Bloomberg's Billions

I have to admit that the side of me that follows politics sort of as a spectator sport can't help but want to see Michael Bloomber launch his much-rumored independent presidential campaign. A three-way race would have more wide upen contours and a much more dynamic electoral map. John Kerry got 40 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 2004 and the state's 37 percent black so you've got to figure Bloomberg couldn't push that down very far. Maybe he'd take enough GOP votes to render Democrats competitive in the deep south.

On the other hand, the larger impact would almost certainly be to siphon votes off in the northeast and turn those solidly blue states competitive. I'm not a fan of third party concepts in general, and what makes them appealing from a spectator point-of-view is a big part of the problem with them -- when you have more than two candidates in the race, the American electoral system starts delivering some truly odd results. The combination of first past the post with the electoral college means that, in principle, you could become president while finishing third out of three in the popular vote. The other thing is that a solid billionaire challenge could be exactly the thing to light a fire under the assess of incumbent politicians and get them interested in political reform. Bloomberg has over $5.5 billion. He could comfortably live until the end of his days with a mere $1 billion in savings, and spend $4.5 billion on a presidential campaign, at which point all bets would be off. The established party candidates need to consider themselves lucky that he seems to be contemplating something more along the lines of "only" $500 million.