Bloomberg As Savior: The Good Hubris Man

As Mayor Bloomberg described it Oct. 2, by orchestrating an extension of the city Term Limits Law without involving the voters, he was actually striking a blow for democracy by giving them a broader choice for his job next year.

The value of this could be seen by the way in which he has personally grown when it comes to the subject of term limits. Not that long ago, when some City Council Members were talking about approving an extension without resorting to the public referendum process by which the law was first approved in 1993 and then reaffirmed three years later, Mr. Bloomberg called it "disgusting."

His view on the subject has been made considerably more benign by the city's fiscal problems and his apparent conviction — driven home to him by editorials in the city's three general interest dailies after he solicited their good favor — that he alone among the potential candidates for Mayor next year is up to the task.

The Unproclaimed Steamroller

"It's not that I think anyone is indispensable," the Mayor told reporters in the City Hall Blue Room, then offered a couple of reasons why other people might believe he is. "We've become a poster child for how to reform education," he said. "Our crime rate is something we can be proud of."

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow BLOOMBERG UNLIMITED: Mayor Bloomberg insisted he was not subverting the will of the voters by asking the City Council rather than the public through a referendum to amend the Term Limits Law so he could run once more in 2009. 'The charter allows the Council to change the law, and it does not favor one method of adoption over another,' he said.

And lest anybody get the idea that he was living up to Eliot Spitzer's self-characterization in an attempt to steamroll the democratic process, Mr. Bloomberg added, "The public here, remember, is not being forced to take a new Mayor." Certainly not, if the current one could force himself into the driver's seat for another term.

That doesn't mean Mr. Bloomberg is a sure thing to win re-election, but it certainly improves his chances if the City Council proceeds, as expected, to pass a bill permitting city officials to seek a third four-year term.

After all, in a referendum, Mr. Bloomberg would be asking the voters to weigh his record and sense of public spiritedness against their own judgment during the 1990s that too much of any city official was a bad thing. Maybe he prevails, maybe he doesn't, but if the electorate upheld a dubious law in 1996 after it had a chance to think about it, it might reserve the right to be wrong once again. Any doubts on that subject should be torpedoed by the reminder that George Bush got a second term, and that time with more votes than his opponent.

Skipping the referendum by signing a Council bill into law might earn him the ire of most of the good-government groups in town, but their usual public clarion, the editorial page of the New York Times, is in lockstep with the Daily News and the New York Post in insisting that, just this once, we should dispense with past protocol and the normal process for doing things because of the desperate times in which we live. (Never mind that the last time those three giants of journalism were on the same page for the same reason, it helped bring us the invasion of Iraq.)

By doing it this way, Mr. Bloomberg has an advantage that goes beyond the reality that Rupert Murdoch exerts greater influence over public opinion than the Citizens Union. Rather than running against the public's ideal of what government should look like, he will be competing against a real-life opponent, whether it be Bill Thompson, Anthony Weiner, or players to be named. Each of them will lack Mr. Bloomberg's achievements in the office they are seeking, and each will have definable weaknesses, some of which they may be unaware of before his estimable bankroll starts shaping public consciousness.

Dream Job May Offer Sleepless Nights

But if allowing the city's movers, shakers and opinion-makers to set the table for him has given Mr. Bloomberg's run the air of a coronation — the front page of the Post Sept. 30 depicted him wearing a crown — one former adviser said he deserved credit for wanting to remain on the throne as a financial plague closes in on the kingdom.

"Whoever is elected is going to be making some very unpopular but necessary cuts," said political consultant Maureen Connelly, who worked for Mr. Bloomberg during his 2001 campaign. "It's a gutsy move on his part — he could've gone out on a high rather than risking a third term."

A less-benign interpretation of the impulse propelling him to step forward as the best possible steward of the city when the deficit hits the fan is that Mr. Bloomberg reached the conclusion that none of those who were seeking to succeed him had the ability to carry on.

The one potential mayoral candidate who made clear that she is now setting her sights on keeping her current job, Council Speaker Christine Quinn, brushed off that implication, arguing that the Council deserved equal credit with him for taking the necessary steps to batten down the financial hatches last year rather than insisting on major expansions of services using a large budget surplus.

In an artful attempt to turn what could be viewed as a no-confidence vote into a call to arms, she said, "The Mayor feels the team we have is a very good team ... and has the ability and the constraint and the vision to lead in bad fiscal times."

'1180' Head: It's Self-Serving

Others saw neither compliments nor altruism in the move. "It's very self-serving," said Communications Workers of America Local 1180 President Arthur Cheliotes, who has had preliminary discussions with the group seeking to launch a campaign and possibly a lawsuit against the Council bill substituting for a referendum. "He's done an alright job as Mayor, but when 3,000 people were killed we didn't think it was necessary to keep Rudy Giuliani as Mayor. We need to understand who runs the city: it's the consent of the governed."

That view is shared by Norman Siegel, the veteran civil rights attorney who plans to make a second run for Public Advocate regardless of whether a change in the law would make the incumbent, Betsy Gotbaum, eligible to seek a third term.

"There's no one better than Mike Bloomberg to watch the money of the City of New York," Mr. Siegel said a day prior to the Mayor's official declaration. "But let the next Mayor appoint him as financial czar. This argument that there's no one else who could do this? Hogwash."

Whether a viable candidate can make a strong run against Mr. Bloomberg is another story, Mr. Siegel said, which was why he wasn't convinced that Mr. Thompson, despite his insistence that he was in the mayoral race to stay, wouldn't ultimately take the safer path to a third term as Comptroller and wait an extra four years to try to move across Centre St. and into City Hall.

'How Do You Run Against $85M?'

Mr. Weiner has "nothing to lose" by running, Mr. Siegel noted, since it would not require giving up his seat in Congress, although a second unsuccessful bid for Mayor could create a perception that he's not a strong-enough candidate to win a citywide campaign. "And the other problem is," he remarked, "how do you run against a guy who's prepared to spend $85 million?"

Both those arguments would have been in play if Mr. Bloomberg had gone through the usual referendum process: appoint a Charter Commission, have it hold public hearings, and then make recommendations for placement on the ballot. That is what rankles more than a few people: that if he had played the term-limits game by the rules in place during the past 15 years, the odds would still have been strongly in favor of his getting the chance to seek a third term and then winning it.

And if Mr. Bloomberg truly decided too late that he wanted to take the shot to be able to get the charter process rolling in time to get the referendum onto the Nov. 4 election ballot — according to one person familiar with the rules, it would have required presenting the Charter Commission's ballot language to the City Clerk by the first week in September — he was not precluded, even now, from scheduling a referendum vote in February at the same time that special elections for City Council seats would be held if members seeking other offices win their races in November.

"Special elections have their own problems," Mr. Bloomberg told reporters. He didn't elaborate, but the Times editorial noted they generally attract very low turnouts.

All Depends What's on Ballot

Then again, so do off-year elections, and for the same reason: they are known as "off year" because little of significance is on the ballot. Regardless of the weather, the first Tuesday in November this year will produce turnout that will dwarf that on the same day in 2007 because of the presidential race; by the same token, a high-stakes referendum on term limits affecting the mayoralty would be bound to sharply increase voter participation no matter what month the vote was held.

As the Mayor made his announcement, three Deputy Mayors who counseled him against taking this route — Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey and Ed Skyler — stood against the wall to his left. The Mayor said he welcomed discussion from his top staffers but that "the bottom line is we face some tough times."

He insisted ego had played no role in his decision to seek another term, and that he was undaunted by the past history of mayoral third terms, much of which he said he was unfamiliar with. Fiorello La Guardia and Robert F. Wagner are both distant memories, but the most-recent Mayor whose third term was disappointing, Ed Koch, is friendly with Mr. Bloomberg and has pledged to support him in his next run. If he suggested that there were any inherent pitfalls in staying too long in the job, Mr. Bloomberg obviously didn't take them to heart.

Mr. Siegel said the problem that he and other opponents of the move have is not connected to any notion that the third term is never the charm, or Mr. Bloomberg himself. "It's gotta be about the principle, not the personality," he said.

'Democracy About Controversy'

From the Mayor's standpoint, though, the principle was clearly secondary to his sense of urgency — whether about the looming financial crisis or what he wants to do with his life beyond 2009, only he could say.

In response to a reporter's question about his choosing the most-controversial way possible to seek a third term, he said, "Everything we do is controversial. That's what democracy is about."

It's just that he views democracy from a higher elevation than the average citizen, if only because his money and the fact that he earned it have given Mr. Bloomberg a certain sense of entitlement. In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg spent $75 million to capture the mayoralty — in last week's New York Magazine he volunteered that he won the election primarily because of that spending and his opponent, Mark Green, having "self-destructed."

He argued at the time that outspending his opponent by nearly 5 to 1 was the only way he could level the playing field in terms of name recognition and the advantages a Democratic nominee enjoyed over a Republican in the city. After taking office, he said that given the powers of incumbency, it would be obscene for him to spend that much on his bid for re-election. So he didn't: he spent $85 million in 2005.

New Yorkers forgave him for his forked tongue then because his first-term performance had been strong and his Democratic opponent, Freddy Ferrer, ran a less-than-inspiring campaign.

Poll Shows Voter Ambivalence

A Marist poll issued the day of Mr. Bloomberg's announcement indicated voters were decidedly ambivalent about his bypassing the referendum route: though 68 percent of them looked favorably on the job he is doing, they were virtually evenly divided on whether he should be allowed to seek a third term. And that poll did not make a distinction between using a voter referendum as the vehicle for that run or bypassing the public until the election itself.

"I think in the end, Bloomberg carries the day because he's so popular," political consultant George Arzt said.

On the other hand, Mr. Koch was nearly as popular, coming off an overwhelming victory giving him a second term as Mayor beginning in 1982, when he suddenly got the idea, with more than a bit of encouragement from the Post and Mr. Murdoch, to run for Governor.

His entry into the race seemed to make the election such a foregone conclusion that several potential contenders to succeed Gov. Hugh Carey, including the then-frontrunner, Stanley Fink, swiftly changed their plans. The one notable exception was the Lieutenant Governor, Mario Cuomo, but Mr. Koch had handily defeated him for Mayor in 1977. Compounding Mr. Cuomo's problems at that time was that Mr. Carey — who had propelled him into the mayoral race — by this time was publicly disparaging him.

Koch Suffered Backlash

But Mr. Cuomo, with the support of a few key unions, from District Council 37 to the Civil Service Employees Association, emerged as the clear alternative to his old foe, and Mr. Koch was tripped up by an interview he did with Playboy prior to announcing for Governor in which he mocked rural life as boring and unimaginative. Even in New York City, where those comments didn't offend residents, voters were put off by his decision to set his sights on Albany immediately after getting a new term as Mayor.

The result was a surprisingly easy primary victory for Mr. Cuomo, who rolled up comfortable margins in the suburbs and upstate. Mr. Koch narrowly won New York City, but "not by what we expected," recalled Jerry Skurnik, who served as his campaign's director of field operations.

Mr. Koch's reaction afterwards was that "the voters punished me" for wanting to leave as Mayor. Mr. Bloomberg may figure it's unlikely they'll look to punish him for wanting to stay. Certainly Mr. Koch believes that, saying the day after his announcement, "I think people are delighted that he wants to run. They need somebody right here who has the strength and the integrity and the experience and the courage."

But Mr. Siegel said, "I think it could boomerang. New Yorkers don't like seeing people go back on their word. That's what they expect from politicians."