Billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is thinking once again of running for President as a centrist independent, especially if Trump or Cruz and Sanders turn out to be the nominees of the big parties.
The New York / Washington press has a lot of respect for Bloomberg and he has a huge amount of money. But independents never win and New York City mayors never get very far, so Bloomberg would need to do something to shake things up.
Here’s a question: What if Bloomberg publicly changed his mind on immigration and said that he now realizes that Trump, while strident and graceless about how he’s phrased it, has a point? Bloomberg could say he’d favored high immigration in the past, but he now realizes that the U.S. had had massive immigration for a long time now, and that by 2016 we’ve already gotten most of the advantages out of an era of high immigration that there are to be gotten, while the disadvantages are mounting, so now it’s time for a number of years of greater restrictiveness.
Moreover, Bloomberg could say that Democratic politicians like Clinton and Sanders deep down know that more immigration isn’t good for the working class, but they still want more immigration because it’s good for Democratic politicians. As a nonpartisan independent, Bloomberg could deride the Democrats for importing ringers to win elections. And he could likewise deride the Republican establishment for trying to solve their partisan problem with Hispanics with a “comprehensive immigration reform” policy that’s bad for the country.
Bloomberg really, really wants to be President. He’s explored running for President before. But it’s been hard for his hired experts (and he can afford the best) to figure out a way for him to win. He’d have to do something to shake up politics, like announce that he was wrong and Trump was right on immigration. As an example of plutocrat cluelessness, he could use the time he went on the radio in 2006 and said illegal aliens were crucial to fairway maintenance.
That would move the Overton Window spectacularly. Would it make it more likely Bloomberg would become president? Probably not. But maybe …
But Bloomberg almost certainly won’t do this. In fact, it’s downright unthinkable.
But why?
