Over the past several months, Michael R Bloomberg has fielded the same phone call over and over again from his Wall Street friends: Why don't you run for president?
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund investor who has historically supported Democratic candidates, buttonholed Bloomberg at a dinner party several weeks ago at Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse and urged him to run. Two weeks ago, Ackman publicly declared, onstage at a Bloomberg Markets conference, "He's all the best of Trump without the worst of Trump." He added: "I would do everything in my power to get this guy elected." Joking about the cost of a campaign, he said: "It's just one quarter's dividend." The drumbeat grew louder in late September, when Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a prominent political consultancy, wrote this tweet: "Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering Independent run."
That's not necessarily the case, as evidenced by Bloomberg's reply to most of his pals: "Not going to happen," he repeats, according to one of his close friends. The plutocracy's renewed interest in Bloomberg pursuing a run for presidency is the confluence of several factors, according to conversations with some of New York's business boldfaced names. One is an anxiety by some Democrats that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been forced to move too far to the left on issues related to business, regulations and taxes. Some Republican business voters worry that Jeb Bush, their preferred candidate, has become lost amid the attention heaped on Donald Trump and will struggle to gain the backing needed to win.
Virtually all business executives complain that none of the candidates have the experience managing and expanding large organisations that Bloomberg did in building his financial data and media empire, Bloomberg LP, and running New York City for 12 years as mayor. Even Rupert Murdoch, who has sparred with Bloomberg over the years, tweeted: "With Trump becoming very serious candidate, it's time for next billionaire candidate, Mike Bloomberg to step into ring. Greatest mayor."
Of course, this popular parlor game of Manhattan's moneyed elite may just be an echo chamber that has no resonance in the rest of the country. And Wall Street's interest in Bloomberg could be a liability to his candidacy. Still, it is Trump's enduring position atop the polls that has convinced them that there is a path to the presidency for Bloomberg.
The conventional wisdom before Trump's campaign was that a billionaire was unelectable; given Trump's success, Bloomberg's friends say he should revisit his stance.
Bank chief executives, private equity bosses and hedge fund managers I spoke with have also implored him to run, but all except Ackman refused to go on the record, so as not to alienate the other candidates. "People thought a billionaire couldn't run for president," Ackman told me in an interview on Monday. "Trump disabused everyone of that notion."
Perhaps.
But Bloomberg, 73, who has expressed skepticism that a "short, Jewish, divorced billionaire" can be elected president, has explained repeatedly to anyone who will listen why he thinks it would be so challenging to win. And unlike other candidates, Bloomberg doesn't want to run unless he can win.
According to friends, Bloomberg has long said he can't run as a Republican, given his views on gun control and global warming. And he is convinced that he can't run as a Democrat, given his strong connections to Wall Street, his wealth and his "stop and frisk" policies as mayor, which rankled civil liberties groups. (He was a lifelong registered Democrat and switched parties when he ran for mayor.)
That would leave him as an independent. He could easily afford to self-fund his campaign. He also could easily get on the ballot in all 50 states, and private polling he conducted years ago suggested he might be able to win a plurality of the popular vote, according to people close to him. But if he did not receive a majority of the Electoral College votes, he would then be at the mercy of the House to vote on the presidency. That's when he would lose, he has told friends, because the lawmakers would vote along party lines.
"I am 100 percent convinced that you cannot in this country win an election unless you are the nominee of one of the two major parties," Bloomberg told New York magazine in 2013 at the end of his mayoralty. "The second thing I am convinced of is that I could not get through the primary process with either party."
He added: "And, incidentally, I think I've got a better job than the president's. He's got a very tough Congress, and he's removed from the day-to-day stuff. My job is the day-to-day stuff. That's what I'm good at - or at least what I think I'm good at."
Bloomberg declined to comment for this column.
His friends say that while he demurs over the possibility of running, he still likes to leave the door open just a smidgen. "It's not a zero-chance thing," said one of his friends, who placed the odds at about 5 percent. Bloomberg has told friends that if in March, the deadline for when an independent candidate would need to declare a run, the leading candidates were in his view problematic, he would reconsider. But only if he could win.
©2015 The New York Times New Service
