IS BLOOMBERG RUNNING? MAYBE

I thought he'd closed the door on a third-party run, but the New York Post thinks otherwise:

Mayor Bloomberg's aides have been reaching out to consultants from his past campaigns about whether they are free for a possible 2008 White House bid -- including one who helped make his slick mayoral TV spots, The Post has learned.

...The Post has learned that a New York political activist who worked on the mayor's last campaign had been planning on joining up with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign team and reached out to discuss it first with Bloomberg's aides.

Bloomberg's advisers told the politico he should not sign up with another campaign and instead wait and see what happens with the mayor, the sources said....

Bloomberg himself has insisted he has "no plans" to run for president, even while talking privately about the possibility -- and while allowing [Deputy Mayor Kevin] Sheekey to drum up interest and scope out the logistics of a run....

The Caucus blog at The New York Times adds:

...Mr. Bloomberg, who traveled to Mexico, Paris and London as well as New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle and St. Louis this year, spent last week in Asia. After promoting his views on the environment and government innovation in Beijing and Shanghai, he spoke in Bali at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, telling his audience that the next president needed to "go around the world, make sure that people understand that we are willing to listen — and actually listen." Sort of like he has been doing....

Asked for his current thinking on his own bid, Mr. Bloomberg offered his standard denial, "I've said that I’m not a candidate," followed by "I don't have any plans to run for president." But has he told that to his adviser, Kevin Sheekey, known around City Hall as "deputy mayor for running for president"?

In The New York Observer last month, pollster Doug Schoen, who worked on Bloomberg's two mayoral runs and remains close to Bloomberg (and who was once a partner of Hillary Clinton's top campaign guy, Mark Penn) denied that Bloomberg is running -- but fellow pollster Kellyanne Conway told the Observer she doesn't buy the denials:

"There's no question that if Michael Bloomberg is even contemplating it, testing it all, Doug is involved. He trusts him indubitably. He held [a] book party for Doug at his private residence, and was there and couldn't say anything more nice about him. I look at Bloomberg and Doug the same way, though," Ms. Conway said, referring back to the denials of a presidential bid. "Neither one of them means that crap."

FYI, check out the cover of the book Schoen is publishing in February:



Hmmm....