesn’t matter if an idea is fantastic: execution is key, and success or failure will over time become clear. In that respect, at least, the businessman is independent of the good opinion of others.

And the awful thing about politics is that, well, it’s nothing like that. The making of political decisions with a view to judging success or failure against objective – or at least prespecified and external – criteria, rather than ideological requirements or popularity – is refreshing indeed…

Goodness, it might even mean that potential policy choices will be analyzed carefully to determine their practical impact on the lives of others or society as a whole. For example, reducing crime is good, and philosophical positions on gun control are not so important; economic growth is good, and philosophical positions on the evils of taxation are less important; a healthy society is good; and philosophical positions on socialized medicine are less important… the list goes on.

For that reason, I am rather well disposed to the thought of a Bloomberg candidacy, but then given the dynamics of the American two-party state, a political duopoly, the only thing an Independent in the race could be sure of doing is making the outcome of the presidential election completely uncertain – perhaps to a point of decoupling it from the broad overall political preferences of the American electorate (c.f. Nader, Perot etc.)

Read “Room for Another” on Watching America.com, the website that translates and aggregates foreign news about the U.S.