Bloomberg as Obama's running mate?

Putting New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on the ticket with Barack Obama might finally quell those Internet rumors about Obama being an undercover Muslim and an anti-Semite and a Palestinian sympathizer. But would Bloomberg play second fiddle? The NY Daily News, via the Bintel Blog, editorializes about why he might and why Obama should inquire.

Bloomberg gives Obama instant economic credibility, exemplifies postpartisan partnerships, offers a deep resume, even deeper pockets, experience confronting terrorism and the ability to think big. The downside?

Let's be frank, some fraction of Americans would vote against any black-Jewish ticket. In a close election, that could hurt.

But the rewards far outweigh the risks. With a bold move, Obama could signal he really is a different kind of politician — and one who can win it all.

As one New York political heavyweight commented recently: No one wants to be the vice president ... until they're asked to be vice president.

Bloomberg playing 'presidential footsie'

Despite Barack Obama's decisive victory in Iowa last week, and double-digit leads for tonight's primary in New Hampshire, and maybe because the Republican landscape remains so unclear, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg continues to play the will-he-or-won't-he game.

Onto this crowded and rejuvenated political stage now comes Michael Bloomberg, our skilled and uncommonly non-neurotic mayor, engaged in a different variety of the electoral enterprise—a prolonged game of Presidential footsie. Even as he has issued denials of interest to everyone from the press corps at City Hall to Ryan Seacrest on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, Bloomberg has deputized some of his leading aides to draw up scenarios for a third-party candidacy and to keep the interest of the press well fluffed. The press, titillated by access, has coöperated with front-page “would-he, could-he” stories. This week, Bloomberg will attend a meeting of Unity08, in Oklahoma, to discuss third-party options, and in recent weeks he has displayed a vague yet imperious disdain for the assembled candidates, while privately hustling from one policy consultant and policy grandee to the next, to ask, “What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who’s divorced really have of becoming President?”

The reason that Bloomberg’s coy exploratory venture has earned him such attention is obvious. “There are two things that are important in politics,” Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist and senator who ran William McKinley’s campaign, in 1896, said. “The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” All the front-runners except Mike Huckabee are millionaires to one degree or another—Obama is the poorest, with a net worth of just over a million dollars, Mitt Romney the richest, with two hundred million—but Bloomberg is wealthier by an order of magnitude. According to Forbes, he is worth more than eleven billion dollars. Bloomberg owns an estate in Bermuda, a horse farm in Westchester County, a condominium in Vail, a ten-million-dollar town house in London, and a thirteen-and-a-half-million-dollar town house on East Seventy-ninth Street. To commute among them, he takes his private jet, a Falcon 9. He isn’t stingy, though; he’s one of the leading philanthropists in the United States and has said that at some point he hopes to give away as much as four hundred million dollars a year.

Still, running for President is not cheap.

The biggest question, obviously, is whether a third-party candidate -- Bloomberg is a nominal Independent -- can really compete in a two-party system. I know a lot of Republican Jews who remain excited about the possibility of voting for someone they agree with not just fiscally but socially, but most observers have so far said Bloomberg couldn't overcome the outsider handicap.

Michael Bloomberg's religion problem

It seems like most the candidates in the '08 race are having a crisis of faith on the campaign trail. But keep in mind that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has not declared his candidacy for president. Yet. Then, read Jacques Berlinerblau's assessment of why Bloomberg would fair poorly among the Party of God (no, not that party of God):

If values voters really do exist, the very competent, very capable, Michael Bloomberg is going to have the darnedest time winning them over. All mayors of the ultra multi-cultural Five Boroughs must learn how to speak a discourse of pluralism and tolerance. This Bloomberg can do solidly, though not spectacularly. But he appears very uncomfortable--John Kerry uncomfortable--speaking about his own religious convictions. I, along with many of his other constituents, had always attributed his reluctant and maladroit God Talk to the fact that he was a nonbeliever--an unremarkable identity in America’s greatest city.

I had assumed this until Bloomberg recently described himself as “short, Jewish divorced billionaire.” This was about as explicit a profession of faith as New Yorkers have heard from their unsentimental leader. Some Jews were surprised (though not necessarily upset) to hear Bloomberg publicly refer to his religion. Mindful of option “(a)” above, Opposition Research teams across America have surely taken note of what could be spun as a self-serving “conversion.”

Mr. Bloomberg is affiliated with Reform Judaism and this too augurs badly for his candidacy. Let us assume that he is deeply committed to his faith. Let us even assume that while he was skillfully micromanaging the City’s recent upswing, he secretly received his rabbinic training and ordination at Hebrew Union College on Broadway and West Fourth Street. My surmise is that even if this were the case, Rabbi Bloomberg would still fair poorly in the Red States. This is because Reform is an example of the type of secularized religion I have been discussing in previous posts. With its emphasis on human agency and social justice, it is nowhere near as obsessed with the role of the divine in everyday life as are certain varieties of conservative Protestantism. Highly educated, affluent and at peace with modernity, they resemble, in many ways, the small but influential class of urban-dwelling non-believers. A Reform Jewish candidate stumping among, let’s say, Evangelical Christians might be construed by them as a Unitarian, a secular humanist or even an atheist.

Bloomberg: 'Short Jewish billionaire from New York'

He'd probably be the most-qualified candidate running for president, certainly the best choice from New York. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg's not in the race, remember?

The slow-burning fire was stoked last week when Bloomberg defected from the Republican party. By going independent, speculators speculated, he could galvanize those disgruntled conservative voters while snaking some of the Clinton and Obama vote. But no one really thinks he could win -- unless the Protocoals of the Elders of Zion really are true -- just that he'd make a boring race a lot more interesting.

The Forward's Jennifer Siegel, whose work I find detailed and insightful, has this report about Bloomberg redefining the role of Jewish pol.

Bloomberg the mayor has transformed himself into a politician whom the vast majority of New York Jews can get behind, even though he does not present himself as a typically “Jewish” politician. It’s a characteristic that some say could prove beneficial if the mayor — who derides himself as “a short, Jewish billionaire from New York” — launches the independent bid for the White House that is suggested by his recent decision to quit the Republican Party.

“Bloomberg has never run away from who he is, but he’s not running around waving a lulav, and he’s not holding up a mezuza all day long,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who worked for Bloomberg’s opponent in 2001, Mark Green. “And why should he? It’s part of his identity, but it’s not way up front, nor is anything else.”

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“Mike Bloomberg is proud of being a Jew, but he’s a ‘WASH’ — a white, Anglo-Saxon Hebrew,” said Morris Offit, a partner of Bloomberg’s at Salomon Brothers. Offit has served with him on the boards of John Hopkins and The Jewish Museum. “Given his class and his secularity, he is a Jew, but in an ethnic and cultural sense.”