Note: This post first appeared at PinkoMag.com.
Lets play a little game. I’m going to tell you why I’m not voting for Michael Bloomberg for Mayor, and if you disagree than you can tell me in the comments why I should. Ready? Good.
For starters, I’m someone who is totally, completely open to Mayor Bloomberg. I like him. There are a few things I really like about him:
- His environmental initiatives, from empowering his planning director to make the city more bike/pedestrian friendly to his efforts to pass congestion pricing, and to dramatically expand renewable power. This is a piece I wrote praising his wind-power proposals just last year.
- His courage nationally on gun control, and in trying to keep guns out of the city.
- The way he never freaks out when something insane happens, like when they exposed that plot to blow up JFK airport and he told the press “You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life.” That was awesome.
- 311. I called it once and then we got trees! That was great.
- When that groundhog bit him. That was great too.
Overall, the city (okay, Manhattan) has weathered the recession well. New York remains a thriving and bustling place to live. It’s still safe, taxes and the business climate are still reasonable. We’re hanging in there, and the Mayor has been a good steward of the city.
So even though I’m a far-left Democrat, and the idea of voting for a Republican (he is the Republican nominee, don’t forget) is repugnant, I am one of those progressives who has been charmed enough by the City’s prosperity and the Mayor’s attempts at visionary environmental policy that I was open to voting for him a third time.
So how did he lose me? Three reasons:
(1) The Rudy Giuliani Mailers. I’m a Democrat. I edit a blog called Pinko. I donated money to Barack Obama, to Hillary Clinton, to local Democratic politicians and to the Working Families Party. All of my emails to the Mayor have been in favor of progressive causes. Most of this information is public record.
So if you’re running a well-funded effort like Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign, there is no way that you don’t know from your list segmentation that I’m a very liberal Democrat. So why do I keep getting mailers for Mayor Mike touting the endorsement of the one person in New York whose judgement I absolutely, completely abhor, Rudy Giuliani? Three mailers! “Mike Bloomberg earned my vote.” Well well well. See, Mr. Mayor, now you’ve done it. I see that and I start asking questions:
What, exactly, did Mayor Mike do to earn Rudy Giuliani’s vote?
Why do Rudy and I share a common view here?
Why would a campaign with literally as much money as a national Presidential bid not be able to properly slice and dice their lists so that they send appropriate mailers to the appropriate audience. Why would they send me the second and third Giuliani emails when I emailed them after the first?
I’ve worked on political campaigns and I know the science of communicating with potential voters, and how high-tech list segmentation can be. Either they don’t know they keep sending me an endorsement from the one person that would absolutely piss me off, or they don’t care. If they don’t know, it’s a badly run campaign. If they don’t care, well, fuck you too.
(2) The complete and total subversion of democracy. I have always believed, perhaps naively, that in a democracy the problems we face are always greater than one person. Giuliani wanted to be extended as Mayor after 9-11. He said that we needed him, that you don’t change Generals in the middle of a war. That argument was offensive, and Bloomberg himself opposed it. New York did just fine. But now that we’re in the midst of the financial crisis, Bloomberg told us the same thing: that we need him. He is essential to us surviving the recession.
It was BAD when he made his play to overturn term-limits. It was WORSE when he did it not by referendum or voter choice, but City Council fiat. Last week he wouldn’t rule out, in an interview with NY 1, running in 2013. The whole thing is shady, it’s egomaniacal, and if he wanted term limits overturned, he had a lot of valid points and he could have presented them to the voters.
(3) He can’t get the big things done. When I look at my bulleted list above (and I LOVE a bulleted list) I can almost convince myself to vote for the Mayor. But the reality is that the visionary, big-picture projects haven’t been accomplished. Congestion pricing failed, not just because Albany wouldn’t allow it but also because the Mayor wasn’t able to win over key allies in the outer boroughs, or make a persuasive public case. The Penn Station overhaul? Didn’t happen. West Side Redevelopment, Atlantic Yards, downtown/ground zero? No, no no. They’re worse than failures actually – in the case of Atlantic Yards, the entire project has been stripped down to the bare essentials needed for the developer to make back his investment – a cookie-cutter arena and some over-priced condos. The features that could remake a city, or that showed some innovation have been stripped away.
In a vacuum you could argue that none of these are his fault. But the pattern is clear. Like the Yankee’s Alex Rodriguez, Mayor Bloomberg can’t win the big one. Congestion pricing was his World Series; West Side redevelopment and Penn Station were his League Championship Series; but even with the biggest contract in the game, he couldn’t get it done. (Rodriguez, I should note, plays in a new stadium built with over a billion dollars in city subsidies, but without the parkland mitigation promised to the community.)
Now that the economy has soured, his third term agenda doesn’t include any big ideas. He’s not promising to restart the congestion pricing debate, or to get major new projects off the ground. His big announcement this week was a series of transit improvements that, as the Times reported, he is almost completely powerless to implement.
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So what, exactly, are we getting? What was so important that we had to overturn term limits? It’s hard to tell from the Mayor’s own campaign website – there is no “agenda” or “issues” section. His third term plans are tacked on to the end of his two-term accomplishments in a section called “Mike’s Record,” an html rendering of his basic rationale for re-election: vote for the Mayor because he’s been the Mayor and wants to keep being the Mayor.
I have other qualms about the Mayor. On education, friends who are teachers and have worked on education reform believe very deeply that the Mayor’s approach to schools – a technocratic, teach to the test mentality – is the wrong direction, particularly in poorer neighborhoods.
Bloomberg’s opponent, City Comptroller William Thompson is gaining in the polls. In spite of the Bloomberg’s mammoth fundraising advantage, Thompson’s inroads with Labor, blacks, Democrats and some Bloomberg progressives like me has brought him within striking distance – a recent poll showed the race at 47-37 Bloomberg.
After researching both candidates, I found Thompson impressive. Not inspiring, but impressive. As Comptroller, he has played a wonkish but important role in the City’s prosperity over the last seven years, managing New York’s investments well and increasing opportunities for women and minority-owned businesses. He has mostly been a supporter of Mayor Bloomberg’s stewardship of the city, while taking additional steps to help harder-hit areas of New York understand the financial crisis. He has also been a fierce defender of the prevailing wage and many union priorities, which are important to me and which probably helped him score the endorsement of the Working Families Party.
His plans for the next four years are solid, but not visionary. He has good ideas about how to use the city’s purchasing & investment power to support sustainable and environmentally-sound businesses. He has been vocal about expanding access to affordable housing, and about the controversial rent increases proposed by the Rent Guidelines Board in June. My sense is that Thompson will be a stronger advocate for areas of the city that have not weathered the economic downturn as well, and for low-income families in New York. I’m not from those areas or part of one of those families, but I think that we can be doing more to improve the quality of life throughout the city.
Accordingly, I gave my first $25 to Comptroller Thompson this week. It probably brought his total to about $225.50, but I feel good about it.
The bottom line for me is the term limit issue in relation to the Mayor’s track record. If Mayor Bloomberg was in the middle of a grand effort to remake the city, or if a range of key initiatives hung in the balance, I could see a case for keeping him around. I also wonder what would have happen if he had become a Democrat. Would it have helped pass congestion pricing, especially if the Mayor had worked to engage the national environmental and progressive machinery in making it happen, as a model for the rest of the country? We’ll never know.
But as things stand now, Mayor Mike has overturned the rules, antagonized me with his campaign, and what he’s promising is simply his continuing, albeit steady, stewardship of the city. But Comptroller Thompson is promising essentially the same thing, with a greater focus on all of New York. If we’re going to change the political framework of our city; and if I’m going to vote for a Republican, lets do it for a set of goals that will yield a defining moment in the history of New York. The Mayor has done a good job, but his rationale for sticking around doesn’t pass reasonable doubt. For me, it’s just not enough.
