Mike Bloomberg's Crushing Loss
There are many reasons to appreciate Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is now, with just 51% of yesterday's vote, the fourth mayor to be elected to a third term in New York City since Manhattan sucked up the surrounding cities into boroughs in 1898. He is wonderful source of entertainment, because he is so snippy. He is a terrible dresser, particularly for a billionaire, and therefore is fun to watch. At City Hall, he eats cereal in meetings and when he is done he slurps milk from the bowl. As for the matter of his insane overspending on his most recent campaign to the tune of $100 million or so, it must be noted that in 2007 alone, between his foundation, his company's charitable giving and his own pocket, he gave $205 million to charity.
And the previous year, he announced commitments, with the Gates Foundation, to distribute $125 million internationally to assist global anti-smoking initiatives. Nearer to home, the streets, plastered as they are with "for rent" and "for sale" signs, are clean-ish; homeless encampments are generally invisible, though homelessness is at an all-time high and 120,000 people entered the shelter system over the last year; and the City pays out far less in settlements for abuse of citizens than they did under the previous administration.
He has made the government both more accountable and more transparent; for just one instance, he has doubled the budget of the City press office since 2002, allowing it to be responsive to inquiry.
It has all been mediocre—largely and mildly—good news. And good news in a very traditional sense of who makes up the City. In the end, Bloomberg was reelected yesterday thanks to rich voters, Catholic voters, white voters, and the right-leaning residents of Staten Island and Queens. He was elected by, in short, yesterday's City, not tomorrow's.
And yesterday's stunning vote by yesterday's people was not about term limits. Fewer than half of voters polled yesterday said that his reversal on term limits was a factor in their decision to not vote for him. So: more than half said that Bloomberg's term limits reversal was not a factor in their decision. This speaks of a voting population that objects to Bloomberg on other grounds.
New York City's official unemployment rate hit a 16-year high in August. Nearly half a million working-age people in the City are officially without work. The majority of the relief for those people has come from federal or state sources. (And even those small emergency state-run initiatives, such as job retraining programs, have only affected the lives of mere hundreds.)
What people were voting against, in one way or another, was about being left behind. It was about financial inequity. What every New Yorker knows is that the City ran amok with the cost of housing, while home prices increased 77% between 2002 and 2007, and while, in 2007, the median household income in New York City was still only $48,631. The skew of the top 1% of earners very nearly did the City in—before the top 1% did itself in.
Bloomberg's biggest problem with voters, and the reason that he actually very nearly lost yesterday, to a man who could barely run a campaign, is that people believe that the rich side with the rich—and yes, even when the rich also sponsor massive charitable giving. The Bloomberg bad bargaining policies of million-dollar real estate kickbacks for corporate real estate, and the administration's failure to reach its goals in affordable housing, rankle with the middle class for a reason: these policies create larger inequity each year.
And now, we believe that the goals of the Bloomberg third term are to restore the City to the planned outcome of his first term, before the crash—a place of ever-growing division between rich and poor. His outrageous $100-million-plus campaign only served to reinforce the impression regarding who he really represents.
Love that Napoleon chart. Did you see this?
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/02/xkcd-charts-characters-from-lotr-star-wars-jurassic-park-more-i-waste-my-morning/
Me too. A friend of mine has it hanging on his wall.
Three terms? New kid on the block. Try a Daley or two sometime. Long-term benevolent despotism gets things done.
Just not things that help average working people.
Have fun being a lame duck third-termer Bloomberg! The history of New York City mayoral third terms is not a happy one!
And what exactly would Thompson have done for working families? Maybe if you are in the Transit Workers Union, Thompson would have been a good choice.
Maggie Daley has given us average working people a bunch of flower beds next to the streets. That helps!
Counterpoint: Todd Stroger.
A newspaper reporter doing a roundtable on NY1 years ago noted that Bloomberg ran after campaign finance limits were imposed in NYC races. She opined that because real estate interests could no longer buy politicians, they just decided to run one of their own for office.
Everything you say is true, Choire, but do you think that Thompson would have done a damn thing about any of it? The Wall Street-real estate elite have controlled economic policy in the city for at least a century, and the broad outlines of it barely change from mayor to mayor. Deindustrialization has been city policy since at least the first zoning plan of 1913. The master plans of 1929, 1969, and 1987 were about subsidizing finance and other fancy service industries and clearing the way for the real estate development that enables them. Even if he had an imagination or a will, Thompson would have neither the popular base nor the institutional power to change it. In fact, there's almost no one in political life in NYC that's even talking about these issues.
So you're saying the city of the future was left behind, and the city of yesterday seized the future. Wow.
Also, Economy and Jobs (40%) and Education (16%) came in way above Housing (9%), and Bloomberg one both categories handily.
One=won, obvs
Mike Bloomberg is his own biggest charity case.
Excellent post, but you missed the most important point: city debt and budget. Forgivable, as most Wall Street types, including Bloomberg, miss that every day…
The Bloomberg terms have seen a string of years with record tax revenue. With decades of finance experience and rich-man wisdom, any prudent mayor would have used those years to build up a bad-times war chest and reduce debt. While there would still be pain from the depression, we could weather the tax shortfall, because we would already have been used to spending only 70-75% of tax revenues, and our interest expense on debt would be down A LOT.
This is Bloomberg's legacy. While I did vote for Thompson, and I'm glad to see the results weren't completely "White Men Can't Jump", deep down, I'm glad Bloomberg forced his way into the next 4 years in office. He will now reap what he has sown, as opposed to passing the buck.
Thompson will thank his lucky stars he didn't win this one, even more so because he was so close. He has all but guaranteed the Democratic nomination next time around. He has four years to learn how to be an alpha (his concession speech showed the first traces of this), and then he can swoop down on the ashes of what remains of NYC in four years and be the savior as opposed to the patsy.
He did put aside $2.5 billion of that money to pay for future retirement benefits, no small thing.
Great coverage, Awl.
I can't help but think that Bloomberg really hurt himself with that extended presidential flirtation a couple of years back. Remember? When guys like Steve Rattner were calling him "the greatest mayor of New York since Fiorello La Guardia"?
If Bloomberg wants to be a Daley-esque Mayor for Life, he's really going to need to focus on the city itself — solving its problems, yes, but also creating a political machine that works to entrench his interests every day. Calling up hired guns like Howard Wolfson every three years won't cut it when he actually faces a formidable opponent, as I think he will in 2012.
http://rumorsontheinternets.org/2009/11/04/a-tale-of-two-mayors/
No way he's running in 4 years. And his day-to-day political operation in the city is quite good.
The $250M in charity in at least part was in support of his political career, as it bought different interests groups off. He escalated his charitable giving dramatically when he first started thinking about running for office.
And it is kind of true about third terms, and I'll make this prediction now: NYC will break you before you leave office, Mike.
Great post. I'm glad I got out of that hellhole of a city when I did.
I wish you would have taken us with you. Just me and my husband. And our two cats.
New York unemployment is on the rise, but conditions vary throughout the state according to this heat map:
http://www.localetrends.com/st/ny_new_york_unemployment.php?MAP_TYPE=curr_ue