Bloomberg the Great

Thursday, 02.28.08

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Surprise party

January 2007

Josh Green describes the Unity '08 movement.

The nice guy syndrome

February 1980

Walter Shapiro profiles John Anderson, 1980's third-party sensation.

Michael Bloomberg decides against running for president as an independent.

So who cares, right? Isn't Bloomberg just a rich dilettante? Actually, no. He was, by a wide margin, the best qualified of all the imaginable presidential candidates. Granted, he's not the kind of political figure who sends reporters into crazed reveries, and as a mouthy lower-middle-class kid from Medford, Massachusetts he doesn't embody America's changetastic post-ethnic future. He is simply the best mayor New York has ever had. Bloomberg's two terms have been marked by impressive improvements in the city's fiscal health, the crime rate, education, and environmental quality. And he accomplished all this by charming and disarming the same entrenched interests his predecessors failed to break through direct confrontation.

This, of course, is a set of skills Bloomberg deployed to great effect in building one of the world's most lucrative media empires. Amusingly enough, some of Bloomberg's detractors have tried to use his entrepreneurial success against him. When he first ran for mayor of New York, Bloomberg was accused of trying to use his extraordinary wealth to buy power. But of course plenty of rent-seeking scoundrels do exactly that without ever making themselves accountable at the ballot box. They do it through well-placed campaign contributions, or, worse yet, by offering lucrative employment to the daughters and sons of senators and former presidents. Then there are the saintly suffering career politicians, who hardly ever fail to turn years of toiling for the commonwealth into lucrative lobbying and consulting opportunities. I'll take Bloomberg over a hundred self-dealing mediocrities, thank you.

To be sure, Bloomberg has said a lot of silly and vacuous stuff about "common sense solutions" and the virtues of "an independent approach." In truth, Bloomberg's most valuable quality is not his "independence" but rather his keen intellect. Let's hope he continues to use it to better the lives of poor schlubs like us.

— Reihan Salam

Not smart enough

After calling all of the major presidential candidates "smart," Michael Bloomberg describes the many ways they are, or at least pretend to be, stupid.

Vaporware

Steven Benen maintains Bloomberg was utterly bereft of substantive solutions, and that he was right not to run for president.

Miseducation

On education, Sol Stern claims Bloomberg's vaunted reforms have been more spin than substance.

Overclass egomania

David Remnick pours cold water on the idea of a Bloomberg presidential bid, chalking it up to simple vanity.

Filed Under: Bloomberg, election, election 2008, New York, politics, Republicans

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I love Bloomberg, despite disagreeing with him about some major initiatives, but everyone I know who works in education says he has done a lot of damage in that sphere.

Posted by Maud | February 28, 2008 8:10 PM

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