City Journal had a nice profile of Michael Bloomberg, noting how very unlike some of the other third party populist rich-guy candidates of recent years, including Berlusconi in Italy and Perot here at home:
But there is no indication that Bloomberg’s call for post-partisan, technocratic government resonates with voters. The last candidate with this message was the hapless Michael Dukakis.
Many of the major issues roiling the public today are in one way or another tied to globalization. Iraq, immigration, inequality, the influence of big money in politics, out-of-control government spending, and outsourcing are what make middle-class swing voters anxious and angry. A Ross Perot/Lou Dobbs sort of candidate could appeal to those voters, as well as to large chunks of the Republican and Democratic electorate. By contrast, the Bush/Senate immigration reform bill garners approval from only 23 percent of the public.
But from the perspective of 2007’s angry voters, Bloomberg is on the wrong side of these issues. He hasn’t spoken much about Iraq, but what he has said has been largely supportive of President Bush. He not only supports the immigration bill, but he also doesn’t see massive illegal immigration as a problem. He is the personification of inequality, of a social hierarchy in which the super-rich seem to have seceded from the rest of the country. As for out-of-control government spending, Bloomberg’s budgets have grown at twice the rate of inflation. And when it comes to outsourcing, Bloomberg built his fortune on the growth of the global economy. Rather than representing an alternative, Bloomberg incarnates the very things people are angry about.
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