Do a lot of people actually think that Bloomberg would hurt the GOP nominee in ’08?  Who are these people, and why are they holding forth on politics while on hallucinogens?  That’s not really fair to hallucinogens–not even these could make someone mistake Bloomberg for a candidate attractive to Republicans, except in the event of a GOP nominee so distasteful to his party that an independent candidate might become a tolerable replacement.  However, Bloomberg is hardly the ideal independent for disaffected Republicans, since he embodies all of Giuliani’s flaws as a social liberal and does not even have his imaginary virtues (“president of 9/11”) to fall back on.  In short, it is hard to explain why anyone would believe that Bloomberg would undermine the GOP ticket.  If anything, conspiratorially-minded Democrats have to be thinking that Bloomberg would be the GOP’s secret weapon to counteract Democratic dominance in ’08.  However, it is precisely his potential appeal to left-leaning voters that will ensure that he gets no support from them for the reasons I outlined in a previous post.  Democrats and Democrat-leaners are hungry for a President who is Not a Republican, and backing the Democratic nominee is the surest way to make that happen.  Backing Bloomberg means playing Russian roulette with the election outcome and hoping, somehow, that the billionaire either does poorly enough not to make a difference or so well that he has a realistic chance of winning the whole shooting match.  A Bloomberg candidacy has no purpose and addresses no need.  If it happens, it would be the purest of vanity presidential runs.  It isn’t going to happen.  There, I’ve said it again.  Put it down alongside my impeccable prediction that Richardson will win the Democratic nomination (an idea that truly seemed much less ridiculous when I first made it).

Marc Ambinder (via Ross) offers the obvious counterargument against this apparently prevailing conventional wisdom about Bloomberg’s largely Republican base.  If it is the prevailing view, I am very surprised.  I’m sure Ambinder is right about where Bloomberg would get his support–if he received any support–since Bloomberg was a pretty conventional Northeastern Democrat (plus a few billion dollars) until the opportunity to run New York appeared and it became useful to become a Republican.  Those were high times for the Goppers back in 2002, so becoming an elephant made sense at the time, and now it makes good sense to turn into something else.  It seems to me that Bloomberg will not run and that he is, like Gore and other non-candidates whom the media wish to draft, actually serious when he says he isn’t running.  (It is true he can literally afford to wait in one sense, but he would have no real reason to wait if he was going to do it–the true lesson of ’92 for him might well be that Perot started too late.)  In any case, whatever else he is, the man isn’t stupid, and only a stupid man–or a man with an ego the size of the moon (that would be Perot)–would waste tens of millions of his own money on a campaign doomed to failure.