Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Will it take a billionaire to take down a billionaire?
That was the theory behind giving Michael Bloomberg a prime speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention, where his mockery of Donald Trump carried extra zing and sting. And that’s one of the ideas behind Bloomberg’s possible bid for the presidency in 2020.
To the extent that people I know reacted to this recent piece of news, it was with a chuckle or an eye roll vigorous enough for corneal abrasion. What most of them said was some version of: “Oh, great, that’s just what voters want and America needs — another superrich old white guy from New York.”
But no two superrich old white guys from New York are exactly alike, and these two have little in common, including financially. Trump’s net worth — as mysterious as the yeti — is estimated to be about $3 billion, while Bloomberg’s supposedly tops $50 billion.
To those of us who make do with fewer zeros and commas, that gap may seem meaningless, but you can fit the annual gross domestic product of North Korea in it.
Bloomberg, 76, probably doesn’t stand a chance. He has all the va-va-voom of a ficus tree, all the populism of a Bermuda golf course. And he’s hardly the perfect suitor for a party whose loudest voices are on the left.
But if we’re going to start putting Democrats’ diverse options for 2020 on magazine covers, falling in and out of love with them and floating scenarios sublime and ridiculous, he warrants an iota of oxygen, a small pocket of the breathlessly speculative space that Cory and Kamala and Elizabeth and Beto are taking up.
And that’s not just because he’s a serious person of stratospheric accomplishment.
He’s also, from a certain angle, the Trump deplorer’s dream come true, an answer to prayers for the president’s opposite.
Bloomberg is as insistent on order as Trump is on disorder, as steady as Trump is spastic. Trump won’t give us a moment’s peace. Bloomberg could lull us to sleep. Politically speaking, we need the REMs.
Bloomberg is as prepared as Trump was unready. The presidency for him wouldn’t be a first whirl at governance, some gee-whiz, why-not, how-hard-can-this-be lark. He spent 12 years, from 2002 through 2013, as New York’s mayor, in charge of a complicated city of more than 8 million people.
Trump operates by gut. Bloomberg demands data and more data. Trump doesn’t really have his hand on the wheel — he just wants to be the shiny hood ornament. Bloomberg is all pinpoint GPS navigation. He didn’t always steer New York in the right direction. But there was never any question that he’d keep us out of the ditch.
Trump is playing midwife to ever more extreme, debilitating partisanship. It’s hard to envision Bloomberg doing the same. How could he demonize Republicans, independents or Democrats when he has been a Republican, an independent and a Democrat?
And while that may make him appear as ideologically rudderless as Trump, he’s not. Many of his core positions and principles — pro-immigration, pro-choice, in favor of free trade, in support of clean air — have been intact for a long while.
He’s pro-transparency, too. When he was in government, he routinely released his tax returns, though his station was well below the presidency and there weren’t rampant suspicions about untoward influences on him and sinister conflicts of interest. He has had complaints about journalists but never sought to delegitimize journalism itself. He never would. He owns a media company.
He built that company from scratch, without noteworthy melodrama. Trump got into real estate courtesy of his father, who gave and lent him large amounts of money, and as he sought to grow that fortune, he sprouted lawsuits and bankruptcies like weeds.
Bloomberg is fanatical about recruiting top-notch talent and empowering it. Trump picks a mix of standouts and stooges and disempowers them — if they’re lucky. If they’re not, he disembowels them. Ask Jeff Sessions, who probably considers Mel Gibson’s end in “Braveheart” preferable to his endless mortification.
Bloomberg’s top aides say that with him, loyalty is a two-way street. With Trump it goes in only one direction.
Bloomberg’s mayoral administration was light on ethical scandals. Trump’s presidential administration ... why even waste the keystrokes?
Trump is a Potemkin philanthropist, so much so that a Washington Post reporter, David Fahrenthold, won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing all the fakery in the Trump Foundation, and the attorney general of New York opened an investigation into it. Bloomberg is the real deal, supporting a carefully chosen array of causes genuinely dear to him. Eight years ago, he signed the Giving Pledge, by which nearly 200 billionaires around the world have agreed to donate more than half their wealth. In the past two years alone, he gave away more than $1 billion.
He has gaping blind spots. I was floored that he digressed in an interview to wonder about the accusations against Charlie Rose, the news anchor who was dismissed from the shows that he hosted on CBS, PBS and Bloomberg’s own cable network after numerous women accused him of sexual harassment. The reporting on Rose was thorough and persuasive.
And though Bloomberg, during his mayoralty, famously rode the subways, he never managed to seem of the subways. But then, the 2016 election has left me confused about who should, could and does have the ability to connect with middle-class and blue-collar Americans. Many of them saw a champion in Trump.
It’s funny: Republican voters came to embrace Trump — and then Republican lawmakers meekly followed suit — though he hadn’t done all that much for the party before. Democratic voters are probably less inclined to embrace Bloomberg, but he has pumped substantial sums of money into initiatives — regarding gun control, LGBT rights, climate change and more — that matter to them.
That doesn’t make him their best choice. It certainly doesn’t make him their likely one. But I hope it elicits their respect and, if he pursues this thing, an open-minded assessment. So many of the virtues lost on Trump are found in him. Let’s celebrate that, as a way of making sure the party’s eventual nominee possesses them in robust measure.
Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.
