Will It Be Bloomberg And Unity In Independent Bid?
December 29th, 2007
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
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Hold your political calculations. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is going to meet with the bipartisan group Unity and there’s a possibility that they could join forces in a third party bid.
There have been stories plus speculation in informed political circles that Bloomberg could still jump into the race — and now the Washington Post’s David Broder reports this:
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a potential independent candidate for president, has scheduled a meeting next week with a dozen leading Democrats and Republicans, who will join him in challenging the major-party contenders to spell out their plans for forming a “government of national unity” to end the gridlock in Washington.
Those who will be at the Jan. 7 session at the University of Oklahoma say that if the likely nominees of the two parties do not pledge to “go beyond tokenism” in building an administration that seeks national consensus, they will be prepared to back Bloomberg or someone else in a third-party campaign for president.
Of course, miracles do sometimes happen in politics. And it is not entirely unlikely that one of the two major political party candidates will would want to try and short-circuit a potentially vote-siphoning third party bid involving (a) a group of highly dedicated, high-profile bipartisan politicians, officials and young activists (b) a billionaire businessman-mayor who has made it clear that he could wind up spending a record-breaking amount of his own considerable bankroll on winning the White House if he does decide to jump in.
But both political parties and many of their partisans now are deeply-locked into polarization patterns (which motivate activists to gather and work for candidates and get the party faithful to vote). So it’s likely that if Unity wants to put up a slate and Bloomberg feels its winnable and wants to jump in, 2008 could see a well-funded, high-profile third party bid.
Those attending the upcoming meeting are impressive, indeed:
Conveners of the meeting include such prominent Democrats as former senators Sam Nunn (Ga.), Charles S. Robb (Va.) and David L. Boren (Okla.), and former presidential candidate Gary Hart. Republican organizers include Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.), former party chairman Bill Brock, former senator John Danforth (Mo.) and former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
Boren, who will host the meeting at the university, where he is president, said: “It is not a gathering to urge any one person to run for president or to say there necessarily ought to be an independent option. But if we don’t see a refocusing of the campaign on a bipartisan approach, I would feel I would want to encourage an independent candidacy.”
Fair enough. But if Bloomberg decides to jump in and if they survey the other possibilities, it’s hard to see how he won’t be at the top of the list. Additionally, Bloomberg’s big bucks can buy him boatloads of advertising and TV time but if he decided to run and worked with Unity he’d ALSO have an already-in-place core of dedicated, experienced politicians and volunteers enthusiastically out there working the campaign.
All of this does mean that in this bronco ride of an election year, the wild cards we’ve seen (the rise of Huckabee, the Clinton campaign problems, the murder in Pakistan) are most assuredly going to be joined by a few more. And all analyses that state what’s “likely” to happen in a race involving two candidates could be seriously flawed.
Because if Unity launches, there will be an electoral impact — and if it joins forces with a Mayor who has proven to be a skilled politico and has deep pockets it will be an election with a huge deck of wild cards.
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, Unity, Third Parties, Michael Bloomberg, 2008 Elections, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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