Wolff: The only Hillary alternative

There is only one person who can win the Democratic nomination for president if Hillary Clinton craters. And it isn't Elizabeth Warren — most certainly not Elizabeth Warren.

But let's skip ahead. Out of the gate, the Clinton campaign seems solid. The refrain that she's learned from her mistakes seems fair enough. Granting her the benefit of the doubt, she appears to be running an engaged, one-on-one, retail campaign. Indeed, for the fortunes of the Democratic party, her campaign may be too good. Everyday she runs an ever-more well-oiled and responsive organization, the chance, already remote, that others will join the race declines, practically speaking to nothing. So here we are, next winter, in this freakish situation of an opposition-free Democratic primary season, with Hillary and nobody else.

The problem is that no matter how strong Hillary Clinton is, it doesn't really lessen her vulnerabilities. So many of her problems are of a ticking time bomb nature. They may or may not blow her up. Her inevitability, her very viability, wiped away in one relentless publicity storm (or the accretion of many).

What are the chances of disaster for Hillary? Surely no less than any front-runner with a target on his or her back. And arguably much greater.

And yet the Democrats will be stuck with her, without an alternative, because — beyond some point on the campaign timeline — nobody will have the wherewithal to raise the dough to make him or herself a plausible option. Not in a last-ditch primary campaign, and certainly not in the general election, where, demanding many months if not years of groveling, the price will be close to $2 billion. There's no default here.

Save one.

You can play this party trick. Everybody is so locked down in Hillary myopia that nobody gets the obvious — the only — alternative.

And it's not simply that this is the sole person with $2 billion in his or her pocket, but the only person who could instantly offer a post-Clinton and post-Obama reset and new start.

Yes, of course, Michael Bloomberg.

Okay, it might be a sad state that money is the overriding factor in politics. But the world is as it is, and for better or worse, Elizabeth Warren's late start in the event of a Hillary collapse, not to mention her antipathy to most potential big donors, saves the Democrats from another George McGovern. And that's also the point: It's not just the money. Or, rather, Michael Bloomberg may be the only guy with enough money to save the Democrats from themselves.

Even Hillary, unopposed, tacks toward an Internet-and-millennially-centric left that tolerates fewer and fewer deviations, and that sees the center as its enemy. And while she may hope she can come back, this too is arguably part of the Hillary deficit: a desire to be liked by the wrong people (a desire to be popular among people who don't really like her).

The race from the center, on the part of the Republicans and now joined by the Democrats, leaves an extraordinary political opportunity, one that, likely, can only be seized by someone not weighed down by ideologically driven money or afraid of an internecine primary fight.

If, as everybody seems increasingly to understand, political parties now facilitate the opposite of consensus, then an effectively independent political power base — in a sense, the only one in the country — like Michael Bloomberg's could be a wonderful, even astounding, corrective.

It's the fundamental duh formula: a progressive social conscience with pro-growth economic views. In the aftermath of the left's terrible drubbing in Britain, Tony Blair, the ultimate centrist architect, expressed the obvious synthesis necessary for political success: "ambition and aspiration as well as compassion and care."

Now, in modern politics and sensibility, those two sides are increasingly antithetical to, if not at war with, each other. Ambition and aspiration must align with brutalist wealth, compassion and care with doctrinaire intractability. Hillary perhaps more naturally aligned with the former now must do back flips and extra penance to align with the latter.

The reset is to take money, and the need to beg for it and sell out to it, from the equation. Money, if you don't need it, means nothing. As opposed to everything.

A Michael Bloomberg-size fortune in effect neutralizes the issue of outside money in politics. Why donate money which, against the Bloomberg resources, only has ever-diminishing value? Other billionaires would sensibly retreat.

But would he do it? Next February say, if the sky falls in on Hillary — one or more of the storm-cloud scenarios breaking over her head — would Michael Bloomberg step up?

It's the hegemony of the Democratic party that has heretofore blocked the career of one of the most restless, ambitious and successful men in American politics. In New York, he circumvented political conventions by running for mayor as a Republican. The chance — the you-might-even-count-on-it chance — of a Hillary meltdown, which will precipitate, for the Democrats, an existential political crisis, offers a similar sort of orthodoxy-breaking opportunity, one that favors the bold and the rich.