Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Bloomberg Impact   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

My gut feeling is that his chief appeal will be to upscale social liberals, and will therefore cut into the Democratic vote. David Frum makes a pretty good counter-argument: Bloomberg is likely to spend his ad money attacking the Republican candidate.

But of course, if he does that, it will be because he is running a campaign that emphasizes the liberal aspects of his political identity: So the anti-Republican effect will be muted by the fact that his candidacy will appeal to Democratic voters. On the other hand, if he runs a campaign that emphasizes conservative themes, he will draw from Republican voters but might attack the Democrats. Or maybe he won't go on the attack at all, since the voters he wants are post-political types who reject the grubbiness of negative ads. In other words: I'm afraid we're going to have to wait and see what type of campaign he graces us with.

06/20 07:04 PMShare