Bloomberg '08?

Nowhere is Bloomberg's independent streak more evident than in the way he handles the dicey political territory of terrorism. Say the threat is dire, and you look like a fear-monger; say it's overblown, and you look naive. Bloomberg, who has seen the intelligence reports and has dispatched NYPD officers to London, Afghanistan and the Middle East to investigate the jihadist threat, doesn't hesitate. Americans, he tells me, are "too freaked out" about the threat of another attack. "There is a much greater risk from lifestyles that hurt you - smoking, walking across the street without looking both ways, not putting bars in the window if you've got kids and you live above the first floor, those kinds of things."

In recent months, as the mayor's national profile has grown, he seems to be going out of his way to say the blunt and controversial thing. He recently sued fifteen gun dealers for selling weapons that ended up being used in hundreds of crimes, angering the powerful National Rifle Association and alienating many in the GOP. I ask him whether there is a single stance that his own party, moving ever rightward, has taken in the last few years that makes him proud to be a Republican. "Neither proud nor disgusted," he says. The Democrats aren't any better, he adds: "Take a look at one of the most contentious issues - guns. Howard Dean has been eight times endorsed by the NRA, and you're going to tell me this is a Republican issue? I'm sorry, no, it's an outrage."

Bloomberg is in a unique position in American politics: Thanks to his wealth, no party or politician can force him to wait his turn if he decides to run for president. He often seems more comfortable with Democrats than with members of his own party. He is close with Sen. Hillary Clinton, but he's closer with New York's other senator, the hard-charging Democrat Chuck Schumer, with whom he sometimes speaks several times a day, and whose wife Bloomberg employs. If he decides to run, such alliances are unlikely to win him many friends in Republican territory. "It's hard to imagine Bloomberg winning a single red state," says Marshall Wittmann, a centrist political strategist and the former communications director for another GOP maverick, Sen. John McCain.

It's true that Bloomberg might come off as too much of a wealthy, detached New York liberal to play in red America. But his biography, political handicappers point out, has the kind of scrappiness that plays well in the heartland: He started off far poorer than George Bush, John Kerry or Al Gore and ended up far richer than all of them combined. The hope for Bloomberg is that he might buy himself the same independence from national interests that he enjoys in New York, at a moment when polls show that a growing number of Americans long for an alternative to the two major parties. The hope, in other words, is that Bloomberg might prove to be a more competent and saner version of Ross Perot, the wealthy, plain-spoken candidate whose third-party campaign in 1992 made both the Democrats and the Republicans look like they were speaking in jargon.

That, after all, is the kind of ambition that $6 billion in the bank might buy.

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

From the September 7th, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone.

Selected reader responses will appear in Rolling Stone magazine: Write to us at letters@rollingstone.com.