The Bloomberg Delusion

By Peter Beinart

Michael Bloomberg is Felipe Lopez. Lopez, you may (or may not) remember, was one of the most hyped high school basketball stars ever. The 6-ft. 5-in. (1.96 m) guard from the Bronx graced the cover of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED before even playing a college game. But at St. John's, he proved a bust. Lopez briefly made the pros, but he had little impact. Last season he played for the CBA's Albany Patroons.

Lopez's fame owed less to his talent than to his location: New York City. If you can make it there, the self-obsessed Big Apple media often assume, you can make it anywhere. And now they're saying it about Michael Bloomberg, another solid local performer who wouldn't get a second look if he hailed from Tampa Bay. Bloomberg has made the covers of both Time and Newsweek, the latter promising that his would be "one of the most significant third-party bids for the White House in American history." "He will not run to be a spoiler," one of his aides told the New York Times. That's good, since everything we know about third-party candidates suggests that for Bloomberg, even spoiler is an impossible dream.

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," 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. And he has competence, but competence works only when it's connected to a compelling ideological vision. Ask Michael Dukakis.

More than 50 years ago, the historian 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.