I think he knows he couldn't win because of his personality and wouldn't run unless doing so as a losing candidate could help accomplish something he wants (even he doesn't have enough money to spend nationally the equivalent he spent to get elected in NYC despite his predilections and peccadiloes.) Actually he really dislikes playing politics, is a control freak, and he requires a somewhat dictatorial platform to govern in the way he likes; having to deal with Congress would drive him nuts.

The employment topic is something he really cares about. Few people paid attention to the following story when it ran in early August, he's already put his money into it. You can't do this kind of thing as president, just unilaterally decide something needs to be done and get private funding for it, you have to instead be able to convince a lot of other people it needs to be done and get their approval. He knows he's not good at the convincing and politics thing, so if he wants to get something done he goes around the rest of the government.  NYC's strong executive position has allowed him to do some of those dictatorial things. That's not something the presidency is set up to allow very often.

Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth

By Michael Barbaro and Fernando Santos, New York Times, August 3, 2011

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances.

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.

To pay for the endeavor in a time of fiscal austerity, the city is relying on an unusual source: Mr. Bloomberg himself, who intends to use his personal fortune to cover about a quarter of the cost, city officials said. A $30 million contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation would be matched by that of a fellow billionaire, George Soros, a hedge fund manager, with the remainder being paid for by the city.

Starting this fall, the administration said it would place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes where many young black and Latino men live, retrain probation officers in an effort to reduce recidivism, establish new fatherhood classes and assess schools on the academic progress of male black and Latino students.

Mr. Bloomberg plans to announce the three-year program in a speech on Thursday morning in Manhattan, in which he will declare that “blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.”....

He is a smart enough man to know that he couldn't stand being president for very long, would end up saying "f you all" and walking out.

Also too,an ahem to all you who despise what you call the "oligarchy" and "Wall Street," I will be very shocked if you agree with David. Bloomberg IS both. This is what they are. Not evil people, but people who by virtue of their success, think they know better how to run things than most of humanity. And a reminder: with ones like Bloomberg, that includes things like what you eat and what you smoke.

I wouldn't want to see discriminatory Stop & Frisk policing nationwide:

A Smell of Pot and Privilege in the City

The Bloomberg administration has quietly been fixing up its sons and daughters with cool summer internships, as reported Tuesday in The New York Times. ...
Sure enough, a Freedom of Information Act request showed that tucked among hundreds of summer interns picked through a competitive process were dozens of the children of City Hall insiders or of Mr. Bloomberg’s friends. They reflected the mayor’s social and political circles: mostly white, many quite wealthy, coming from private high schools and Ivy League colleges.
In short, these are not residents of Stop and Frisk New York.
Nowhere in the city is that tactic used more heavily than in Brownsville. On average, the police conducted one stop and frisk a year for every one of the 14,000 people who live there, an analysis by The New York Times found. More than 99 percent of the people were not arrested or charged with any wrongdoing.
Brownsville has the highest marijuana arrest rate in the city. The top 10 precincts for marijuana arrests averaged 2,150 for every 100,000 residents; the populations in those precincts are generally 90 percent or more nonwhite.
Mr. Bloomberg’s neighborhood has the lowest rate of marijuana arrests; the 10 precincts with the lowest rates averaged 67 arrests per 100,000 residents. The population in most of those neighborhoods was 80 percent white.
For blacks and Latinos, [marijuana] is very, very illegal.
But not in Mr. Bloomberg’s neighborhood.

Bloomberg Gives With One Hand; Takes With the Other

This week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would invest $30 million from his own pocket to uplift the young black and Latino men who are most excluded from New York’s civic, educational and economic life. While this proposal is generous, it fails to address the fact that the Bloomberg administration has supported policies that have led to staggering racial disparities in New York’s corrections system. While funding job recruitment and education programs is indeed important, there’s a critical missing piece in this grand plan: ending NYPD’s widespread aggressive stop and frisk policies that target communities of color at skyrocketing rates and contribute markedly to the marginalization of the very same communities Bloomberg now aims to help.

There's new cracks today in Bloomberg myths that even I was willing to buy:

For Bloomberg, Waste Mars Another Digital Project
By David M. Halbfinger, New York Times, September 23, 2011

....The administration has pressed ahead despite repeated warnings that the project is deeply troubled, according to a review of thousands of pages of city records, as well as dozens of interviews with officials and private contractors.

The administration’s own internal monitors regularly filed reports detailing chronic mismanagement, cost overruns and rampant waste....

In both projects, the administration, bent on proving that outside consultants could improve the workings of government, ignored clear signs that the projects were foundering, the interviews and records show.....

This leadership vacuum contributed significantly to rising costs and delays, the interviews and records indicate. The administration delegated the project to officials who did not have the authority to make important decisions and who squandered opportunities to reduce costs. Its expensive private consultants often seemed not up to the task.

Yet throughout this time, aides to Mr. Bloomberg publicly portrayed the project as advancing smoothly.....

Funny how it sounds like the TPM.com software tech story, only on a much much bigger scale, including the experts leaving real quickly when they saw teh horror.

I myself was enamored with Bloomberg's 311 call system when it was initiated. Because it was good for the little, easy to do stuff. But then I found out that it made it virtually impossible for a little guy without any connections (me) to even write to, much less talk to, an individual city department. There is no direct accountability to citizens for the actual city government functions, they don't have to deal with citizens anymore, they do not have a phone number or a listed office. You have only 311 operators to talk to, they are your only connection to your government. It's an ingenious way to protect them from citizens so they can go about working at whatever they and their superiors think they should be doing, without interruption from citizens. If they don't respond to a query or complaint, the 311 operator just puts a note on the system. And there it sits for months more until you consider the long time-tested alternate routes of the local TV station help line or the few still having listed phone numbers like elected council members.