By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
The troubles with Michael Bloomberg, from the
conservative point of view, are obvious enough: He has a terrible record on
abortion and on Second Amendment rights. He is a climate-change crusader and is
unlikely to install great heaping pallets of Federalist Society–approved judges
in the U.S. courts. He is a nanny and a scold whose conception of the proper
sphere of government action is broad enough to encompass salt-shakers and soda
cups. But while Nurse Bloomberg may be Barry Goldwater in comparison to the
silly Sandinista sad-sack who succeeded him, he is not running against Bill de
Blasio or Warren Wilhelm Jr. or whatever it is the mayor of New York City is
calling himself these days.
Republicans, damn their eyes, are by all appearances more
or less satisfied — or much more than satisfied — with President Donald Trump.
It is easy to see why they would turn up their noses at Michael Bloomberg. It
is less obvious why progressives would.
The Democrats’ objections to him are partly demographic —
he is an old, white, male billionaire in a party that increasingly is openly
hostile to each of those categories independently and slavers with rage when
they are combined — and partly political: In rhetoric and in office, Bloomberg
has shown himself to be a bipartisan moderate who if not quite free of ideology
at least has the good sense to try to subordinate ideological passions (his and
others’) to the pursuit of administrative competence.
While we should bear in mind that much of what passes for
“pragmatism” in American politics is ideology dressed up in quantitative drag,
Bloomberg’s relatively narrow brief for the presidency should still be music to
the ears of old-fashioned, Eisenhower Republicans:
The president of the United States
runs the executive branch, with its hundreds of agencies and 4 million
employees. The job’s essential skills primarily involve leadership and
management, not policy analysis. The country elects a commander in chief, and
yet based on the campaign so far, one might think we are electing a legislator
in chief — or a prime minister whose party controls a parliament.
Bloomberg also boasts an excellent record in office as
mayor of New York City, a job that endows his curriculum vitae with a
record of executive accomplishment that is an order of magnitude more
substantial than that of Joe Biden, a vice president whom Barack Obama did not
think enough of to support for the presidency in 2016, or that of Pete
Buttigieg, formerly the mayor of Corn Depot, Ind., or wherever it was. The rest
of the Democratic field is dominated by time-serving career hacks and
fantasists such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
There is a governor in the Democratic race (Steve Bullock
of Montana, going nowhere) and a billionaire businessman (hedge-fund man Tom
Steyer, a hobbyist) but no one with an actual record in executive office that
is anywhere near as compelling as Bloomberg’s. There are a couple of Democratic
candidates who could conceivably best Donald Trump in a general election; but
other than Bloomberg, there is no one who might plausibly make an effective
president — “effective” here meaning effective as something more than a
partisan mascot and cultural totem.
(A little irony: Donald J. Trump vs. Hillary Rodham
Clinton might have made a pretty good election for mayor of New York City.)
When Trump ran in 2016, he touted his billions in
personal wealth and his record in business. And a lot of voters bought what he
was selling. If I were a partisan Democrat, I might enjoy the spectacle of his
trying to pull that in a race against Michael Bloomberg, a self-made
quinquagintibillionaire without a string of embarrassing casino bankruptcies on
his résumé, a man who could buy and sell Donald Trump a dozen times over by
Trump’s own estimate. (The real multiple is probably more like 60.) Democrats might
also enjoy the fact that Bloomberg is kind of a jerk — but a cold-blooded one,
not a rage-tweeting one. When the newly elected President Trump asked his
advice on governing, Bloomberg answered: “You don’t know anything about
government. Hire people who are smarter than you.” Good advice, and the country
is better off for the fact that Trump took it in many cases.
Anti-Trump Republicans are not a very large constituency,
but it is possible to imagine Bloomberg siphoning off some high-profile
Republican support in a way that Warren or Biden could never hope to do. If
2020 ended up being a fight over suburban moderates, Bloomberg would have the
edge.
A Democratic party sufficiently reformed that it would
nominate a sensible figure such as Michael Bloomberg would in itself constitute
a significant victory for conservatives. Unfortunately, the Democrats are
unlikely to undertake that necessary self-examination without a heavy electoral
defeat. It took Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984 to get Democrats
started on the de-McGovernization process, and it took until 1992 before they
were able to capitalize on it. Losing again to Donald Trump might be what it
takes for the Democrats to start thinking again. But if they’d rather not go
through that, then they could do worse than Bloomberg.
Unfortunately for them, they almost certainly will, too.
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