Michael Bloomberg's New York

The other electoral amusement coming soon is Mayor Bloomberg’s assault on City Hall powered by limitless campaign funds from his own pocket. What does it feel like, I wonder, to reach in, pull out $60 or $80 million and say to your team, Here, go get yourself a ham sandwich?

I venture to guess that most New Yorkers heading to the polls will feel somewhat conflicted about the mayor, unlike the feelings generated by, say, mayors Giuliani or Koch or even Dinkins in their respective days. We can all point to something good he has done, like getting smoking out of restaurants or increasing the number of bike lanes.

But there’s also the creepy sensation of having something like a Restoration regime in our city government. Bloomberg doesn’t have any heirs or known girlfriends (he may like guys, for all we know), so there’s apparently no danger of saddling ourselves with a nouveau monarchy à la Kim Jong-il. However, the fact that he could buy half of lower Manhattan puts even his supporters on the defensive.

What you constantly hear from the few people interested in discussing the mayoral race is the standard defense of an elite or aristocratic class, that they aren’t corrupt because they have no need to be. Last night I heard someone offer this insouciant endorsement: ‘It’s his money, so he just decides what he wants and doesn’t have to answer to anybody’.

This is a good thing? I had thought answering to people was somehow embedded in the idea of electing our governing officials rather than giving them life-time sinecures based on their titles, their landholdings, their numbers of serfs, or their ability to analyze the classical poets in Mandarin using 13-stroke characters.

Furthermore, it is simply not true that the super-rich or the high-born are less corrupt than grasping tradesmen still climbing the social ladder. They just do it differently. Bloomberg has plenty of bad habits involving land developers, city contractors and the like, and his origins in the business mega-deal and the quick assembly of staggeringly over-dimensioned fortunes do not give him a healthy outlook. His plans for a West Side football stadium and his backing of the highly dubious plans for the Brooklyn Navy Yards conjured the ghost of bad old Robert Moses and luckily blew up in both cases, either as a result of opposition in Albany or last autumn’s overall collapse.

Bloomberg’s challenger, Comptroller William Thompson, is the sort of cozy, clubby machine candidate who belongs in another era and wouldn’t be recognized on the street by three-quarters of the city’s residents whose money he now oversees. He said in a televised debate that he would ‘bring in his own people’ to the city government, which sounds alarmingly like very old-fashioned patronage. Not that anyone was paying much attention.

Finally, there is the nagging issue of Bloomberg’s gross abuse of the democratic process by buying his way to a third term after the people of New York voted TWICE not to permit them. I’ll be shocked if Bloomberg doesn’t get his way, but his arrogance should cost him a sizeable piece of his victory margin. And his inventory of goodwill could dissipate very quickly if things don’t perk up around here in the next phase of his reign.