Bloomberg, Bipartisanship Aren't The Answer
A bunch of wild-eyed idealists formed Unity08 to get Mike Bloomberg to run for president which he's supposedly been ramping up to do for months anyway and somehow still hasn't yet managed to pull off. The group behind the site is having a meeting next week which Bloomberg and his pal Chuck Hagel will attend to talk about the importance of bipartisanship, which, come on guys, is pretty fucking lame. The whole idea of the Unity08 thing is to build a network of people fed up with two-party gridlock and influence of money, blah bah blah, and then "recruit" an independent centrist candidate who also happens to be a billionaire so that he's not beholden to any interest groups or whatever and create a benevolent consensus government. The two problems with those ideas right off the bat are (1) bipartisanship and (2) billionaire.
I'm going to say that, like, 70% of people think the country is seriously "on the wrong track," (I don't know, I heard that somewhere) and if you think about that, it really is a staggering number of people. People hate the war, think the tax code is totally fucked, are worried about the economy and are drowning in debt - and that's just in my apartment. I really don't think people are that far apart when it comes to what they want. It get's a little tricky when picking the person they think will give it to them, though.
But so, yes, money has corrupted our political process and turned it into the three-ring circus we so dutifully cover, but who's to say if it was really ever actually any better. The Republicans are evil and the Democrats are pathetic: both pander; both bloviate; and both are responsible for pretty much driving the world to the brink of chaos. So does that mean we need a billionaire independent to come to the rescue? The idea that such a person is incorruptible because he has a billion dollars of his own to throw into a race is pretty much completely retarded. Bloomberg/Hagel would have to run like everybody else and if they actually managed to get into office they would have to find a way to stay there. Um, and also: finding a person rich enough to not need to raise money is doesn't actually fix the money problem. He would still have to work with Congress to pass serious campaign finance law, which, of course, Congress would never actually do.
A word or two about bipartisanship, while I'm at it: nobody wants it. The Democrats already run their Congress in a "bipartisan" fashion by passing all the GOP's bills on wiretapping and legalizing torture and the like. We certainly don't want to encourage these idiots to put their heads together any more than they already do if 2007 is the result.
So how about this for idea: let's elect the person most likely to take us back to the time when our biggest concern was whether or not the computers were going to destroy the world because we forgot to tell them that years have four digits instead of just two. That person is obviously Ron Paul.
Bloomberg Moves Closer to Running for President [New York Times]