
 |
|
Sept. 5, 2008
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: What does 'doing the right thing' entail?
Caroline B. Glick:
The master strategist
Sept. 4, 2008
Ron Kampeas: Biden, Palin take lead in clash on Mideast issues
Bruce Dancis: With humor as their weapon, the Three Stooges took on Hitler
Sept. 3, 2008
Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: Productive school years don't just happen
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Quick lamb stew serves up flavors of India
Sept. 2, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Costly Advice
Caroline B. Glick: Calling Israel's bluff
JWisdom: Wandering in Wonder by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
August 29, 2008
Rabbi Berel Wein: 20/20 sightlessness
Caroline B. Glick: When history is not repeated
JWisdom: Blessed or Cursed: It's Really Up to You by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 28, 2008
Steve Lipman: A Comeback for the 'Jewish Jordan'
Jeffrey Weiss: Researcher reports 'intriguing' diabetes breakthrough
August 27, 2008
Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald: Removing the perfectionist's mask
The Kosher Gourmet
by Emily Nunn: Summer harvest linguine
JWisdom:: The Missing Link in Spiritual Life by Rabbi David Aaron
August 26, 2008
Yaffa Ganz: Grandma gets lessons in staying cool
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: The Dems' 'soft' jihadist
JWisdom::
Today: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Plague of indifference
August 25, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: A friend is bearing a silly grudge from a supposed wrong. What recourse do I have?
Daniel Pipes: Barack Obama through Muslim Eyes
JWisdom:: The knowledge you need to overcome your insecurities by Malka Schulman
August 22, 2008
Rabbi Berel Wein: Life's essential ingredient
Caroline B. Glick: Dominos anyone?
JWisdom:: Actually, Do Sweat the Small Stuff! by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 21, 2008
Today in Biblical History
by Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Popularization of Kabbalah: 20 Menachem-Av 1558 CE
Jonathan Rosenblum: Lessons from the Beyond
JWisdom: : The Olympian within is rooting for you -- yes, you! –- to go for the gold
August 20, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: Misleading Platform Platitudes
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Chicken Salad with Asian Dressing
JWisdom: The Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith: America's Defense of the Jews --- Until WWII by Rabbi Nosson Scherman
August 19, 2008
Dennis Prager: If the Almighty doesn't exist
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Obama's Islamist problem has nothing to do with his upbringing
JWisdom:
Think your life is messed up? by Rabbi David Aaron
August 18, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Business with Friends
Diana West: Roars About Russia, Bare Whispers About Islam
JWisdom: Relationship agony: The real cause by Malka Schulman
August 15, 2008
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: To love the Divine
Caroline B. Glick: Georgia, Israel, and the nature of man
JWisdom: The Truly Righteous Don't Demand Entitlements by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 14, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Confessions of broken spirit
Libby Lazewnik: The Numbers Game
JWisdom: Six Questions You'll Be Asked in Heaven? - Uh - Let's Just Take One for Now! by Gavriel Aryeh Sanders
August 13, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: Georgia should be on their minds
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Go Greek: Pair flavorful lamb kebabs with a hearty salad
JWisdom: Human hybrids aren't science fiction by Rabbi David Aaron
August 12, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bless us
Daniel Pipes: The West's Islamist Infiltrators
JWisdom: From Sadness to Gladness: The Route from Tisha b'Av to Rosh Hashana by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
August 11, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: A Jewish view on fair pricing
Caroline B. Glick: Ignoring failure in Gaza
JWisdom: 'Communication' Is Not The Answer! by Malka Schulman
August 7, 2008
Rabbi David Gutterman: A Continuing Story With a Sustaining Goal
Rabbi Berel Wein: Mourning and morning
JWisdom: Yes, we are still in exile by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 6, 2008
David Ashenfelter: Government made military engineer's life a living hell because of his faith, Defense Department report documents
Jonathan Tobin: Speak the Truth; Defeat the Lies
JWisdom: Jewish Spirituality: Fusion or Confusion? by Rabbi David Aaron
August 5, 2008
Chris Leppek: Church/state wall beginning to crumble?
Paul Greenberg: Exit Olmert (no encore, please)
JWisdom: Serenity: Make the commitment by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin (Read by Gavriel Sanders)
August 4, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Am I taking advantage of another's psychological quirk?
Andrew Silow-Carroll: A black and a Jew walk into the White House…
JWisdom: The Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith: Edward R. Morrow visits the ‘living dead’ by Rabbi Nosson Scherman
March 22, 2007
J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
June 22, 2007
/ 6 Tamuz, 5767
Who Does Mayor Mike Hurt?
By
Michael Barone
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has changed his party registration from Republican to Independent, which everyone is taking as a step toward running as a third-party candidate for president. Bloomberg, whose income is said to be about $500 million a year, is capable of self-financing a campaign, and he has very good job ratings as mayor of New York. A mayor or former mayor of New York has not been a serious candidate for president since DeWitt Clinton in 1812. Now we may have two of them in the 2008 race.
How serious is a Bloomberg candidacy? And who does he take votes away from? Speculation about these questions is interesting, but I think the answers depend on who the Republican and Democratic parties nominate.
Fox News has a national poll showing that in a three-way New Yorker race (a real subway series!), Bloomberg would get just 7 percent of the vote, to 41 percent for Rudy Giuliani and 39 percent for Hillary Clinton. With Bloomberg out of the race, Giuliani leads Clinton 45 percent to 42 percent. In a Quinnipiac poll of New York State released yesterday, in a three-way race Clinton gets 43 percent, Giuliani 29 percent, and Bloomberg 16 percent; in a two-way race, Clinton beats Giuliani 52 percent to 37 percent. In other words, both polls show Bloomberg taking about equal percentages from Clinton and Giuliani. Where Bloomberg is best known, in New York City and its suburbs, he gets 22 percent and 21 percent.
What these polls tell me is that Bloomberg would start off well below the critical mass of support that he needs to be competitive with the major parties or at least with the candidates who are currently leading in all or almost all national polls of Democratic and Republican primary voters. It also tells me that Bloomberg votes tend to come about equally from Clinton and Giuliani both nationally, where he gets only a few votes, and in the state where all three are most well known.
But of course Bloomberg could become much better known: Money can do that. And a Bloomberg candidacy could become viable if the two major parties nominate winger candidates; indeed, a key Bloomberg adviser has hinted that Bloomberg will decide to run only if one or both major party candidates show significant weakness. This is, after all, what Ross Perot did in 1992. He announced he might run on the then No 1 cable news network, CNN, in February 1992, when he knew that the Republican nominee would be incumbent George H. W. Bush and that the Democratic nominee would most likely be Bill Clinton. Perot, who had quite an animus toward Bush, suspected that he was weaker than generally thought and believed, accurately, that as a successful entrepreneur and a retired military officer he would have credibility in attacking Bush. He knew that Clinton's remaining rivals in the Democratic race, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown, had serious weaknesses and that Clinton had serious vulnerabilities Gennifer Flowers had been all over the airwaves the month before as well.
Bloomberg, like Perot, doesn't have to decide to run until he sees who the nominees are. It seems to me and, I gather from news accounts, it seems to his chief political advisers that his candidacy can be viable only if one or both parties nominate candidates identified as wingers. As the New York numbers referenced above suggest, Bloomberg is probably not a viable candidate if Giuliani and Clinton are the nominees. And probably not with Barack Obama or John McCain. A closer case comes if the culturally conservative Fred Thompson or the increasingly shrilly left-wing John Edwards is a nominee. And a Bloomberg candidacy might seem quite viable if the Republicans nominate a cultural conservative like Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback or the Democrats nominate a seeming left-winger like Bill Richardson or Christopher Dodd. All those candidates have records that would allow them to argue that they are in one way or another mainstream. But it would be an uphill argument.
In that context, which party would a Bloomberg candidacy hurt most? His now abandoned affiliation as a Republican doesn't tell us much; he enrolled as a Republican only because it enabled him to get elected mayor without going through a Democratic primary dominated by a relatively small, left-wing electorate heavily influenced by public-employee unions. His positions on cultural issues are well to the left, even to the left of most or all the Democratic presidential candidates. As Opinion Journal's James Taranto points out, Bloomberg favors same-sex marriage, a very aggressive form of gun control, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, and abortion rights; he opposed the confirmation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts. On foreign policy, his views are less well known and certainly not tested; presumably he would run as a competent executive who could make dispassionate decisions.
Bloomberg's liberal stands on cultural issues suggest he would take more votes from the Democrat than the Republican. Veteran Democratic speechwriter and campaign consultant Bob Shrum thinks that Bloomberg, with his liberal stands on cultural issues and his willingness to raise taxes rather than cut spending, will take more votes away from the Democratic nominee and asks, a bit plaintively I think, "Does the pro-choice, socially liberal Bloomberg really want to be responsible for electing another Supreme Court-packing, gay-bashing, gun-loving, domestic-program-slashing President?" Conservative public relations guy Greg Mueller has a similar analysis. He E-mails that what he's telling conservatives is: "If Bloomberg gets in the race, he will take more votes from the Democrat nominee, certainly if it is Senator Clinton or Senator Obama -- than a conservative GOP candidate. There are many, many independents, and some Democrats, who will simply not vote for Senator Clinton under any circumstances. And, there are still others who feel Senator Obama is too inexperienced. Bloomberg gives these voters a place to go, dividing the Democrat vote. Bloomberg could be to Senator Clinton or Senator Obama in '08 what Ross Perot was to President George H.W. Bush in '92."
But there's countervailing evidence that a Bloomberg candidacy might take more votes from the Republican than the Democratic nominee. SurveyUSA pollster Jay Leve presents the following results from statewide polling, showing that a Bloomberg candidacy flips several Bush 2004 states with 43 electoral votes to Democrats against a couple of other Republicans (Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio) and, if Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, several that everyone has assumed are safe Republican (Alabama, Kansas, Texas). (Here are Survey USA's numbers in the two-way races in these states and in three-way races, which deserve some further analysis.) But he also has numbers that show that if Giuliani is the Republican nominee, California and New York, with 86 electoral votes, are flipped toward the Republicans. Note: In all of these, Bloomberg still comes in third. The support for a candidate who is clearly finishing third in every state, with no chance of winning any electoral votes, will probably tend to evaporate in the last weeks before Election Day although Perot still got 19 percent in 1992 which means that he'll be taking fewer votes from either major party.
I think there's one other factor to be considered. Would a Bloomberg candidacy change the dynamic of the race? I have long thought that if Ross Perot had been run down by a bus in 1991, George H. W. Bush would have been re-elected by a small and uninspiring margin (which might have led to a successful Bill Clinton candidacy in 1996). I remember that at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, the late Paul Tully, then deputy Democratic national chairman, told me that in the spring of 1992 "Perot departisanized the critique of Bush." He was able to lower Bush's numbers in a way that Bill Clinton at the time could not possibly have done. Bloomberg, in the spring or the fall, might be able to do the same thing. David Frum, blogging at National Review Online, a pessimistic conservative, sees the following scenario:
Bloomberg's numbers will dwindle (as Nader's did). He will then face a stark choice: accept that he's been made a monkey of or up the ante. Nobody gets to be as rich as Bloomberg if he is not a fierce competitor. So assuming he has followed the path thus far he will double down. He will go negative, filling the airwaves with harsh attack ads.
Against whom will those ads be aimed? A lot will ride on that question. Attack ads are dangerous things, because they damage both the attacker and the attackee. Their main effect is not to change votes from D to R or R to D, but to depress turnout among potential supporters of the targeted candidate. Candidates refrain from excess negativity for fear of damaging their own image. But a Bloomberg in the polling basement will feel no such constraint.
The ads will be a free gift to the candidate Bloomberg dislikes less at the expense of the candidate he dislikes more.
And the candidate he dislikes more will almost certainly be the Republican.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
BARONE'S LATEST
The New Americans
Now, more than ever, the melting pot must be used to keep America great. Barone attacks multiculturalism and anti-American apologists--but he also rejects proposals for building a wall to keep immigrants out, or rounding up millions of illegals to send back home. Rather, the melting pot must be allowed to work (as it has for centuries) to teach new Americans the values, history, and unique spirit of America so they, too, can enjoy the American dream.. Sales help fund JWR.
|
JWR contributor Michael Barone is a columnist at U.S. News & World Report. Comment by clicking here.
Michael Barone Archives
© 2006, US News & World Report
|
|

Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Rod Dreher
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Michael Goodwin
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
James Klurfeld
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Jonathan Last
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
The Medicine Men
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Jonathan Tobin
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Jeff Stahler
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Know-It-All
Lori Borgman
The Savvy Consumer
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
Marybeth Hicks
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Nutrition Myths
Supermarket Shopper
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|