While most of the country is focused on Obama and Clinton, McCain and Romney, and big issues of race and gender, war and the economy, the sliver of island called Manhattan, just off the coast of America (where it rightly belongs, some would say) is busy getting frustrated with the non-candidacy candidacy of a man who many on the mainland would probably have difficulty identifying. There’s no doubt that if New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decides to run for president, it could seriously affect the race, stealing votes from one side or the other. The reality, though, is that Bloomberg has repeatedly denied that he will run, and the only people seriously chewing over the possibility that he still might can be found in a mile radius around Gracie Mansion.
Within that radius, of course, are the home bases of most of our national media. And the volume and persistence of the Bloomberg rumor (a Bloomer?) is testament to the ability of one of his deputy mayors, Kevin Sheekey, to grab the collective ear of New York’s media elite and get them to echo back a singular message: the mayor is mulling the idea. There are many reasons why Bloomberg might want this message out there. He might actually be serious and just waiting to see who his competition would be in the general election, or he simply likes the power this rumor buys him in Albany and Washington. But this rumor has been the source of many articles and much talk over the past two years.
The boiling point for me was a front-page piece in The New York Times last Friday with this imploring headline: “Calls Grow for Bloomberg to Make Up His Mind.” It speculates that “before actually entering the contest, Mr. Bloomberg may have already risked losing something: people’s patience.”
But who are these “people,” I wondered. Turns out we’re talking about “editorial pages from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Post, The Village Voice and The New Yorker.” Ah, right.
The piece does eventually make clear that there is “little indication that ordinary voters around the country have given much thought to a Bloomberg candidacy,” and it even offers hard numbers. Of 550 voters in New York State, where people actually know who he is, only 27 percent thought the mayor should run and a measly 12 percent imagined he could win. These people, who could not care less about a Bloomberg run, apparently aren’t among those “people” who are frustrated by the mayor’s indecision.
Before we can understand how the press came to be irritated by this waiting game, it’s worth understanding how it hyped the idea of a Bloomberg candidacy to begin with.
First there’s the New York Sun, which has never hidden its support for a Bloomberg run, whose praise has leaked from the editorial page onto the front page in story after story—though recently even the Sun appears to have grown frustrated with Mayor Mike’s coyness and seems to have turned to Obama, of all candidates.
But the Sun has always been more of an advocate than an objective reporter of Bloomberg’s ambitions. And yet, it’s not alone. Since early 2006, The New York Times has run more than two-dozen stories based on little more than speculation about the hypothetical candidacy. All have featured the character of Kevin Sheekey and some variation of this phrase from a May 2006 piece:
Kevin Sheekey, the deputy mayor for government affairs and Mr. Bloomberg’s lead political architect, continues to work behind the scenes, chatting up lobbyists and other operatives to promote the idea of Mr. Bloomberg running as an independent.
This “chatting up” by one man, which until last week, when Bloomberg appeared to begin conducting his own internal polling, has pretty much been the only “evidence” that he is considering a run. But it has netted him some pretty high-profile coverage nevertheless. Back in December 2006, New York magazine put the “five-foot-seven billionaire Jew,” as he likes to call himself, on its cover, under the headline, “His American Dream,” and indulged the rumors at great length, slathering Bloomberg with compliments¬—“blunt, pragmatic, consensus-building, ideologically ambidextrous”—and packing more snow onto the rolling snowball. Other magazines followed suit. In July of last year a New Yorker piece by George Packer analyzed the situation a bit more soberly, but in the end joined the chorus—though he pinpointed exactly what makes the conversation about Bloomberg even possible: his enormous wealth. Maybe voters do want an independent candidate, he wrote, “who seems to have very little baggage other than an impressive record as mayor and suitcases full of money.”
Notice what two words appear in the titles of all the publications cited thus far: “New” and “York.” Okay, well, then by the last day of 2007, with time now running out for any viable candidacy, the Times kept upping the ante, publishing a piece headlined, “Bloomberg Moves Closer to Run for President,” based primarily on the increase in chatter among the mayor’s coterie and the fact that he was to attend a conference on bipartisanship in Oklahoma. By the next day the paper of record contained a full-page graphic jokingly comparing and contrasting Bloomberg to each of the major candidates. A contest between the mayor and Hillary would be a “sartorial slam dunk: while she has been mocked for her pantsuits, Mr. Bloomberg landed on US magazine’s best-dressed New Yorkers list.”
All of this breathlessness is what led, ultimately, to the article last Friday expressing, finally, that the all the anticipation, the whispering, the drum beating, might have been for naught.
My point here is not that Bloomberg’s potential candidacy should be ignored. Rather, it’s that the story should have been kept in perspective—national perspective. Why do we get virtually no coverage of candidates who are actually running, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, and an avalanche of coverage of someone who is not and insists he will not? The answer, of course, is that because of Bloomberg’s wealth he is considered—by the terms of our dangerously broken election system—more viable, even as a hypothetical candidate, than Kucinich or Paul. But what if the press, from day one, covered a candidate like Kucinich based on his ideas rather than his money? What if it insisted that his ideas be taken just as seriously as Hillary Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s? What if the campaign were about ideas, rather than about money? Would the nation’s perception of who is a legitimate contender change? Who knows, but it would be interesting to find out.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.