“Bloomberg Unbound” is the headline on this week’s cover of Time. “He’s remade New York,” it says. “Next up, the world.” The story is a terrific piece to read while waiting to see whether Joe Lhota is going to get his mayoral campaign into gear.
Time describes a meeting in Paris, “behind ivy-clad walls, guarded by armed men and surrounded by black Mercedes.” In bounds Mayor Bloomberg, who starts “talking right away” about the regions of America that “still don’t believe in evolution or global warming.”
The meeting turns out to be of the World Health Organization, the Tobacco-Free Kids campaign and what Time calls “other masters in the international cabal to end smoking.” It is a meeting, Time reports, about “using enormous private wealth to change government policies and shift human behavior.”
It happens that Time went to press with this scoop just before the news broke of the decision handed down in New York state Supreme Court in the so-called outdoor-smoking case. A savvy judge, George Ceresia Jr., ruled that the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation had exceeded its authority in banning smoking in state parks and recreation areas.
Ceresia issued a permanent injunction, ordering the removal of no-smoking signs from state parks and a halt to any plans to put up new ones.
What bothered him was that on a number of occasions the state Legislature had considered enacting a ban on smoking in public outdoor spaces such as parks but had refrained from doing so.
The judge wasn’t making a policy decision one way or another. He went to the trouble of listing the failed legislation. He marked the point that the Legislature did ban certain indoor smoking. In respect of outdoor smoking, though, the Legislature decided not to act.
“In the Court’s view,” Judge Ceresia wrote, “this is a strong indication that the Legislature is uncertain of how to address the issue.” He made a point of noting that the state’s highest court had ruled in another case that “repeated failures by the Legislature” do not “automatically entitle an administrative agency to take it upon itself to fill the vacuum and impose a solution of its own.”
No doubt Bloomberg would say that he didn’t make this mistake; the city’s smoking ban was legislated by the City Council, which is why the case in Judge Ceresia’s court involved only state parks. But this isn’t the picture Time magazine paints of “Bloomberg Unbound.”
It writes of a return to the era of great benefactors like the Rockefellers, Mellons and Carnegies, who used their great fortunes to promote education, the arts, scientific research and other great causes during the previous century. Today’s billionaire philanthropists, however, are hoping to reshape society according to their own conception of liberalism.
“It’s their world,” is the way Time put it. “You just vote in it.”
Bill de Blasio’s great scoop in New York’s mayoral campaign was grasping how much resentment has built up here in New York to Bloomberg’s methodology. He has been the only candidate to do so.
My own view is that it’s not Bloomberg’s money that the city has come to resent; on the contrary, the city admires Bloomberg’s business and financial success.
It’s the sense that Bloomberg has taken voters for granted that de Blasio has tapped in to. At least so far, Lhota has run his campaign for mayor without addressing this issue. He hasn’t challenged Bloombergism — or, for that matter, defended the Republican Party or even stood up for his original patron, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
So whom is he prepared to defend? No wonder New Yorkers are looking to the courts.
The plaintiff in the outdoor smoking case is a group called NYC Clash, which stands for New York City Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment. The Big Gulp soda case was brought by people in the beverage business.
Some Orthodox Jews are in court defending their religious free-exercise rights to circumcision. Others are in court defending their right to require customers to dress modestly in their stores.
These contests are but early skirmishes in a long campaign now commencing to unravel the rules and regulations of the Bloomberg years while the soon-to-be-ex mayor is off exporting Bloombergism to foreign lands.