Home Delivery

Bloomberg watches, waits

BY KARLA SCHUSTER | karla.schuster@newsday.com

10:18 PM EST, January 3, 2008

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

Mayor Michael Bloomberg isn't a candidate for president, and the chances he might become one didn't get any better after Thursday night's Iowa caucuses.

But they didn't get any worse, either.

With a fairly close race among the top Democrats and Mike Huckabee, the conservative former Arkansas governor, emerging as a clear victor in the GOP contest - who won is less important than who voted and why, experts say.

"I don't think it makes a damn bit of difference... it's about what we expected," said Mickey Carroll of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

"You could make a case for Bloomberg running against any of them," he said.

Because the success of an independent presidential candidate hinges on voter disaffection with traditional party politics, those pushing Bloomberg to run were probably watching exit polls are closely as election returns, said David Birdsell, a political science professor at Baruch College in Manhattan.

"What Iowa does is begin to give you a sense of how the Democratic electorate is shaping itself," Birdsell said. "Are people badly divided on the issues of experience and new vision? You're looking at things like how are people breaking for one candidate or another and what's the depth of their committment to that person? The results are important, but they're only half the story."

On the Republican side, Huckabee's win also does little to alter Bloomberg's presidential calculations, given that his key rival, Mitt Romney, is also a conservative. A victory by either man gives the mayor with the bipartisan message even more room to stake out the ideological middle ground.

"If Huckabee or Romney ends up the nominee, then it's them running on right wing and a prayer and here comes the super mayor," said Air America radio President Mark Green, who ran for mayor against Bloomberg in 2001.

Bloomberg has repeatedly insisted he is not a candidate, while his aides, most notably Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, the engineer of his 2001 mayoral campaign, lay the groundwork for a possible run in which the billionaire mayor could spend more than $1 billion.

He has traveled extensively over the past 18 months and is set to attend a meeting in Oklahoma next week with a group of Democrats and Republicans calling on their parties to disavow partisan gridlock. And Thursday morning on The Today Show, the mayor said of the presidential field: "Everybody is out there for their own advantage, or the advantage of their own party rather than what's right for this country."

Bloomberg's money gives him something else the other candidates dont have:time. He can afford to see who emerges after so-called Super-Duper Tuesday, when more than 20 states, including New York and California, hold primaries.

"What Bloomberg is going to do is wait he sees the lay of the land," Carroll said, "and we won't know that until Feb. 5."