Are both Obama and McCain looking at Mayor Nanny? I would understand the Messiah looking at the possibility, after all, they share a great number of big government ideals. But McCain? Surely that would be the worst possible choice and would lose the election by alienating the base even further.
The morning before John McCain’s sprightly turn on Saturday Night Live on May 17, the de facto GOP presidential nominee had breakfast at Sarabeth’s on Central Park South with Michael Bloomberg and his girlfriend, Diana Taylor. This much you may have read in the Post, which reported that the trio consumed scrambled eggs and coffee and left a 20 percent tip. (The tab was picked up by the McCain campaign—which is akin in its degree of absurdity to a homeless guy’s stuffing a $5 bill into Warren Buffett’s pocket.) A McCain spokesman quoted by the Post added that “discussing a vice-presidential slot for Bloomberg was not on the agenda.” But a source close to the mayor informs me that the topic of McCain’s V.P. search was very much on the menu. One of the participants, in fact, came away from the conversation under the distinct impression that Bloomberg is on McCain’s short list.
Speculation about the possibility of Mike for veep is nothing new, of course. It’s been bubbling ever since late February, when the mayor decided, once and for all, not to launch an independent bid for the White House. Yet, by and large, the ruminations have revolved not around Bloomberg’s being McCain’s running mate but Barack Obama’s. The hopemonger has courted the mayor, not only orchestrating a breakfast op of his own but running an important economic speech past Bloomberg before he delivered it. And Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, as is his wont, has been stoking the flames like some kind of meth-addled pyromaniac. Moreover, according to a friend of mine who witnessed the exchange, a non-Sheekey member of Bloomberg’s inner circle recently told a prominent CEO in the city that Bloomberg’s and Obama’s people held a meeting in April to discuss the former’s suitability to being the latter’s No. 2.
In a presidential year in which the unprecedented has become the commonplace, and in which the political currents swirling around the race keep carrying us into, as the cliché has it, uncharted waters, maybe it was inevitable that the veepstakes would yield a circumstance this bizarre: the presumptive nominees of both parties seriously mooting the concept of teaming up with the same dude. And not just any dude, mind you, but the Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, divorced, Jewish billionaire mayor of our glorious metropolis. The mind doth fairly reel at the notion—and even more so at the fact that it might actually make sense for either of them.
