Bloomberg knows he knows best
Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a campaign rally at the Buffalo Soldier Museum in Houston on Feb. 13. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is at right. Credit: AP / Houston Chronicle / Elizabeth Conley
America is about to meet Michael Bloomberg, presidential candidate, and the possibilities of what comes after that formal introduction on a debate stage in Las Vegas Wednesday night boggle the mind.
What will the people of Nevada, South Carolina, Kansas and Kentucky think of this prickly but persuasive know-it-all of a New York City Jewish billionaire?
Bloomberg, thanks to a 19% showing in a national poll this week and some fourth-quarter rule changes by a Democratic Party eyeing his billions like jackals spying a pile of ribeyes, is hitting the stage. There he’ll serve as a sudden addition to the menu, like a special the waiter never mentioned until it became clear the table wasn’t buying the regular dinner options.
Bloomberg’s meteoric rise in a race in which many Democrats are desperate for an answer to President Donald Trump is not surprising. Anyone can look good for a moment early in a presidential contest: just ask Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, John Edwards, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum or Howard Dean.
But can Bloomberg’s wave survive people getting a chance to listen to him answer questions, and watching him grimace with the heavy pain of his intellectual superiority while having to answer those pesky questions?
Great question! No one knows. That’s why we play the game.
Even before he announced his late entry, the clamor of support that should have been Bloomberg’s death-knell in the Democratic Party began: the onslaught of right-wing thinkers telling liberals Bloomberg is their best choice. Bloomberg is the kind of Democrat Republicans love, which is to say a self-made billionaire longtime Republican, and New York Times conservapundit Bret Stephens probably shared their feelings best in his November column “Run, Mike, Run!”
The last time I saw the opposite party get this excited about a presidential candidate in the primaries was when Democrats clamored for the dreamily moderate 2012 Republican candidate Jon Huntsman. He dropped out after Republican voters remembered they don’t like the candidates that Democrats like and stomped his White House dreams in New Hampshire like an empty pack of Marlboro Reds.
That also might happen with Bloomberg. Practically everybody I know or read who supports him is a Trump-hating moderate or Republican, not a Democrat, and their support is more pragmatic than passionate. But Democrats get to pick their presidential candidate, and disdain among Democrats is why Bloomberg always ran for New York City mayor as a Republican: he feared he could not win a Democratic primary.
It was, and continues to be, a legitimate fear. He is far to the right of many of the voters he’d need to woo to snag the nomination, at least some of whom would not vote for Bloomberg even in a general election against Trump.
I look forward to seeing someone on that stage who is all the things Trump claimed to be and never was: Self-made, a billionaire, smart, well-educated, respected and truly unconcerned with what others think of him. Trump, who has claimed to be above public opinion, is obsessed with it. Bloomberg, with whom I spent a few hours toward the end of his mayoralty, is so supremely self-confident you sense that he has not even considered that he might be wrong for years. He doesn’t get angry when you disagree with him, he’s just baffled that you could possibly be so misguided.
That was the hubris at the core of his anti-big soda, anti-salt, anti-tobacco nanny-state impulses. Bloomberg knows best and believes we all need to just do as he says.
I’d have said it would make him too unlikeable to be president, until “too unlikeable to be president” stopped being a thing.
Lane Filler is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
