April 22, 2012 | 12:37 pm

Friedman: Bloomberg should run for president

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I’ve been saying for a while now that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg should run for president. Now Thomas Friedman agrees.

This isn’t about giving the United States its first Jewish president. Instead, Friedman argues that Bloomberg could be the independent outsider who “give[s] our two-party system the shock it needs.” He writes:

This election has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this.

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Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared. And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing. Congress would have to take note.

Read the rest here.