Mr. Independent.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg )

In the quaint and yet periodically relevant terms of the Gilded Age, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a captain of industry who turned into a Mugwump. With Bloomberg L.P., his empire of "financial information services," he has become the forty-fourth richest person in America, worth at least five and a half billion dollars. But unlike the financial titans of the late nineteenth century, who made it a business practice to buy mayors (and governors and legislators), Bloomberg instead bought the mayoralty, spending almost a hundred and sixty million dollars of his own money on his two winning campaigns. Then, unlike the robber barons, who corrupted public officeholders to serve private or party interests, the Bloomberg administration has generally offered a model of nonpartisan good government, which was the ideal of that circle of disenchanted old-money Republicans whom Party stalwarts mockingly called Mugwumps, after the Algonquian word muggumquomp--meaning "war leader," or "kingpin."

In the Presidential election of 1884, the Mugwumps, fed up with corruption at the city, state, and national levels, refused to support the Republican machine candidate, James Blaine--a move that may have tilted the race to the Democratic winner, Grover Cleveland. Last week, Bloomberg ended his affiliation with the Republican Party, as he did seven years ago with the Democratic Party (thereby changing his political registration as many times as Hil-lary Clinton has had a geographical makeover and Rudolph Giuliani has torn up his marriage license). If Bloomberg's media tease turns into the full-blown affair of an independent Presidential campaign, who would benefit? New York, for starters. Or, at least, the glittering constellation of news and entertainment companies, Wall Street firms, political consultants, civic boosters, paid gossips, columnists, pundits, publicists, and solipsists who feed--and in turn batten on--the impression that unless something happens in New York it doesn't happen. Not even a Subway Series would exalt the city and annoy St. Louis or Boston quite as much as a three-way Presidential race between a senator, a mayor, and an ex-mayor from New York. The closest sports analogy might be the 1951 baseball playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants (decided by Bobby Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world") for the right to lose to the Yankees in the World Series. But that comparison, too, falls short.

The forty per cent of the American electorate who regard themselves as Independents would also benefit. Their number has been growing in recent years, and they are increasingly joined in political sympathy by Republicans and Democrats who find their parties captive to a base, fringe, or interest group with which they have little in common. We are living through one of those recurring moments--1912, 1980, and 1992 were others--when disgust with the two big parties stirs a longing for an outsider of upright character, untainted by dirty money or political dealmaking. (Barack Obama and Giuliani are trying with some success to play the role from inside the parties, which might encourage Bloomberg to stay out.) This longing is almost always based on the illusion that compromise is separable from power, that political innocence should be the main qualification for office. The candidates Eugene Debs, John Anderson, and Ross Perot would probably not be remembered as stellar Presidents, but they forced both the Democrats and the Republicans to take ...