As Ralph Nader pushes for a woefully irrelevant run, and as Ron Paul likely campaigns for a vaunted two percent in the Libertarian Party, and perhaps Cynthia McKinley does the same for the Green Party. Michael Bloomberg. He just might get somewhere! Where, I do not quite know. The poll numbers to consider are that the Bush Administration just reached another low, and the Democratic held Congress isn’t any better in the polls.

Something I muse about the Democrats’ plight: I represent this conflicted opinion swatch as this poster at that message board. So she hates Bush. She hates the Iraq War. But when the Democratic House passed a resolution for time lines, she bought into the “Defunding the troops” line and hated that as well. So there you go. A public opinion glitch that has to be dealt with. The Iraqi Study Group has been resurrected. Ignored last time by apparently the only branch that matters (which now apparently excludes Dick Cheney), let’s see where this lark goes this time around.
Another interesting confliction: there was a sense last November by large swarths of the voting public that they were voting for Divided Government, checks and balances. And now that we have the natural outcome of that, with a stalled Energy Bill for instance, it chunks some points off of Congress’s approval rating. Go figure!

Back to Bloomberg. Recall that there was this moment in the 1992 presidential election where Perot was leading Bush and Clinton in the polls. Then he dropped out of the race. And he jumped back in the race to garner 19 percent. Now, the deal with Perot is that he very likely reached his mass vote. He managed to avoid a certain amount of media scrutiny by jumping out of the race when he did, scrubbing some of the second thoughts for much of the electorate.

Bloomberg has one thing Perot has and lacks one thing that Perot does not have. He has the image of Sanity — he’s a, quote-in-quote “competent manager”, who — incidentally — is beloved by the mainstream beltway media. A few year’s ago, when his approval rating was actually in the 20s, one of the newsweeklies (Time or Newsweek) covered him as one of The nation’s Best Mayors. (I remember at the time Jon Stewart actually saying he approved of Bloomberg’s job performance, and found that interesting in light of his poll numbers.) And he was just featured yet again in a cover article with Arnold Schwarzenegger. And Eleanor Clift called Bloomberg / Hagel her “Dream ticket”. Indeed — interesting to note — he was mayor during the vaunted New York City post 9/11 recovery that Giuliani claims credit for, which would undermine Giuliani for his presidential run, methinks.
What he lacks that Perot has is charisma. He is a boring figure who inspires nobody. Which may mean that any support he ends up garnering will crater, crash, and burn from sheer inertia.

And that is where we are at with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who seceded from a Republican Party he was barely and only tactically a part of anyways. I note swirling around the discussions of Bloomberg the question of Ballot access. Well, there’s “Unity 08”, which if you go to their website you will see a slobbering kiss of a press release heralding Bloomberg’s break with a political party he was only tactically a part of to begin with. But Bloomberg could probably just buy off Unity 08 and get rid of the danged contraption. (Seriously: “middle way”? BAH de BAH!) The other answer tends to the simple “He has billions of dollars” mode. Which is true enough, but of some interest is how the tool of millions of his billions of dollars would be used to garner him ballot access throughout the states.

Which leads me to the answer of how a Michael Bloomberg goes about garnering ballot access. The same way Ross Perot did in 1992 — echoing to 1996, after they proved their mettle with the quasi-Marxist “New Alliance Party” in piecing together a 50 state ballot access for 1988 and 1992. The same way Pat Buchanan did in 2000. The same way Ralph Nader gained access to at least New York State in 2004. The same way Michael Bloomberg received the “Independence Party” line for New York for his mayorial runs. (I suppose that requires some explanation on New York’s ballot laws — a candidate can run on several party labels, and it’s a little weird.)

The answer is: by tapping on the shoulders of psycho-analysis -slash- political cult leader Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani. The workings of Fred Newman’s wikipedia page are found here.

In 1994, Fulani and Newman became affiliated with the Patriot Party, one of many groups that would later compete for control of the Reform Party founded by Ross Perot. She also joined with Jacqueline Salit to start the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, an organization dedicated to bringing various independent groups together to challenge the bipartisan hegemony in American politics. During the 2000 election, Fulani endorsed Pat Buchanan, then running on the Reform Party ticket, and served briefly as a campaign advisor. Fulani later withdrew her endorsement of the Buchanan campaign on the grounds that it had “hijacked” the Reform movement in order to further Buchanan’s own right wing^[12] Fulani and Newman then endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Natural Law Party leader John Hagelin, a close associate of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Later, Fulani unsuccessfully sought the Vice Presidential nomination at the national convention organized by a faction of the Reform Party. agenda.

In the 2001 election for Mayor of New York City, Fulani and the Independence Party of New York endorsed the RepublicanMichael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, once elected, approved an $8.7 million municipal bond to provide financing for Fulani and Newman to build a new headquarters for their youth program, theatre and telemarketing center.

[…]

Despite the extended media attention given to the above charges, Fulani continued to broaden her grassroots base of support in the African American community in 2005, forming what she described as a “coalition of outsiders” to organize Independence Party support support for the re-election campaign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The coalition was described in local press coverage as consisting of “union officials, clergy, sanitation workers, police officers, firefighters, district leaders and others who work at the grassroots level.”^[16] Vocal defenses of Fulani also appeared in the city’s Black press; writing in the Amsterdam News, columnist Richard Carter wrote “there is little doubt that the main reason for the negative press, which, by the way, is not unusual for this brilliant, outspoken political strategist, is because she is a strong, no-nonsense Black woman. So strong she makes the city’s political establishment and lockstep white news media nervous.”^[17]

Actually it’s a strangely parasitic organization, somehow finding its Marxist bearings into the campaigns of Ross Perot and, however briefly, Pat Buchanan. (Incidentally, would somebody please write a book about the 2000 Reform Party Presidential Primary. That one fascinates me to no end.)

OR we could run with more ancient history:

Newman founded the collective Centers for Change (CFC) in the late 1960s after the student strikes at Columbia University.^[8] CFC was dedicated to 60s-style, radical community organizing and the practice of Newman’s evolving form of psychotherapy which he would term (circa 1974) “proletarian therapy”, later “Social Therapy”.^[9] CFC briefly merged with Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1974. Within a few months, however, the alliance fell apart, an event which Newman attributed to LaRouche’s increasingly “paranoid”, “authoritarian” direction^[10] and the NCLC’s “capacity to produce psychosis and to opportunistically manipulate it in the name of socialist politics.”^[11] In August 1974, the CFC went on to found the International Workers Party (IWP), an explicitly Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party.

In the wake of another factional fight in 1976, the IWP publically disbanded. In 2005, Newman told The New York Times^[12] This claim appears to be consistent with critical allegations, made many years earlier, that the organization had never actually disbanded and remained secretly active.^[13][14] that the IWP had transformed into a “core collective” that continues to function.

Throughout the latter part of the ’70s, Newman and his core of organizers founded, or assumed control of, a number of small, grassroots organizations, including a local branch of the People’s Party known as the New York Working People’s Party; the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council; and the Labor Community Alliance for Change.^[15][16][17]

That Larouche – Newman alliance is fascinating, in that the two gurus appear to have learned some tactical and quasi-ideological concepts from one another.  The term “Core Collective” is also interesting.
Okay. This whole fade-away likely doesn’t add up to a hill of beans. It is a strange and ugly underbelly of electoral politics, particularly third party national politics. Likely no worse than Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s bizarre connections with political figures. (See this here.) What does Newman get out of a Bloomberg presidency anyways?

Then again, what the heck do we get? Really? Bloomberg?
Well, Ralph Nader has been kind of obsessed with him, thinking his big money beats the big money of the Republican — Democratic Duopoly.

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