All In

Michael Bloomberg is switching affiliations. He will no longer be a Republican. "I think the country is in trouble," Bloomberg said. This stands in stark contrast to his comments just a year ago when he told a group of Manhattan Republicans about his run for mayor: "I couldn't be prouder to run on the Republican ticket and be a Republican."
He's not so proud today. "Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years," he said. "We've had a go-it-alone mentality in a world where, because of communications and transportation, you should be going exactly in the other direction." Oh, and there's the "problem" over there with the guns and bombs and so on.
Bloomberg is not the first fish in the political sea to swim against the current. Ronald Reagan started his life as a Democrat, a supporter of the New Deal, FDR. and Harry Truman. Things change. In 1910 Teddy Roosevelt, broke with his friend and anointed successor William Howard Taft, but lost the Republican nomination to Taft. He then ran in the 1912 election on his own one-time Bull Moose ticket. Roosevelt lost but pulled so many Progressives out of the Republican Party that Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in 1912. The result was that conservatives held sway in the Republican Party for twenty more years.
Many believe that Bloomberg's switch is positioning him for a run at the White House in 2008. If that's the case, he seems a little more coherent than Ross Perot, another third-party interloper who had more money than God. Bloomberg spent more than one hundred and fifty-five million dollars for his two mayoral campaigns, including eighty-five million when he won his second term in 2005. In the big book of Presidential Texas Hold 'Em, that's an awful big blind.