OK, Mike, enough is enough. It’s time to declare your intentions.
For a while there, we were as amused by Mayor Bloomberg‘s presidential posturings as he himself seemed to be.
Yes, yes, whisper his aides, knowingly.
“No, no,” responds Mike – just before boarding one of his private jets and flitting off to another high-profile political event.
There was Bloomberg this week, at a University of Oklahoma convocation of Washington used-to-bes, bemoaning the rancor in contemporary public affairs.
Politics in America has always been a contact sport, but if Mayor Mike thinks he can propel himself into the White House at the top of the Can’t-We-All-Just-Get-Along Party ticket, he certainly has the right to give it a try.
Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey has spent most of the past year laying the groundwork for a Bloomberg White House run. Now comes word, via pollster Doug Schoen, that Sheekey is undertaking a two-month study of the the mayor’s chances in November.
How precious.
Look, this game has been going on long enough.
New Yorkers won’t be shocked to hear Bloomberg say he is running for the highest office in the land. Certainly they know his ego is only slightly smaller than his bank account, and stranger things have happened.
What’s becoming irksome is the phony coyness.
That, and the mayor’s seeming inattention to a pretty hefty municipal budget deficit and other problems too important to be left to an absentee mayor.
A Quinnipiac Poll released yesterday shows that New Yorkers overwhelmingly approve of the job he’s doing as mayor – and even think he would make a good president. But fully 58 percent said they probably or definitely would not vote for him should he run.
And 61 percent said they think he has a “moral obligation” to fill out his term as mayor, which runs to the end of next year.
We don’t begrudge anyone – particularly someone as accomplished as Mike Bloomberg – the right to run for president of the United States.
But he was elected to be New York’s one and only mayor – and the city would be best served by his continuing in that job, with no distractions.
Either way, New Yorkers deserve an answer, one way or another.
Now.