“Dude, You Should Totally Run For President!”

I don’t know which is worse — someone who actually wants to run for President* or someone who runs for President after one of his aides eggs him on about it during a testosterone-elevating, alcohol-fueled steak dinner**:

The announcement by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent was made after nearly two years in which his aides had laid the groundwork for a potential independent run for president.

They collected technical data on the requirements to put Mr. Bloomberg on the ballot in 50 states either as a third party or an independent candidate. Mr. Bloomberg went to Washington for a round of meetings with opinion leaders and traveled the country giving political speeches, including two this week in California.

And Mr. Bloomberg told associates that he was closely studying the 1992 presidential campaign of H. Ross Perot, the wealthy Texan and friend who drew 19 percent of the vote as an independent, to figure out how much a race in 2008 would cost.

For all that, Mr. Bloomberg told a packed news conference on Wednesday that he did not plan to run for president and intended to serve out his second term as mayor.

“My intention is to be mayor for the next 925 days and 10 or 11 hours,” he said. “I’ve got the greatest job in the world, and I’m going to keep doing it.”

Still, Mr. Bloomberg proceeded to use a news conference to give a critique on national politics. It was the fitting end of a week when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and gave two speeches in California offering a pointed indictment of partisan politics in Washington, contrasting it with how he runs New York City.

Indeed, his aides said that he had not intended for the news of his registration switch, which he initiated last Wednesday by signing a document with the New York City Board of Elections, to become public until he had returned from California, but he was hardly upset at the swell of attention it drew him.

The aides said there was division in his camp about whether he should run for president. Kevin Sheekey, who was the architect behind Mr. Bloomberg’s unlikely mayoral bid in 2001, urged Mr. Bloomberg to run for president over steaks and drinks at a dinner at Dylan Prime to celebrate his re-election in 2005. Others argued that it was an impossible task and a waste of Mr. Bloomberg’s reputation and resources.

Mr. Bloomberg was described as conflicted about a national run, intrigued by the possibility of winning the presidency but telling friends that he would not run unless he was certain that he could win.

*Because, honestly, do you ever trust someone who wants to be President? It’s a weird thing to do.

**On the other hand, faux humility is useful — the idea that you are “drafted” to run (think a shorter, more nasal Wesley Clark) is probably appealing to people. But back on the first hand, shouldn’t you want to run for President because, you know, you have some commitment to public service or some kind of special purpose in the world? Which is to say, the best apocryphal Presidential-Genesis story might not be that one night your buddies idly suggested, somewhere between the iceberg wedge and the porterhouse, that you should totally go for it. (That said, it is slightly less smarmy than John Edwards’ Wade-hugging “never told this to anyone before” epiphany.)