Bloomberg's Kibitzer Candidacy

After teasing us for a year, Mike Bloomberg is putting his billion dollars back in his wallet and leaving a few platitudes on the plate instead.

In a New York Times OpEd titled "I'm Not Running for President, but...," New York's Mayor delivers a ringing concession speech for a presidential campaign that never started.

As he leaves the arena he didn't enter, Bloomberg chides the future nominees for being "afraid to level" with voters about global trade, global warming, immigration, improving schools and gun control.

"More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue," he says. "We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream."

But he stands ready, Bloomberg tells us, to help McCain and Obama or Clinton, "to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate."

In the event the Mayor has forgotten his ethnic roots, what he is proposing to be is a kibitzer, defined as "someone who looks on and offers unwanted, usually meddlesome advice to others."

But not entirely, Bloomberg warns us: "If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach--and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy--I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House."

Does he mean Ralph Nader?

The McCain Mutiny

Now that he is the Republican front runner again (talk about Comeback Kids!), John McCain has a bull's eye on his back for all manner of Conservatives, and today's Washington Post recites the litany.

"For at least eight years," the Post reports, "official Republican Washington has been dominated by what McCain advocates have called President Bush's 'Death Star'--an array of advocacy groups and lobbyists that backed Bush in 2000 and have remained the city's conservative power brokers.

"Republican politicians with national ambitions genuflect to (David) Keene at his Conservative Political Action Conference. They sign (Grover) Norquist's pledge not to raise taxes and attend the weekly conservative conclaves over which he presides as the head of Americans for Tax Reform. And they curry favor with religious conservatives such as Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition."

At one time or another, McCain has poked a finger in the eye of these king makers with his position on issues, as the executive director of Gun Owners of America points out. "I can tell you every single immigration activist and organization is terrified by the New Hampshire results," says the executive director of an "immigration reduction" group.

If Huckabee and Thompson fail to keep McCain from taking South Carolina, all these idealists will be put to a severe reality test. At the moment, Sen. Jim DeMint is backing Romney there, but John McCain's Baghdad traveling companion and likely running mate, Lindsey Graham, will be trying to tip the scales in his favor.

In 2000, Karl Rove bushwhacked McCain there, but that kind of ambush is not in the cards this time.

Media & Politics: Another Crossroads Year

Like 1968, 2008 could decide the direction of American politics for decades to come.

The parallels are striking--a President leaving office with an unpopular war still going on, long-standing social issues to be resolved and cultural changes breaking up what had seemed to be a consensus among previous generations.

Back then, there was Vietnam instead of Iraq, racial and gender equality rather than illegal immigration, and hippies, campus revolts and sexual revolution in place of today's faith-based conflicts over public regulation of private behavior.

The 1960s started with Kennedy's new frontier and ended with Nixon's Silent Majority. Decades of Democratic dominance gave way to Republican rule. Now, Bush's compassionate conservatism is ending and will lead to what?

For most of our history, Americans have been protected from violent change by a double-edged inertia that was slow to correct injustices but was a buffer against the kind of social breakdown that afflicts almost all other nations.

How much of our tranquility was based on technology or the lack of it? In the 1960s, television made the poor, oppressed and victims of war visible for the first time, bringing them into history and American living rooms. Vietnam and racial violence were not confined to impersonal newspaper headlines, and the results were protest and upheaval across the country.

Now, a flood of images and information about terrorism, war and their consequences washes over us 24/7 on cable and online. Politicians are less free to soothe or distract us from our own reactions and opinions.

But as the chaos of this campaign so far illustrates, the results may be division, confusion and uncertainty about whom to trust with the power to make sense of it all and get us back on track. The more we talk, it seems, the more polarized we become. But somebody has to be President and work with a Congress we choose to lead us out of all this.

In 1968, we picked Richard Nixon. In 2008, we will have to do better than that.