Bloomberg's Week

It's been one busy week for Mayor Bloomberg. On Monday, he was in Boston, receiving the highest award offered by the Harvard School of Public Health. Yesterday, he was in Virginia, endorsing a Republican state senator locked in a tight race with a Democratic opponent backed by the National Rifle Association. He also met yesterday with the U2 rock star Bono, a noted activist against poverty and disease in Africa, who told reporters he thought Mr. Bloomberg "could do an awful lot of good inside or outside the White House." And today, Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to be in Seattle to deliver the keynote address at a mayoral summit on climate change.

Mr. Bloomberg has been disavowing plans to run for president as an independent. If Mayor Giuliani, whose endorsement back in 2001 helped Mr. Bloomberg win the mayoralty in the first place, is the Republican nominee, it may be that the rationale for a Bloomberg candidacy will start to diminish, because there will already be a pro-abortion-rights, pro gay-rights, tough-on-crime, New York City mayor-manager candidate in the race. Then again, Mr. Bloomberg could always run against Mr. Giuliani, who has graced the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine, on an anti-tobacco platform.

In any event, we tend to watch what politicians do, not what they say. And no matter what the mayor says, it seems to us that a New York City mayor who visits Massachusetts, Virginia, and the state of Washington — all states whose electoral votes an independent candidacy by Mr. Bloomberg would stand a plausible chance of winning — in one five-day workweek…

Well, let's just say it this way. We've been nursing the idea of a presidential candidacy by Mr. Bloomberg for a long time now, back at least to our February 8, 2006 editorial, "Bloomberg for President." We have encouraged him to run, though we have not endorsed him for the office. We've received a good deal of mockery in return, some of it from the mayor himself, but much of it from those who think it is a nonstarter. This week's schedule was not that of a mayor who wants to shut the door on the idea for good of a presidential campaign.