Bloomberg, 2012?

„»He would probably get my support«, the former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura said of Bloomberg, or »Blomberg«, as he pronounced it, explaining that he refuses to vote for either Democrats or Republicans, on principle. Ventura then brought up the recent losses of »Linda McMahon and that lady in California«, Meg Whitman, who spent roughly fifty million dollars and a hundred and sixty million dollars, respectively, as a way of suggesting that wealth is not enough. (This has surely been a concern, at times, of Perot and even of Silvio Berlusconi, two of Bloomberg’s weekend neighbors, who, with the Mayor, make up a kind of Bermuda Triangle of rich politicos.) »If Bloomberg could finance me for the Presidency, I would win it«, Ventura said. »So, if he doesn’t want it, he could hire me to do it for him.« Ventura now hosts a show on truTV called »Conspiracy Theory«. He promised that in an upcoming episode he would be revealing the real murderer of J.F.K. — »and it’s not Lee Harvey Oswald«.

In 2006, when Heilemann first floated the Bloomberg-for-President trial balloon, in another New York cover story, his sources told him that the Mayor would be willing to spend between two hundred and fifty and five hundred million dollars for the cause. Now, apparently, the range is one to three billion. There’s a moral there: the longer you wait, the more expensive the solution. In some circles, this is called throwing money at the problem. Democrats and Republicans have already tried it.”