World: Are you ready for the Nanny Monologues?
Mayor Mike pilfered a third tour in City Hall from an otherwise term-limited town, which should have been enough for anybody — but apparently not for him.
Now he’s recruited a touring company of fellow nanny-noodges to bring the joys of bike lanes and Big Gulp bans to municipalities around the globe. All a mayor will have to do is ask for help and Mike and his minions will be there — think the Justice League of America, except to neaten up crosswalks, confiscate salt shakers and tax tobacco out of town.
The Times terms it an urban SWAT team and, best of all, Mike intends to pick up the tab.
Ah, it’s good to be the billionaire.
But you know what? For all of Bloomberg’s infuriating quirks — the condescension, the arrogance and the sometimes-hilarious cluelessness concerning ordinary New Yorkers — many mayors could do much worse than to take Mike up on his offer.
Certainly New York prospered during the Age of Bloomberg — crime is down, jobs are up, tourists are as thick as pigeons on the streets and in the parks — and New Yorkers seem to appreciate this.
Mike’s poll approvals are unusually high for a city with historically scant patience for third-term mayors — and those numbers don’t take into account some of the administration’s less obvious accomplishments: Kick-starting Ground Zero construction in spite of the Port Authority; a dramatic (if largely under-the-radar) re-zoning of the city and the now-burgeoning redevelopment of the post-industrial moonscape on the Far West Side.
It’s true that the mayor couldn’t jolly the Olympics into town, and congestion pricing never happened. But, frankly, both those initiatives collapsed largely of their own weight; they didn’t make political or policy sense — especially the Olympics.
Also a mixed bag of results was Mike’s signature initiative — mayoral control of the pubic schools. He extracted nominal authority for the Board of Education from Albany — no small victory — but soon discovered that operational power was an entirely different matter.
Real reform is always tough, but forcing accountability on public-school teachers borders on the impossible. They have unions that operate not unlike the Teamsters back in the day — except that whereas the Teamsters swung crowbars to get their way, the teachers deploy lawyers.
(And they help elect more tractable mayors — hellooo there, Mr. de Blasio! — but more on that at a later date.)
So while there is a lot to like about the Bloomberg education record — classroom progress is limited but real, which is more than anyone else can say — the overall initiative is in the deep weeds right now.
Then why should other mayors take too seriously advice from a former colleague who — press-conference smirks notwithstanding — has been something less than a miracle worker?
Because Mike’s wins far outweigh his losses — and because there was much of value in the Bloomberg mayoral style.
If ever there were a politician who refused to bow before the prevailing winds, that fellow is Mike Bloomberg. Once on a course, he stayed on that course. His loyalty to deputies and commissioners was as solid as the Adirondacks — and his willingness to take personal heat when it mattered was unparalleled.
Even if the course was mistaken, and even if the loyalty was misplaced — which sometimes indeed it was.
Bloomberg understood that mistakes can be rectified, but that constancy is crucial if a city as complex as New York is ever to be effectively governed. To say nothing of reformed.
Even the pig-headed nanny nonsense — targeting sugary drinks, fat banishment and so on — sent an operationally useful message: Once Mike is dug in, if you mean to move him, bring a backhoe.
There would have been no classroom progress at all without Bloomberg’s obduracy. A less determined mayor would have sacked Police Commissioner Ray Kelly when the mostly manufactured complaints about NYPD tactics started piling up — and the price likely would have been paid in blood.
Indeed, perhaps the most pressing question now attending Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio relates to constancy: Ideologies and objectives aside, can he withstand the rip-tide crosscurrents that he’s about to wade into?
If he can, then the coming debates can proceed on their merits, or the lack thereof. If he can’t, then look for a steady descent into the debilitating incoherence that hobbled city governance in the ’80s and early ’90s.
For better or for worse, Gotham is not going to be the same without Mike Bloomberg. He now belongs, ahem, to the world.