Why Michael Bloomberg is Hugely Overrated
In his seven years as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg has been the recipient of an almost uninterrupted spate of good publicity.
It’s about all his legacy will amount to, and it is not an accident. His entire political career has been designed, down to the carefully released rumors about his presidential ambition, as an experiment in governance through public relations. Barack Obama loves him, John McCain loves him, Time magazine loves him, 70% of New Yorkers loves him, and yet if I stopped writing right here to ask what, exactly, Bloomberg has ever accomplished, not many people could come up with an intelligible answer. They might mutter something vague about “education reform” without being able to explain its manic-depressive vicissitudes, or cite any concrete evidence of its success. Crime? That’s been down since the days of Giuliani, and anyone might have been able to maintain an already successful law enforcement program.
Behind the po-faced façade of a competent but bland CEO of America’s toughest metropolis lurks a breathtakingly calculated mediocrity, a man who silences his critics with cash and is then the first to tell you just how popular he is.
It’s worth remembering that Bloomberg, a fired Salomon Brothers partner who parlayed his $10 million severance package into a financial software empire, was a registered Democrat before he decided to enter public life in a year that seemed friendly to Republicans. In 2001, the year he ran as Giuliani’s successor, Bloomberg donated $705,000 to the New York State GOP, its largest single-donor windfall since Nelson Rockefeller, and followed up that noticeable gift with another $500,000 a year later, ostensibly to ensure the re-election of Gov. George Pataki, but clearly also to ensure party loyalty.
It allowed Bloomberg’s nanny-like encroachments on property rights and civil liberties to go largely unlamented by machine Republicans. He’s added laws to the books that fine storeowners for having too many letters in their awnings, or ticket cars that are rendered immobile by snowstorms. And don’t even think about lighting up in a bar, sitting on a milk crate, or putting your bag down on the adjoining subway seat. The kind of velvet fascism that rules American corporate culture now rules Gotham, a city once celebrated for its louche glamour and gritty countercultural style, something many puritans wrongly misremember as being only coexistent with rampant crime. (Oh yes, there was middle ground between Mean Streets and Sex and the City, a time when “poverty” could be comfortable, and Times Square was a navigable cesspool far preferable to the Disney World it’s become.)
In a city with a skyrocketing cost of living — Moscow on the Hudson has been redefined — plutocracy is king. For Bloomberg “[t]he money,” as Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin have written, “buys acquiescence if not adulation.” And it’s spread around everywhere. In 2005, Bloomberg gave $140 million to over 800 organizations, including the Independence Party, which has backed him twice, and on whose executive committee sits Lenora Fulani, a vicious Jew-hater and protégé of the Stalinoid cult leader Fred Newman (think Lyndon LaRouche, but with even less charisma). Overall, Bloomberg has poured about $160 million of his own fortune into both his inaugural and re-election campaigns. To get an idea of just how much that is relative to normal candidates, consider that his challenger in 2005, the hapless Democrat Freddy Ferrer, spent on his entire run what Bloomberg spent on his consultants, all of whom should have advised him to tighten his purse strings.
Though lauded far and wide for his Warren Buffet-like willingness to give to charity (Slate is a big Bloomberg booster on the philanthropy front), less acknowledged is the fact that the mayor’s largesse silences special interest groups and liberal tubthumpers, who might otherwise find fault with the steward of so many of the reviled and “authoritarian” policies of his predecessor.
Bloomberg rather resembles Hugo Chavez in this respect, except that instead of mistaking the populism of almsgiving as genuine socialism, he mistakes it as well-oiled, technocratic democracy, with himself in the role of lead “manager.” In 2000, before he entered politics, he gave $500,000 to the Dance Theater of Harlem, and $100,000 to Ballet Hispanico, both noble causes, but also convenient ones for cultivating an image as a healer of racial wounds in a town where they’ve historically been gangrenous.
I AGREE 100000%.
I’ve lived in Manhattan for 30 years.
Been a registered Dem for longer thasn that.
I voted against Rudy twice, and for him once.
Rudy saved the city.
Rudy did all the heavy lifting.
Bloomberg has been coasting on all the great and difficult things Rudy accomplished.
Rudy took on the quality of life issues and made the city livable. He demolished crime. He took on the mob – the carting industry… AND the squeegee-men, the fish/fruit markets, the sanitation union, and so on.
SURE: Rudy was confrontational, and this alienated a lot of people. Tired many.
But BLOOMIE!?!?!?!?!?! WTF HAS HE DONE!? WHAT SINGLE SOLITARY TOUGH ISSUE DID HE TAKE ON?!?!?
None.
Zero. Zilch. Bupkus.
Nada.
His biggest fight was over the westside stadium and he lost.
He has improved NOTHING in the city; in fact, most things are worse: the city is dirtier and the general quality of life diminished.
EVERYTHING livable about the city is a result of Rudy.
Bloomie is the most overrated politician since… OBAMA AND BJ CLINTON!
Two other MSM darlings who accomplished NEXT TO NOTHING BIG, DARING, TOUGH.
His personal webpage, known as Bloomberg.com, is one of the most egregious Obama advertisers in all the MSM. I suspect he’s been bought by Soros to peddle that Manchurian candidate known as the Obamassiah…
If one works for the Department of Education one can see the real side of Liberalism. Rampant age discrimination, racial (anti-white)discrimination, vicious persecution of the old and sick, elimination of any right of redress and the import of young, foreign (cheaper) employees to replace those politically incorrect
older Americans. Mike, you are a dirtbag, get out of your limo and look into a mirror…the one locked in the attic
I’ve never met any reasonable people who thought Bloomberg was anything but a tyrant who feels compelled to pay millions of dollars to attain a poor paying position that allows him to impose his own emotional problems on others. Bloomberg is pathetic.
When NY was in a 24 hour steamy August blackout a few yrs back, Bloomy stood on the corner telling people to drink water while stranded tourist & commuters were literally sleeping on the concrete streets of Times Square. No buses or shelter were arranged to deal w/ the crisis…very unGuilianiesque. Nanny liberal Bloomberg is more concerned with telling us how to live(no smoking or fats)& apologizing for his wealth. The year after 9/11 he raised property taxes 19% w/ a mansion tax, to boot…making NYC a city for the rich…you pay an extra $100,000 if you want a view of the sky. Agree that Bloomy is coasting on Rudy’s record to clean-up the city (w/ his broken window strategy on crime,) but today’s NY Post has an article describing how the city is slipping-back to pre-Rudy days of panhandlers, graffiti & crime.
On the money. Hats off to Michael Weiss and PJM for breaking the long silence on Moneybags Mike.
After getting rich and becoming a big shot in business, Mrs. Bloomberg’s boy Mikey had no place left to go but politics. So he leased Gracie Mansion for four years with an option to renew for sixty million. Pocket change for a big fish like Mike.
Back when it was a possibility, long shot or no, Mayor Mike had his staff research four-years–with-a-four-year-option on the White House. Half a billion was their best estimate, give or take a few hundred million. A bargain at the price but the feasibility wasn’t there.
People like Mike because he’s an Independent. But Mike isn’t Independent like McCain. McCain is a Republican stalwart willing to weather party ire for principled disagreement. Mike is an independent because he is loyal to nothing but Mike. And Mrs. Bloomberg, of course. Mike’s political party is the party of opportunity.
People like the Mayor with the mojo because he’s beholden to nobody. Paid his own way. Owes nobody nuthin. But that isn’t the whole story.
The whole story is that Mike spreads it around pretty thick. Every time you turn around there’s another piece in the Times about an anonymous donation to this or that worthy cause “widely believed” to come from His Saintliness, the Mayor. And that’s only the big donations that make the news. Moneybags Mike is the most famous anonymous donor in history.
Proof’s in the pudding, say Mayor Mike’s boosters. Its boom times in the Big Apple. Real estate everywhere in the country is in the basement. Here in NYC, it’s going through the roof. Construction cranes are so scarce they’re trucking in junkers from Canada that fall over in the street and kill people. Every hotshot developer in town has a huge multi-acre project he’s working on. The city is awash in investment dollars.
But with big dollars comes big baksheesh. Nothing requires government cooperation like real estate development. Municipal corruption is rampant. Mayor Mike sets the tone. Money greases the works. And the grease never flowed so thick and so rich.
It’s a fact of life in New York that no municipal inspector of any kind refuses a bribe. Was long before Mayor Mike decided to show Mrs. Bloomberg he could make a success of himself in politics. But the climate for value-added cooperation between business and government was never so encouraging.
Does the concrete being poured into all the new construction meet Code? When a concrete inspector halted construction of Donald Trump’s multi-billion dollar project on the Upper West Side a year or two ago it made the papers. For a day. Then it was gone with no conclusion. Was the concrete up to snuff? If no, what about yesterday’s batch?
Or was all the fuss nothing more than an inspector squeezing Trump’s contractors for more money? Someone higher up the political chain putting the squeeze on Donald himself? In Mayor Mike’s New York, where every day is a goniff’s Christmas, no one know for sure.
Real New Yorkers breathe a sigh of relief every time one of Mikes big projects fails. First it was the sports center in midtown that would have brought so many cars into the City it would have impossibly snarled traffic in and around Manhattan every time there was a game. Then there was Mike’s proposed eight dollar toll into midtown in order to reduce traffic congestion and pollution.
The automobile is City Hall’s cash cow. Ticketing and towing not only brings in a flood of income, it absorbs a great lumpen mass of humanity that would otherwise be on the welfare rolls. Sometime back, our ever clever and creative liberal politicians turned welfare into workfare. Put welfare recipients into uniform and gave them the dignity of a job, benefits and a pension ticketing cars. Like magic, hundred of thousands of New York’s least talented and able shifted from the red column to the black column in the City’s books.
Mike didn’t invent this sleight-of-hand screwing of working New Yorkers by their elected officials. But Mike is nothing if not an efficient modern manager with a nose for cash and he’s considerably tightened the screws. Traffic enforcement has been technically upgraded and increased. Every uniformed civil servant carries a book of parking summonses and every one has a quota to meet. Cops, traffic trolls, sanitation inspectors, everyone earns for the city.
City Hall is a parasite on the automobile but Mayor Mike clucks that cars are the City’s worst problem. Truth is, as the Mayor well knows, car storage not cars, is the problem. Hourly parking in Manhattan runs three to four times the minimum wage. Monthly parking is four to five hundred dollars a month. But with eight million people, Manhattan has fewer Municipal parking lots than Yonkers.
A system of municipal parking lots in and around the city with connecting buses or jitneys is a no brainer. Technically no challenge and relatively cheap to implement. It would cut congestion and pollution and vastly improve quality of life. But Moneybags Mike wouldn’t think of it. Better to whip the automobile even as you milk it.
Problem with the grey little guy, he is not a New Yorker. Matters not where he was born and raised. Mrs. Bloomberg’s Mikey doesn’t drink, smoke or, God forbid, do drugs. His sexuality, thank God, is not an issue. He’s concerned for his health and he’s concerned for yours and mine.
On this Seventy-fifth anniversary of Repeal, it’s worth remembering Mayor Mike’s ban on smoking in ten thousand New York restaurants and bars. Now if he can only impose a ban on alcohol, carbohydrates, and cholesterol in the City’s bars and restaurants, wouldn’t this town really be jumping.
Bloomberg is major lightweight. I was born and raised in the Bronx, lived 20 years in Manhattan, survived the downslide under Dinkins and the revival under Rudy. Bloomberg is coasting all the way on Rudy’s work. Yes, Rudy is confrontational, but guess what? You have to be to get anything done in a corrupt liberal nightmare like NYC. Nobody can debate and eviscerate a liberal like Rudy can. He moved mountains and did what everyone said could not be done. Too bad it didn’t translate on the national stage. We could use Rudy in the White House to get things moving in the right direction.
Another billionaire fake marxist hypocrit that won’t turn over all his private property to fidel or kim il or beijing in time for the olympics.
RINOs (or DINOs, for that matter) automatically set themselves up for scrutiny. And almost always fall down.
Correct, of course, especially when you say his fans know nothing about him. Kind of like Obama, though Bloomberg is actually more arrogant perhaps. His “cant we all just get along and not be so partisan” message is SO old and naive. Good work, Weiss. I will send this to my pro-Bloomberg friends, who will get angry, but not be able to counter your words.
Rudy was a GREAT leader. Bloomberg couldn’t hold his hairpiece.
Thanks for the info which the commenters confirm. “Nobody can debate and eviscerate a liberal like Rudy can; maybe then we need a different NY mayor for VP.
As a long time New Yorker it is a pleasure to read this article. It is good to know not everyone has been hoodwinked.
My favorite Bloomberg shenanigan. Lamenting about all the cars that are driving into Manhattan and making a big deal about the fact that he, the mayor, takes the subway to work from his upper East Side apartment.
Except the NY Times pointed out that he takes a small caravan of SUV’s to the 59th street subway station and then hops on the train to City Hall.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/nyregion/01bloomberg.html
Even Mayor Mike’s money and influence matters little compared to the political clout of the Man Who Runs Albany, Sheldon Silver. It’s at once amazing and appalling how one man can have so much influence over all facets of New Yorkers’ lives. Super Mike has his own Kryptonite – Silver Kryptonite.
Thanks for the Doomberg update.
Bloomberg has destroyed the NYC school system. Despite touting inflated scores on dumbed -down tests, the drop out rate continues at over 50%,and a NYC high school diploma, from all but the handful of selective High Schools,is considered a joke by employers. Fuzzy Math, whole -language, and pc indoctrination keep the kids stupid;but don’t worry: NYC has pretty waterfalls to distract the public from this and other Bloomberg failures!
Rudy Giuliani took New York City out of the pit it was in and made it a great place to live again. Things have gotten worse again under the Bloomberg administration. Crime is creeping back up, and the homeless problem is spreading again, albeit slowly. Put simply, Mayor Giuliani gets it, and Mayor Bloomberg does not. Here’s hoping Mayor Giuliani takes a shot at becoming Governor.
“laws to the books that fine storeowners for having too many letters in their awnings, or ticket cars that are rendered immobile by snowstorms. And don’t even think about lighting up in a bar, sitting on a milk crate, or putting your bag down on the adjoining subway seat”
Those comments alone are enough to make me vote for him.
Thanks for making NYC a wee bit classier!
Rudy’s picnic with the New York press was over once her left office. Mr. 9/11 then thought he could use this tragedy to run for president. This is a man who publically humiliated Donna Hanover, then his wife, for some two-bit social climber–his current wife–who posseses none of the grace, professional accomplishment, or class of Ms. Hanover.
How an elected official treats the mother of his children in public tells you a great deal about the soul of that man.
The New York press wa shaking in its boots while Rudy was mayor and founds the testicular fortitude to address Rudy and his nonsense when he left office and starting floating this idea that he would run for president. Beyond New York, Rudy cannot (and will not) be elected to anything. Period.
He “pimped” 9/11 to fame and fortune while one of his deputy mayors, Rudy Washington, had to sue the city for 9/11 related health problems. Imagine that.
As for Bloomberg: there is an article in The New York Times today about his Deputy Mayor who, according to the article, is actually running the city. The apple does not fall far from the tree. This is another died-in-the-wool arrogant soul.
The city has become bifurcated with folks who can barely afford to live in the city and those who have fabulous wealth. Quality of life in New York? What the hell does that mean? Paying thousands a month to live in a damn closet-like apartment?
When the City fully collapses from greed, Rudy and Mike names will be remembered. That’s what happens when you have these outsized personalities.
Bloomberg is nothing but a TYRANT. Staten Island chuck for mayor