Wealth of Nations.(The Talk of the Town)(Michael Bloomberg)

After two thousand five hundred and thirty-nine days of the failed and benighted Administration led by George W. Bush, the victory of Barack Obama in Iowa last Thursday night--and the embracing speech he delivered in Des Moines to celebrate--was a thrillingly hopeful, and potentially transformative, moment in American political life. Obama distinguished himself in a talented field by pulling in young voters who normally disdain the ballot box and Republicans and Independents who normally disdain Democrats, and by offering an increasingly clear vision of a way out of the moral and policy depredations that have brought the national spirit to its lowest ebb in memory. It was no less uplifting, after two centuries of white men in charge, to see Hillary Clinton, who is hardly done campaigning, give a gracious concession speech to a winner, an African-American, who, as he put it, has "a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas."

Onto this crowded and rejuvenated political stage now comes Michael Bloomberg, our skilled and uncommonly non-neurotic mayor, engaged in a different variety of the electoral enterprise--a prolonged game of Presidential footsie. Even as he has issued denials of interest to everyone from the press corps at City Hall to Ryan Seacrest on Dick Clark's New Year's Eve broadcast, Bloomberg has deputized some of his leading aides to draw up scenarios for a third-party candidacy and to keep the interest of the press well fluffed. The press, titillated by access, has cooperated with front-page "would-he, could-he" stories. This week, Bloomberg will attend a meeting of Unity08, in Oklahoma, to discuss third-party options, and in recent weeks he has displayed a vague yet imperious disdain for the assembled candidates, while privately hustling from one policy consultant and policy grandee to the next, to ask, "What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who's divorced really have of becoming President?"

The reason that Bloomberg's coy exploratory venture has earned him such attention is obvious. "There are two things that are important in politics," Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist and senator who ran William McKinley's campaign, in 1896, said. "The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is." All the front-runners except Mike Huckabee are millionaires to one degree or another--Obama is the poorest, with a net worth of just over a million dollars, Mitt Romney the richest, with two hundred million--but Bloomberg is wealthier by an order of magnitude. According to Forbes, he is worth more than eleven billion dollars. Bloomberg owns an estate in Bermuda, a horse farm in Westchester County, a condominium in Vail, a ten-million-dollar town house in London, and a thirteen-and-a-half-million-dollar town house on East Seventy-ninth Street. To commute among them, he takes his private jet, a Falcon 9. He isn't stingy, though; he's one of the leading philanthropists in the United States and has said that at some point he hopes to give away as much as four hundred million dollars a year.

Still, running for President is not cheap. Some press estimates say that Bloomberg would have to spend half a billion dollars to get on the ballots of all fifty states, pay for a staff and commercials, and run an effective national race. Kevin Sheekey, the Mark Hanna of Bloomberg's non-candidacy candidacy, told Newsweek that the number is higher: "If it happens, it's a billion-dollar campaign." Whatever. If Bloomberg feels like it, he can put a Presidential run on his Amex card. His credit is good. And he is experienced in self-financing. In 2001, he invented himself, with a wink, as a Republican, and spent some seventy-four million dollars to overcome Mark Green and rule New York. In 2005, he spent eighty-five million dollars on his reelection campaign: eighty-five million dollars to defeat the juggernaut that was Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president. The Times editorial page, which generally supports the Mayor, rightly decreed the amount "obscene."

For the moment, Bloomberg's flirtation with a third-party run is a plutocrat's relatively harmless indulgence of ego and curiosity, but he may get serious. It has happened before. In 1992, the similarly loaded computer-systems executive H. Ross Perot ran a campaign fuelled by more than sixty million dollars of his own fortune. His was a memorable political expedition that featured a spacey ideology of managerialism and nativism and a personality well beyond the bounds of special. Perot won nineteen per cent of the vote and ...