It seems inevitable he will have to run for President at some point. There's just something so...pure about Michael Bloomberg.
Extraordinary wealth among national leaders has likely always been with us. The collusion of wealth and image mastery with the modern media environment takes an important step with John F. Kennedy's televised debates with Nixon en route to the White House, but reaches a new intensity with the ascent of a media figurehead to the Presidency in 1981. The telltale sign of this ongoing intensification was Ross Perot, who appeared in 1992 as a retrogressive test to determine whether unalloyed cash — money as such — could still bid for the job.
After that signal rebuke to mere money, the new logic was extended even further in the laboratory of Italy's Second Republic, wherein staggering wealth and media power (rather than mere prowess and access) were synthesized in the avian body of Silvio Berlusconi.
But from intensification to purification can be a more subtle leap than we imagine. This is the true achievement of Mike Bloomberg, in whose existence the historic accommodation closes upon itself as both set of facts and as ideological space. Not only does he possess Perotesque wealth beyond the realm of mere tactics, strategic wealth, but his media empire is about money: "Bloomberg L.P. is the largest financial news and data company in the world."
In this sense his herald was Steve Forbes, but Bloomberg achieves a far greater clarity; his company sells information about money largely to financial institutions, and before its founding he worked for Salomon Brothers, the largest issuer/trader of bonds in the country, and the firm that pioneered the shift to entirely derivative-based trading. It is no secret that the position of politics lags several years behind that of economics; surely the time has come for a true son of Spectacular Capital to assume the position.
Posted by jane at July 15, 2007 01:18 AM | TrackBack