The Race Card in the Wings

If Barack Obama overcomes the Clinton machine and wins the Democratic presidential nomination, the odds are that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will mount his own aggressive third party campaign for the presidency. And Bloomberg, backed by a personal fortune in the billions, might just win -- not just because of his money, nor because of the generally accepted consensus that he's been a good mayor, a fair-minded manager who has actually overcome partisan divisions to govern his fractious city effectively. Vast sums of money, combined with a real track record as a leader, should be enough to get him into the race. But the factor that could well win him the presidency is something else: a mobilized pro-Israel leadership of the major Jewish organizations that is distrustful of the Republican field, and positively paranoid about Obama.

Bloomberg, who will be the first Jewish-American ever to mount a viable candidacy for the US presidency, is no racist and will be careful to distance himself from any Swift-boating of Obama within the Jewish community -- but by the time he throws his hat in the ring, the damage will already have been done. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week, the whisper campaign against Obama has been particularly acute in Jewish circles; and the Jewish-American newspaper The Forward has reported in depth about a leaked internal memo written by an American Jewish Committee staffer -- a memo later disowned by the AJC leadership -- that lays out the Jewish (or, rather, pro-Israel) case against Obama.

Bloomberg's calculations will partly hinge on how big a factor the mobilization of Jewish opinion against Obama, under the rubric of suspicions that his increasingly strident pro-Israel pronouncements are simply tactical, will be. If the nasty whispers in the Jewish community about Obama are, for now, just that -- whispers -- the entry of a billionaire Jewish candidate self-financing a run for the White House against Obama will open the floodgates for a far more brutal, racially-inflected battle. Bloomberg's edge in the big states with influential Jewish populations could seal the deal: California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania alone carry 161 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win. The thinking is that Obama would have to spend a fortune in just these states in order to counter effectively the advantage Bloomberg could have on the ground if -- that is, when -- the racial politics get ugly. Bloomberg could thus spend a bigger piece of his enormous wealth blasting media at voters in smaller swing states where his plurality wins would carry him to victory.

A Bloomberg candidacy would thus, by its very existence, inflame racial and ethnic tensions to truly horrific levels, dispossessing Black and Latino Americans of their hard-earned stakes in the one political institution (along with some parts of organized labor) in which they have managed to gain a significant toehold, the Democratic Party. Jewish-Americans committed to the ideals of social justice and a democratic (regardless if Democrat-led) America should thus do everything in their power to dissuade Bloomberg from running this year. He should, rather, simply change his party affiliation back to his pre-Mayor Democratic membership, and embark on a four- or eight-year plan of leading the Democrats into victory, fairly and squarely, in 2012 or 2016.