<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Like most Irish-Americans born before the Summer of Love, Kevin Sheekey cannot ignore the lure of Camelot. So as he sits at a prime table on the cool lawn of the mayor&amp;#039;s mansion in Los Angeles, he gapes as Maria Shriver speaks about how politicians can achieve zero without talented staffs to turn vision into action. It&amp;#039;s a crowd of pundits and politicos, with a sprinkling of Hollywood stardust. Addressing this crowd of overachievers, Shriver mentions only one person present -- Sheekey -- whom she holds up as an example of the best of American politics. It&amp;#039;s a dream come true -- the hottest of the Kennedy girls, the one who married a movie star, giving a shout-out to Sheekey. He nods, raises his glass of pinot, smiles. Can you believe this shit? The sky is blue forever. The event is called &amp;quot;Ceasefire! Bridging the Political Divide,&amp;quot; and the philosophy behind it is pretty simple: Most Americans are sick of the shrillness and incompetence that have come to dominate American politics, and they are ready for an alternative. Sure, they mostly blame George W. Bush, but what the hell have the Democrats achieved lately? The assembled represent not an emerging third party but a coalition of people who just want to get shit done, solve problems. Imagine that. Sheekey is here because his boss, Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York, is seen as a postpartisan apostle of effective governance. Or perhaps more accurately, Bloomberg is here because his political strategist, Sheekey, forty-one, is betting that the climate is right to knock the two-party system on its ear. He&amp;#039;s trotting his boss around the country to test the power of two words: President Bloomberg.  Sheekey earned Shriver&amp;#039;s love because she panicked watching her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, try to run California like he was an action hero without a screenplay. She reached out to Sheekey -- already well-known for his success with Bloomberg in New York -- and pleaded, Please save my husband from himself. Despite the temptation to head west, Sheekey stayed with Bloomberg, but he did help lay out a game plan. It was simple advice: Why are you fighting? Reach out to the unions, reach across the aisle, compromise, build consensus, lead by positive example. Get things done. Governor Arnie was reborn.  Now, with a growing number of similar allies across the country, Sheekey thinks he can take that approach national.  Sheekey certainly has the Kennedy look. He could pass for a cousin. He&amp;#039;s got the hair, the tieless preppy dress, and the easy smile. But he also has a drive and hunger that has not been seen around the compound for a generation or more. Sheekey is on a mission. He knows politics (as a former prot\u00E9g\u00E9 of the late Senator Daniel Moynihan), and he knows numbers (as a product, like Mike himself, of years at the most innovative financial data company in the world, Bloomberg L.P.). And the very idea of President Bloomberg starts with one number -- no, not the 19 percent Ross Perot garnered with a far less disenchanted electorate back in 1992. No, not even the $1 billion Bloomberg could potentially throw into a race. The one number that jumps and sings and dances for Sheekey is the one that torments the White House and both major parties. The number is seventy-five. Roughly 75 percent of Americans, as of this summer, think the country is headed in the wrong direction, despite a basically sound and growing economy. This is unheard of, and it is the wild card that Sheekey hopes to play all the way to the jackpot in 2008. Sure, Sheekey hears the cries of derision -- the electoral college! The mayor of New York! He&amp;#039;s short! He&amp;#039;s a Jew! Sheekey shrugs. Sheekey is not stupid. He has a plan.  And here is where that other number does matter hugely. It&amp;#039;s not just that Bloomberg has a billion dollars to spend -- what&amp;#039;s just as important is that he does not have to raise it. It frees him from having to devote all that energy and time to soliciting donations. It also allows him to proclaim true independence, which, nicely, is the whole basis of his platform: leadership not beholden to any of the old power bases.  So how will Kevin Sheekey spend $1 billion of his boss&amp;#039;s cash? First, you can bet he will get Bloomberg on the ballot in all fifty states -- a hassle, but it is nowhere prohibitive; it usually takes manpower and money. He will also orchestrate the most sophisticated voter-targeting and turnout effort in history. Sheekey will replicate and expand the microtargeting he used in both of Bloomberg&amp;#039;s mayoral campaigns. In those, he helped devise an extremely detailed approach to voter identification, targeting voters as individuals, not members of rigid demographic groups. Once the target is identified, say, a deer-hunting union member in western Pennsylvania who worries that global warming is fucking up his sport, you hit him with a multitiered media blitz -- direct mail, phone calls, e-mails, door knocks. While the information delivered will be about targeted issues -- global warming, health care, crime -- the message will be the same: This guy gets shit done. Sheekey will still have enough cash to go toe-to-toe with the main-party candidates on TV and radio, which will reinforce the more targeted media.  When Sheekey ran Bloomberg&amp;#039;s races in New York, he took the approach that the campaign was essentially a thousand small races that needed to be won. He conceded no territory based on past patterns, no vote because of what the existing wisdom said. The skeptics say winning in New York is one thing, but America is huge. Sheekey answers, with a little cheek, that there are only thirty times more voters in the entire country than in New York City. Sheekey is betting that he has the man, the message, and the money to make a serious run.  Here comes Maria to give him a hug and kiss. Tomorrow, this Irish kid driven to get shit done will get on Bloomberg&amp;#039;s private jet and soar again into that endless blue sky.  This story is part of our second annual register of emerging ideas, trends, discoveries, products, people, and obscene gestures you should know about before everyone else does. &amp;amp;lt;&amp;amp;lt; Read Previous * [Back to Esquire 100] * Read Next &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3437/sheekey1007/>