The Quiet American

For a glimpse at why these columns keep plumping for Mayor Bloomberg to get into the presidential race, feature the situation today. The Republicans are feuding, at one and the same time, over who is the more ardent Christian and who is the most hostile to undocumented immigrants. Governor Huckabee is touting his latest nuttiness, namely that it should be illegal for Americans who are dual nationals to vote in foreign elections. It seems the latest man from Hope wants to rob foreign democracies of their most reliable pro-American constituencies. Among the Democrats, Senators Clinton and Obama are quarreling about whether being first lady is a better preparation for the presidency than living overseas as an elementary school pupil. They are in their umpteenth debate over these kinds of fine points.

Where is Mr. Bloomberg? He's just landed in the world's most populous country, China, where he will visit Beijing and Shanghai before flying to Bali for the United Nations' conference on climate change. It's but the latest of his high profile, and high substance, foreign trips; he's recently visited Mexico, Britain, and France. Everywhere he travels he's going to be extraordinarily well plugged in. It would not surprise us were it to turn out to be the case that the business news and information company that he doesn't run — but owns — employs more high quality professional newsmen and women in China than, say, our Central Intelligence Agency employs agents.

One could call him the Quiet American, though without the negative connotations of Graham Greene's antihero. We've never made any secret of our disagreement with at least some of the mayor's broader agenda, particularly on the domestic side; the New York Times had a terrific report out of Georgia about how the mayor's antigun lawsuits are poisoning the political atmosphere for him there, though, as our Grace Rauh reports today on page one, he's pressing a new, 16-question survey he and the mayors siding with him on guns want the other candidates to answer. But if one thinks about the combination of foreign– and domestic-travel the mayor has made in the run-up to the election year ahead, it's extraordinary.

Mr. Bloomberg likes to couch his travels in terms of his mayoralty. "We have roughly 500,000 people of Chinese ancestry in this city," he said last week at City Hall. "We are a center of trade. We are a center of finance. What China does is very important to us." Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to participate in a conference on innovation in Beijing, speak at the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, and visit the Shanghai Stock Exchange. He is planning to meet with the vice chairman of the National People's Congress, Cheng Siwei, the mayor of Shanghai, Han Zheng, and the Party Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, Yu Zhengsheng. It wouldn't surprise us were the mayor to come away with a harder-headed view of the communist economy than, say, Henry Paulson, whom he's meeting at a ceremony for the New York Stock Exchange building in Beijing.

At Bali, the mayor is scheduled to address the climate change conference. He has spoken about the importance of including cities in their discussion, a fact that has been underscored in recent months in the adjacent columns by our contributing editor, Edward Glaeser, who likes to point out the way in which cities, with their high population densities and relatively small footprint, have less of a deleterious impact on the environment than urban sprawl and certain kinds of agriculture. And when it comes to foreign affairs, the mayor has far and away the best — the most open — position on immigration of any of the candidates, in either of the parties.

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And is leadership ever needed on the immigration issue, as Ryan Lizza reports in an important article, "Return of the Nativist," in the December 17 number of the New Yorker. He reports on how the Republicans opposing immigration in the primaries are endangering the party's chances in November. What an opportunity for the mayor, who is taking on his overseas trip the aide, Kevin Sheekey, who has been pressing the logic of the mayor making a presidential run. Our Ms. Rauh, in her story "Bloomberg's Electoral Calculus," reported Friday that it turns out plenty of political professionals think the mayor has a significant chance to win in states with more than half of the votes in the electoral college. It might be wishful thinking on the part of the political consultants she spoke with. Or it might be an understatement. Political experts may be writing off the mayor's chances in Texas and Georgia because of guns, but we can think of all sorts of ways he could get past that question. All of which is by way of saying that when the rest of the field is all tuckered out, Michael Bloomberg will just be getting, in his quiet way, all tuned up.