Click here for my thoughts on Bloomberg, in non-recipe form.

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Start with a crust of self-made success and stunning innovation as the founder of the largest financial data company in the world.

Spread a thick and flavorful foundation of executive stewardship and vision as Mayor of America's biggest city. (The Senate's bland "Advise and Consent" formula doesn't work nearly as well.)

In a separate bowl combine Bloomberg's Common Sense approaches to issues including free trade, immigration, homeland security, health care, gay rights, and the death penalty. Pour this healthy Post-Partisan batter onto the first layer.

Add a stick of Teddy Roosevelt's energy and fearlessness. (Telling New Yorkers they can't smoke is at least as hard as running up San Juan Hill in a hail of bullets.)

Now add two tablespoons of Ross Perot's wealth, so that you're not bound by campaign finance limitations.

Important: Immediately make sure to extract Ross Perot's craziness. (Accusing Mitt Romney of sabotaging your daughter's wedding will ruin the whole cake.)

Add a dash of John Anderson's Rockefeller Republican sweetener. Just a dash. (It's been sitting around since 1980 and might taste kind of funny.)

Bake for 10 months of 325-degree voter discontentment.

FROSTING:

You can make your own but avoid the following Independent ingredients:
Ralph Nader cream (spoils easily)
William Jennings Bryan brimstone (too spicy)
George Wallace nutmeg (too racist)

I recommend heading over to Zabar's for the frosting. Just call New York City Hall for directions.

Here's something I wrote last June, after Mike Bloomberg switched his party affiliation to Independent, fueling speculation that he might run for President. (Re-posting this gives me time to work on my Miley Cyrus post.):

I have a major political crush: His name is Mike Bloomberg. And now it looks like he may make a run for President as an Independent.

First a quick word about former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani: It's fashionable to trash him as a mean, divisive guy who unfairly exploits the grief that occasioned 9/11 and the gratitude all of us felt for someone who was in charge at all.

Giuliani is all of those things. But he did something monumental with New York before 9/11. He took a city that certainly felt out of control and showed that it could be governed. A gigantic feat. I would have been perfectly happy if Time Magazine had selected him as Man of the Year - again, for what he did pre-9/11. (And to those who say they miss the "earthiness" or "grit" of the former Times Square: Please move to Newark.)

Without Giuliani there would be no Mayor Bloomberg, because without him, New York would be a messy house divided against itself every which way - the kind of morass that no one with Bloomberg's talent would want to manage. The rewards would be too meager.

I was at the Take Back America conference where Hillary Clinton got booed again for her stance on Iraq. We were broadcasting at the time, so I didn't get to see the speech in person. But Jill Pike went to report from the speech live for us and her observations were backed up many other people I spoke to at the conference and the tape when I watched it for myself. There is some chance Senator Clinton wanted to get booed.

She is a very smart person and she couldn't have thought that blaming the Iraqi government for the mess in Iraq was going to play with that audience. It is an educated crowd and one that is very disaffected by our government's handling of the occupation. A conservative audience might cheer at, "it was the Iraqis' fault" line, but certainly a smart, progressive audience wouldn't.

She is already in hostile territory because she has equivocated on Iraq for her whole tenure in the Senate while Baghdad has burned. She had to know she was throwing a match on the pyre.

So who wins and who loses if, as seems likely, Michael Bloomberg runs for president? I think David Frum has it mostly right. The losers will be Bloomberg himself (he'll probably waste about $100 million and end up with 2 or 3 percent of the vote) and the charities who likely will miss out on at some of the money Bloomberg devotes to his vanity campaign.

And the winners? That's easy. As Frum puts it, they are "the consultants, pollsters, and advertising directors who - having failed to get a piece of the action from the major presidential campaigns - will keep their children in private school and themselves in expensive timepieces with Bloomberg's money. Their eyes are already lighting up like London saleswomen when a bored Saudi princess wanders into their shop."

Frum thinks the Democrats will get some benefit from Bloomberg's campaign because his ads will hit the Republican nominee harder than his Democratic counterpart. I suspect that Bloomberg will have no effect on the outcome, but it's too early to assess this question with any confidence.