1hundredsixty8

Scene: Private office, Bloomberg Campaign Headquarters, NYC. Michael Bloomberg is seated at his desk. Across from him is  ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀, a reporter from ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀, whom Bloomberg has known since the 1980’s.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: Off the record, Mike, why do you want to be President? At your age- jeez, you’d turn seventy-eight right after the inauguration- why would you want to deal with all the stress, the tsuris?

MB (smiling): You really believe I want to be President?

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: Well, you’re spending money like you do.

MB (laughing): Now you’re on to something.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: (Puzzled look)

MB: I’m worth over sixty billion dollars and I can’t possibly spend it all in the rest of my life. I donate great sums of money to many causes. Why not the most worthwhile cause of our time, removing Donald Trump from the White House? A second term of Trump as President would cause near-irreparable harm to the nation. The corruption would become endemic. And the fact he is nowhere close to being as wealthy as I am will drive him more bonkers than he is already. The cancer needs to be removed before it metastasizes any further.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: So you don’t care if you get the nomination and run head to head against him?

MB: The important thing is to get him out of office. It’s a game and I’m better at it than he is. He has to believe I’m a serious candidate so he takes me seriously. Elections are about money, data, media- the things I’m good at. I’ve already promised to keep buying ads even if I’m not the nominee. I’ve spent more than two-hundred million already and primary season has just begun. The ads I buy are aimed at Trump, not the other Democrats, and they talk about issues that people care about. I am comfortable with the possibility that I may spend over a billion to run him out of Washington. I do not necessarily have to be President.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: Many of those on the left are very uncomfortable with billionaires like you and Steyer acting like you can simply buy the nomination.

MB: Those people are naive. We didn’t make the rules of the game. It takes lots of money to run a Presidential campaign. Since I don’t need donors, I am beholden to no special interests. Changing the electoral system means first getting elected.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: What about the black vote? You were not popular with New York’s black voters because of stop-and-frisk. Do you think you can turn that around?

MB: I have already taken that on head-on. I apologized directly to the black community before I even officially announced my candidacy. I said I was wrong for not ending the policy sooner. It was a policy we inherited from the Guiliani administration. While activists have made it a major issue, my sense is that crime disproportionately affects people of color and that was certainly part of the rationale in continuing the policy. I have come to see that I was not sensitive to all of its consequences.

I am also gaining support among blacks in particular because they believe I am the candidate who can defeat Donald Trump. And the fact that Obama signaled our successful relationship when he was President and that I endorsed his re-election bid in 2012 is a plus for my campaign. 

In the final analysis, it will take a candidate who hews closer to the center to build the coalition necessary to defeat a man many feel is unsuited for the office. Uniting progressives with centrists and center-right independents should be the goal.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: What if, after all this, you end up winning? Are you prepared for that circumstance?

MB: Of course. I intend to bring professional management back to the Federal government, in the same way and on a much larger scale as I did here in New York City. The institutions of governance need to both be restored and reformed. The trust of the people that the government works for them must be regained. Our standing in the world has been diminishing under Trump and that must be reversed. How do you do it? You do it by appointing quality people to manage the various departments and staffing the bureaucracy with professionals. You set appropriately high standards for the government’s performance. There are areas in which the government needs to do more and areas where it needs to do less. This will be all detailed in due course. The campaign is not the time to dive into the weeds.

 ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀ ▀: It seems as if you thought this through very thoroughly. 

MB: Plan your work and then work your plan. It’s a good formula.