October 22, 2009
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, occupies a paradoxical position in the polls as the November 3 election approaches. The latest survey, conducted by Quinnipiac University last month, found that 69 percent of likely voters approve of his performance but only 52 percent intend to vote for him.
It's not that his Democratic opponent, city comptroller William Thompson, presents an even better alternative — the same survey found that 44 percent of voters "don't know enough about him to form an opinion." It's that a year ago, Bloomberg shepherded a bill through the City Council to modify a referendum passed by voters in 1993 limiting all elected officials to two four-year terms. The mayor and his supporters lengthened the limit to three terms, arguing that the economic crisis demanded "continuity of leadership." The legislation gave Bloomberg a third shot at mayor and 35 two-term Council incumbents a windfall opportunity to hold on to their seats for another four years.
They never realized what a backlash of resentment their action would cause. Bloomberg's been good for the city, people are saying, but I won't vote for him because he trampled on the will of the people. Who does he think he is, a king? In perhaps the most radical slap, the Spanish-language paper El Diariocompared him to Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez, whose attempt to tamper with the term limit was defeated in a referendum: "New Yorkers," it editorialized, "were not even given that chance."
If there were no term-limits law in the first place, Bloomberg would have had no problem at all: He's been the quintessential New York mayor — on the spot in every emergency, creative and effective in his policies, takes the subway to work. Even in this overwhelmingly Democratic town, voters would have elected him, once a Republican and now an independent, enthusiastically. He'll still get elected — Thompson has been unable to get traction — but many citizens will pull the lever reluctantly, with his manipulative behavior sticking in their craw and his reputation for integrity sullied. The third term will not be like the other two.
Such is the paradox of term limits. On one hand, don't limits short-circuit the democratic process, preventing voters from endorsing or repudiating their officials at the ballot box? And on the other hand, shouldn't public office be not a career but a temporary calling, a work demanded of an array of competent citizens who, like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, would serve as needed and then speedily return to private life?
In the first instance, the problem is that it's not all that easy to "t'row da bums out." Politicians, even the worst of them, easily become entrenched in office, amassing huge war-chests that make opposition almost impossible and relying on the complacency of an electorate that would rather vote for a devil they know.
Alternatively, too-short term limits put office-holders in a revolving door; as they go in and out, the business of the public is left in the hands of bureaucrats and lobbyists, the only ones maintaining "continuity." Furthermore, as the California legislature's experience with severe term limits show, there are few Cincinnati among the politically driven — rather than returning to the plow, they just plow ahead from one office to another.
Plus, there are many creative ways to get around term limits — nepotism, for example. Here in the South Bronx, when Councilman Wendell Foster was forced to relinquish his 24-year sinecure, his daughter Helen stepped right in and was handily elected. After two terms herself, she was delighted to vote for Bloomberg's proposal; with no significant opposition, she'll extend her career on the Council for another four years.
Actually, a 12-year term limit might in fact be the best, or least worst, of both worlds. My own sense is that eight years is the turning-point for politicians: Either they've hit their stride and deserve more time, or they've hashed things up enough for voters to decide for themselves to get rid of them. After 12 years, most of these ducks are pretty lame on their own account and should be mercifully retired, like it or not.
The New York state legislature is as dysfunctional as California's, but for exactly the opposite reason: an insularity that results in immobility. In the Assembly, for example, almost half of the 106 members have been there two decades or longer, feathering their nests. A 12-year limit would help break the stranglehold of the old and liberate the legislature for productive work.
So despite the uproar, extending the term limit in New York City may be ultimately beneficial, giving voters the opportunity to have a positive say on third-term candidates while capping their tenure at a reasonable time.
Whether Mayor Bloomberg emerges unscathed, however, remains to be seen.
Showing posts with label michael bloomberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label michael bloomberg. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Sunday, August 17, 2008
MAYOR MIKE MAKES A MOVE
June 28, 2007
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
It was hardly a surprise to New Yorkers that Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Republican party last week. He had dropped in to it only six years ago, not because he bought the ideological package but just because he wanted to be mayor.
Assessing his chances as a Democrat with no previous political experience, he cut his ties with the party in 2001, registered as a Republican, and let four seasoned New York politicians follow the customary Democratic pattern of eating each other up in the primaries. Meanwhile, he outspent and outspoke his lone Republican primary opponent, the tired political hack Herman Badillo, and won handily. He then sat back and watched the two surviving Democrats, Fernando Ferrer and Mark Green, go at it again in a runoff.
Despite a fractured and financially drained Democratic opposition and his targeted, multimillion-dollar campaign, his was a very long shot. In June of 2001 he’d gotten a tepid endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ("Yes, sure, I think he’s qualified to be mayor," Giuliani said at the time; "he has a lot of managerial experience."), but after two terms of dictatorial rule, the mayor had so polarized the city that his endorsement might actually have been Bloomberg’s kiss of death. The dynamic changed after Tuesday, September 11 (the scheduled date of the primary, subsequently delayed for two weeks). Now a civic hero, Giuliani re-endorsed Bloomberg, which did the trick - though not by much. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, he barely eked past Green in the general election.
Four years later, things were the same, only different. As the primaries approached, Ferrer and Green were eating each other up yet again, but by then Bloomberg was far above the fray. This time it was Ferrer that he beat, and by a landslide. Even in the Bronx, where Ferrer had been a popular borough president, and among Latinos, his ethnic base, his showing was unexpectedly weak. Mayor Mike, as the tabloids were now affectionately calling him, had proven himself to the people.
Rudy’s dismissive comment in early 2001 was inadvertently prescient. Bloomberg’s managerial experience turned the city around. He eliminated an inherited $6.4 billion deficit by streamlining city government and boldly, and un-Republicanly, raising taxes. He furthered Giuliani’s success in reducing crime but did it coolly and collaboratively, without the abrasion and confrontation of his predecessor. He took control of the Board of Education, something that previous mayors had found impossible, and made substantial gains in reforming the bureaucracy-bound public school system, actually improving education in the process. He committed city resources to affordable housing, sparking a building boom here in the Bronx and in the other boroughs. And showing his aesthetic side, he invited the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to mount, at their own expense, "The Gates in Central Park," a project that previous mayors had scorned for 20 years. Those 7,500 orange banners packed the hotels in the bleak midwinter of 2005, filling city coffers with tax money and reinvigorating the worldwide tourist trade.
Like all good managers, he achieved his goals by hiring the most talented people for his team instead of doling out plums to his cronies. And like the best of managers, he did everything with elan, an appealing, level-headed optimism that has brought almost the whole city on board. Astonishing in the bruising world of New York politics, he has his critics but hardly an enemy.
He’s even defused Al Sharpton.
No wonder some people are thinking president. After the sinister secrecy and administrative incompetency of the Bush years, and the prolonged partisan deadlock in Congress, it is most refreshing to imagine, if only for an instant, a national leader who is straightforward, creative, non-ideological, practical, and collaborative, with a crackerjack cabinet of non-partisan experts and a national agenda with the nation in mind.
It is the overwhelming disgust of party pettiness and the longing for a politics of principle from a no-nonsense pragmatist that may make a Bloomberg bid realistic. Outsider candidates of recent memory - George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader, yes, but also party dissidents like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean - ignited enthusiasm from a broad spectrum of Americans searching for an alternative, but they all failed because there was something vaguely or plainly kooky about them. There is nothing kooky about Michael Bloomberg.
And nothing quixotic, either. This is a man with an uncanny sense of political timing. He’s like a star running-back, able to see a hole in the line and shoot right through it to the goal. And because he can finance an entire national campaign all by himself, he can afford to do just as he did in 2001: sit back and let the party candidates eat each other up. If he sees a hole after the February primaries, he may make a run for it. (This must be scaring the dress off Rudy, who was recently beaten by Bloomberg 56 to 29 percent in a poll of New Yorkers by the Daily News as to who was the more effective mayor.)
Meanwhile, he will go on being mayor of New York, pushing his long-term proposals for a safer and greener city, setting out broader ideas on domestic and foreign policy for his now wider audience, and building a coalition of notable backers dissatisfied with their parties’ inflexibility and impotence. Judging from the warm words and the cover of Time magazine from last week,
Arnold Schwarzenegger may be one of the first on board.
It remains to be seen if Mayor Mike will play as well in Ohio and Alabama as he’s playing in New York. He hardly knows that himself at this point. But his detachment from party apparatus - and a net worth of $5 billion or so - will at the very least allow him the freedom to shape the national discourse uniquely, and positively.
Watch him.
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