The 2008 Presidential election could come down to a three-way face-off among three candidates who all have connections of varying strength with the city that David Letterman's announcer Alan Kalter identifies five nights a week as "the greatest city in the world," New York, New York.
This according to Sebastian Lowell Radford, associate professor of government at Harvard University, and acting director of the Center for the Study of the 2008 Presidential Election from the Perspective of Academic and Media Elites Employed by Great Research Universities in the Northeast of the United States.
"In all likelihood," says the ambitious young academic, already the holder of too many prestigious fellowships and teaching awards to mention, "the presidential contest of November 2008 will feature a three-way contest among Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, Republican Party nominee Fred Dalton Thompson, and Unity08 independent candidate Michael Bloomberg."
Absent from this list of more-or-less New Yorkers is former New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani, whose candidacy Professor Radford believes will be scuttled pre-convention because of his too-liberal-for-"values voters" position on a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, as well as the inevitable psychological implosion due to his psychiatric problems as recounted in a recent Vanity Fair article.
Asked by TheSpoof.com reporter, I. Spoof, why he thinks these particular candidates will emerge as opponents in the final showdown, Professor Radford, surrounded by computer and television screens in his Eliot House office overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts on a fine spring day, explained:
"Senator Clinton's name recognition, vast fund-raising capacity, and battle-hardened corps of smart, ruthless, and intensely-driven staff, along with the novelty of being the first serious female presidential candidate in U.S. history, makes her nomination extremely likely."
Anticipating the next question, the activist-scholar, added, "Barack Obama is young, good-looking, a Harvard Law School graduate, and charismatic, as well as the first serious African-American candidate in U.S. history, but he's really just an opportunist who's willing to indulge his supporters so he can have some new life experiences. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's even less substance to his candidacy than usual for a serious candidate, and he's untested, and Hillary will roll right over him in the end, or before it."
On the Republican side, according to the Cantabrigian pundit and media star, nobody really likes any of the candidates currently on offer, and since everyone knows and likes former Tennessee Senator Fred Dalton Thompson from his role as the conservative, crusty, yet wry, New York City District Attorney Arthur Branch and wants a conservative candidate who looks and sounds and can act presidential and since no one has played more presidents in films than Senator Thompson, who will soon be seen as President Ulysses S. Grant in the movie version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he's a shoo-in for the Republican nomination.
In terms of their New Yorkness, says Professor Radford, who has already been mentioned as a future Congressional candidate in his own right, should current U.S. Representative from the 8th Congressional District of Massachusetts Michael Capuano decide to move on, neither Senator Clinton, who hails from Illinois, nor Senator Thompson, who was born in Alabama and represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate, can honestly claim that designation.
Not so in the case of current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has lived in New York City for many years; made his fortune there as a general partner at Salomon Brothers and as the creator of his own company, Bloomberg L.P, which sold financial information terminals to Wall Street firms; and is currently serving his second four-year term as mayor of that city.
"Mayor Bloomberg has set aside $1 billion of his vast fortune to run for President. That alone, apart from his obvious and proven talents in the fields of technology, business, philanthropy and government, make him a serious contender," according to Professor Radford. "And Unity08, which is virtually unknown to most Americans at this point, could do worse than to have him as its nominee," he adds.
"One way or another," he concludes, as he puts the MacBook Pro containing the multi-media content that will accompany his afternoon lecture on American politics to the latest crop of Harvard's best and brightest, and takes graciously takes his leave, "someone from, or perceived to be from, New York City will become the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. Count on it."
