Bloomberg '08?

>> In our politics blog now: Would you vote Bloomberg for president?

The first thing you notice about Michael Bloomberg is that he doesn't behave like other politicians. When he finishes an interview, New York's mayor doesn't smile or shake hands - he just gets up to go. Stuck on a podium with a class of third-graders, he doesn't chat them up, or clown around, just coolly assesses the skies for evidence of rain. Asked whether he's ever smoked pot, he beams and says, "You bet I did! And I enjoyed it." Pressed to reiterate his working-class roots, so voters will forgive him for being a billionaire, he refuses. "In New York City politics, there's a race to the bottom: 'My mother washed more floors than your mother, for less money.' I mean, come on." Bloomberg behaves like someone who believes he has discovered an alternate political physics, one where the normal rules don't apply.

Bloomberg is small and stands very straight and wears great suits and has a face that looks strikingly fresh, exfoliated to the edge of pink. He gives off an air of social awkwardness and sometimes has a tin ear for the problems of ordinary New Yorkers: When the city's transit workers threatened to strike in 2002, he showed off for the cameras a fancy, spanking-new $600 mountain bike he'd bought to ride to work and urged New Yorkers to do the same. In recent months he has become the GOP's loudest and fiercest internal critic. He calls the Republican position on stem-cell research "insanity," derides the party's gun-control legislation in Congress as "god-awful" and says of conservative plans for illegal immigrants, "We're not going to deport 12 million people, so let's stop this fiction." Thanks to his loud attacks on partisanship in Washington, he has begun to be talked about as a third-party candidate for president. Here, supporters say, is a man who can bridge the blue-red divide: the Republican mayor of the nation's biggest and bluest city, a fiscal conservative who is liberal on social issues, a power broker on a crusade against the establishment, a billionaire who spends what for a man of his class must be an unseemly amount of time in the Bronx. He is coming to seem, more and more, like the Republican equivalent of Sen. Joe Lieberman: a man seemingly out of place in his own party.

Bloomberg, in fact, identifies strongly with the defeated Democrat from Connecticut. "I think what they're doing to Joe Lieberman is a disgrace," the mayor volunteered when I met with him in his offices in July, shortly before anti-war bloggers helped Ned Lamont beat Lieberman in the primary. Lieberman lost not because he supported the war in Iraq, Bloomberg insisted, but because "he's been willing to say what he believes even if it doesn't help the, quote, party." The mayor was as apoplectic as he gets - not quite angry, exactly, but deeply, deeply annoyed. "My point is that there are things you've got to stand up for," he said. "And when we are intolerant of opposing views, what does that say about us?" What Bloomberg calls intolerance, of course, others call voting: The mayor has an unrepentant streak that can come across as undemocratic.

A few days later, Bloomberg was offering to campaign for Lieberman - and political observers wondered whether the move wasn't a calculated way to pull in support among centrist Democrats for Bloomberg '08. Although the mayor has frequently dismissed the possibility of a self-financed presidential run ("Which letter in the word 'no' do you not understand?"), he has recently turned more coy. At a dinner party this spring, he noted that he had half a billion dollars to devote to a bid for the White House, the kind of cash that would enable him to completely bypass the political parties. And in August, Bloomberg had dinner with Al From, the head of the Democratic Leadership Council and the centrist kingmaker behind Bill Clinton's run for the presidency. (Bloomberg, long a Democrat, switched parties to run for mayor.) This summer, when I met Bloomberg in his office, he told me in no uncertain terms, "I won't be announcing any candidacy for any office - sorry to disappoint." But one of his senior advisers, a few minutes later, walked up to me and said, "You're in for '08, right? You're on the bus?"