While Failing to Connect Thompson Keeps Jabbing

By RICHARD STEIER Bill Thompson seems to have missed the message implicit in a phrase popularized by two Democrats who made longshot candidacies pay off, Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins: “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.”

It means that while eventually you’re going to have to deal with the realities of holding high office, you can get there by convincing voters you have a plan and the strength of personality to bring it to fruition if they trust you.

The City Comptroller never really offered that kind of narrative, however; not on the campaign trail, not in two debates with Mayor Bloomberg in which it could be argued that he won each time on points. The problem in those debates wasn’t just that he never knocked the Mayor down, never mind out; if anyone kissed the canvas, it was Mr. Thompson at his own hand.

Thumbs Up for Espada, Down for Mayor

THE WORDS WITHOUT THE MUSIC: During their second debate, City Comptroller Bill Thompson continued to make the case against his opponent’s re-election without explaining enough why he could do as well or better if he were Mayor. In the first one, the most-memorable remark was Mr. Thompson’s “yes” when asked by NY1 political anchor Dominic Carter whether Pedro Espada was a better State Senate Majority Leader than Joe Bruno. Both men are tarnished by suspicions of corruption, but the double-dealing Mr. Espada has the added baggage of being associated with the peak of dysfunction that Albany never quite reached with Mr. Bruno calling the shots.

At last week’s debate in WABC-TV’s studios, it was an unforced error that left the Comptroller sounding absurd: asked to grade Mr. Bloomberg’s tenure, he said he’d be “kind” and gave him a D-minus.

This placed him in company with extremists at both ends of the ideological spectrum, which would not exactly help Mr. Thompson harvest votes from those in between who may be angry about Mr. Bloomberg’s term limits maneuver but not to the point where they’ve lost all sense of proportion.

A colleague of mine with little love for the Mayor said he would have given him “a strong C, with room for improvement.”

And Communications Workers of America Local 1180 President Arthur Cheliotes, who is sufficiently anti-Bloomberg that he spent $500,000 in dues money on scathing TV ads that present the incumbent, literally and figuratively, in an unflattering light, was even more generous.

“Maybe a B,” he said the morning after the Oct. 27 debate, “only because he’s not Rudy Giuliani.”

Mr. Bloomberg, having been handed a gift by his opponent in the form of a critique too harsh to be taken seriously, handled it adeptly. First he was gracious, telling the TV audience that the man who had just low-balled him had been “a reasonably good Comptroller. . . I [just] don’t think that he’s the right guy to run the city.” By the morning after, his campaign had a new TV ad running that responded to Mr. Thompson’s assessment by contrasting it with the praise lavished upon the Mayor by the Times and Daily News when they endorsed him, and touting his record on crime and education.

Of course you can’t believe everything you read in the papers, especially when they state, as the News did, that Mr. Bloomberg had made good on his promise to give voters more choice by amending the Term Limits Law without bothering to ask them. Given that claim, the News showed remarkable restraint in not pointing out that 40 years ago, Mr. Bloomberg boosted civic life when he helped the Jets win the Super Bowl and the Mets the World Series in the same year.

But in throttling the Mayor for making the “more choice” claim two weeks ago, our virtually certain next Comptroller, John Liu, declared, “He took away our choice.”

Thompson’s Missed Opportunities

He meant that at least a couple of Democrats and a couple of Republicans who were considering running bowed out once Mr. Bloomberg jumped back in. But that also had the effect of giving Mr. Thompson a smooth path to his party’s nomination. Mr. Bloomberg presented a more-forbidding obstacle than any of those who packed it in, but the reservoir of bad will created by his stampeding the City Council into amending the Term Limits Law left him vulnerable to someone who could offer a compelling vision of the city that perhaps leaned more toward ordinary New Yorkers than—as some have accused Mr. Bloomberg of doing—making it easier for large businesses and the wealthy to thrive here.

Mr. Thompson never made that case strongly enough, however. In both debates, he sometimes scored with jabs at mayoral policies or effectively parried Mr. Bloomberg’s shots at his record as President of the old Board of Education, but he got too bogged down in those tactics to say enough—and do it interestingly—about how he could run the city better.

He spoke last Tuesday about the need to “close the affordability gap,” using jargon rather than offering concrete examples of how he would manage it or what any Mayor could do on that front. While he spoke about the million-plus residents who left the city during Mr. Bloomberg’s time as Mayor, he never mentioned those who came to take their place or why this was a more-ominous development than it’s been in the past.

I remember working for the 1980 U.S. Cen- sus and interviewing a neighbor in Carroll Gardens who had grown up and raised her own family there and was worried that her children wouldn’t be able to afford to live in the area once they got old enough to leave her apartment. Not long after, graffiti like “Die Yuppie Scum” appeared in the Carroll St. subway station. But while there was some displacement, the neighborhood thrived, and continues to do so, with a stretch along Smith St. that was once considered dangerous after dark now home to a kind of Restaurant Row.

‘He Didn’t Paint a Picture’

“This argument of a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ long preceded this Mayor,” political consultant George Arzt noted. “You could paint a picture of people struggling in this city with taxes; Billy didn’t do that. Enunciate a vision that economic development will not be about a sports stadium or cleaning up Willets Point, but [rather] building housing and developing the World Trade Center area and the Farley Post Office as the new Moynihan Station.”

Mr. Thompson didn’t do that either. It may have made sense for him in the first debate, Mr. Arzt said, to come out slugging and knock the Mayor off his pedestal to convince viewers that he could be tougher than his reputation, but it was a tactical error to use their second encounter primarily to “blame Bloomberg for everything under the sun. He doesn’t give anyone a reason to vote for him, and he needed to do that.”

Mr. Thompson made some resonant points during the debate. He questioned the progress the Mayor has claimed in education, contending that students are “being taught to take standardized tests. They’re not being taught comprehension and critical thinking.”

But his call for an analytical approach that went deeper than can be measured by exam scores was contradicted by his response when asked how he would avoid raising taxes to pay for some of the programs he has proposed. He cited the $9 billion the city currently spends on contracted services, but the man whose job should make it natural to analyze numbers offered no estimate as to how much money could actually be saved by shifting some of that work in-house or ending the no-bid contracts he said were common in the Department of Education.

City’s Transit Cuts Unmentioned

He pledged to use mayoral appointments to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board to give “activist riders” a platform, contending, “We’re shortchanged by Albany every day.” He never mentioned, however, the way the city’s own contribution to mass transit has sharply diminished beginning with Rudy Giuliani and continuing under Mr. Bloomberg.

And when Mr. Bloomberg said that transit workers deserved more money but “the MTA doesn’t have the money” to cover an arbitration award it is appealing with the Mayor’s support, he handed Mr. Thompson a ripe opportunity. But rather than pointing out that the appeal was unlikely to accomplish anything other than to make workers wait for a raise that was decided in a fair and supposedly binding process, and that this was another case in which the Mayor deviated from his normal respect for the governmental system because the result didn’t suit his purposes, the Comptroller let the moment pass.

Cites Mayor’s Kerik Flirtation

He got off one of his better lines when he was asked why he planned if elected to replace Ray Kelly as Police Commissioner, given his success in reducing crime even as the size of the force has come down by close to 5,000 officers. Mr. Thompson noted that Mr. Bloomberg’s professed first choice for the job was “Bernie Kerik, who’s now sitting in jail.”

But a better answer would have been that as strong as Mr. Kelly has been, he was replaced once before by a new Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the crime reduction that began under Mr. Kelly during the last two years of David Dinkins’s Mayoralty accelerated with Bill Bratton as Police Commissioner.

Mr. Giuliani eventually forced out Mr. Bratton for deflecting too much of the spotlight he believed should be trained solely on himself, but former Mayor Ed Koch used to acknowledge that there were people in his administration who were smarter than him but his talent lay in picking those people and utilizing them well.

Mr. Thompson never tried to make such an argument in explaining why he deemed the formidable Mr. Kelly expendable, and he offered no examples of people who have worked for him in either the Comptroller’s Office or at the Board of Education who went on to bigger things. When Mr. Bloomberg, parrying criticism by Mr. Thompson that his administration focused too much on luxury housing, pointed out that his affordable housing program was validated by President Obama hiring away Housing Commissioner Sean Donovan, all the Comptroller could muster in reply was that the agency “dropped the ball” by not supporting the successful tenant lawsuits against the operators of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

A Seller vs. a Buyer?

And so it went. Mr. Bloomberg criticized him for a “pay to play” culture in which placement agents that got city investment business returned the favor by donating to Mr. Thompson’s political fund; the Comptroller retorted by accusing the Mayor of “pay to endorse” politics in which he bolstered his support in the black community by getting the endorsement of Newark Mayor Corey Booker, who not so coincidentally received a $26,000 campaign contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s private accountant.

Even giving as good as he got, Mr. Thompson was letting the fight slip away, trading punches rather than scoring at the Mayor’s expense on the last occasion the two men would square off face to face.

At the end of the debate, he spoke about the opportunities he had enjoyed, as the child of a city Teacher and a state judge, and lamented, “That opportunity appears to be eroding and closing.”

His appeal didn’t seem visceral enough, however. If anything, his father’s success in Brooklyn political and legal circles blunted any drama that might have existed regarding Mr. Thompson’s life story by suggesting that getting to this point had not involved a major struggle on his part.

A Hunger Gap

It’s been abundantly clear how much Mr. Bloomberg wants to continue as Mayor from the time that he circumvented two voter referendums to get his shot at a third term, punctuated by spending that has already eclipsed a level he himself deemed “obscene” prior to seeking his second term.

Mr. Thompson, for better or worse, came up to Election Day without offering evidence that he wanted the job with the same urgency, or believed in his ability to do it strongly enough to convince voters to give him his shot.