When Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor in 2001, New Yorkers had little idea what to expect from him. A liberal Democrat by disposition turned Republican by opportunity, the billionaire media baron had no previous political experience. He had used his fortune to conduct a stealth campaign, bombarding the public with direct mailings and television advertising and making virtually no unscripted appearances. Wrapped only in the halo of outgoing mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s belated endorsement, and widely expected to lose, the would-be mayor was barely questioned, let alone tested, before he took office.
In the immediate wake of 9/11, Bloomberg’s conciliatory and willfully apolitical style turned out to be well suited to the city’s sense of trauma. The political neophyte seemed to promise Giuliani-like results without the ex-prosecutor’s abrasive, stentorian style. Now, halfway through his tenure and with talk of the next mayoral election already in the air, Bloomberg has a record and an established public personality. He is far more of a known quantity, even if much of what can now be said about him is neither especially flattering nor encouraging for the future of New York.
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To his credit, and despite his sometimes graceless efforts to escape his predecessor’s shadow, Bloomberg has consolidated and even extended a number of Giuliani’s most important achievements. Contrary to the expectations of many commentators, there has been no increase in crime in New York City, nor a renewed sense of urban dread and menace. In fact, since Bloomberg took office, the crime rate has dropped a further 10 percent, thanks in no small measure to the latitude that he has given to his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. Moreover, as the mayor noted in his recent State of the City address, “We’ve done all this while protecting the nation’s most important city against the constant threat of terror.”
Bloomberg has also built upon the success of Compstat, the block-by-block breakdown of crime statistics that Giuliani instituted as a way to assign responsibility for public safety. Now the city has a similar system for quality-of-life problems, based on phoned-in complaints. By replicating the Compstat ethos of tracking data and quickly spotting undesirable trends, Bloomberg has made the city more responsive to the petty annoyances—potholes, noise violations, inadequate garbage pickups, cell-phone dead spots—that can make life in New York a daily trial.
Bloomberg’s most significant accomplishment to date has been winning back mayoral control of the city’s schools. For years, 110 Livingston Street, the Board of Education’s downtown Brooklyn address, had been shorthand for Byzantine bureaucracy and wanton waste. Giuliani had paved the way for the takeover with his tough talk about the need to “blow up” the Board of Education; but the former mayor’s enemies in Albany, where such decisions are made, refused to give him the victory. State lawmakers proved more receptive to Bloomberg’s calm and conciliatory style.
From a purely administrative point of view, Bloomberg’s reorganization of the schools has thus far been highly successful. Textbooks are delivered on time, and supplies are available. The powerful custodians’ union, which has been ripping off the city for years, is being brought to heel though the partial privatization of janitorial services. More important, a mayor can no longer hide behind the Board when schools perform poorly while stepping forward to take credit for any and all signs of educational progress. Bloomberg has repeatedly said that if he fails to reform the education system, he should be voted out of office—a commendable pledge of accountability.
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But there are other items than these on Bloomberg’s ledger sheet, and too many of them fall decidedly into the debit column. Though there is no denying the importance of his having won mayoral control of the schools, his use of that control with respect to the curriculum has been irresponsible, even reckless. As a candidate, Bloomberg spoke of the need for a back-to-basics approach to education. But the instructional program imposed by the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein (formerly the Justice Department’s lead counsel in the Microsoft case), is straight out of the left-wing fever swamps of Columbia Teachers College.
Advised by Diana Lam, a well-known advocate of “progressive” education, Klein abandoned a variety of phonics programs that had shown some success in improving reading scores, replacing them with a one-size-fits-all “whole language” approach that has a long history of failure. Worse, the literacy effort has been micromanaged from Klein’s office, which has told even experienced and successful teachers how to arrange every minute of their day and every inch of their classrooms. Blackboards, for example, are prohibited, as is arranging chairs in rows with the teacher in the front. (According to the slogan of progressive education, a teacher must act not as “a sage on the stage” but as a “guide on the side.”) This attack on pedagogical authority has even extended to school discipline, emboldening unruly students and generating a surge in violence against teachers.
Education aside, Bloomberg has expended valuable political capital on various pet causes. The most notorious of these has been his anti-smoking campaign. He used much of the good will of his honeymoon in office to pass a draconian law that banned smoking in bars and other heretofore unregulated places and dramatically raised the cigarette tax—an issue he had not mentioned as a candidate. The predictable result has been a new and violent black market in out-of-state cigarettes and vastly increased noise levels outside bars, some of which have lost considerable business. Even voters sympathetic to his cause were offended when the mayor promoted it by warning the citizenry, with missionary zeal, that “more people [would] die from second-hand smoke than were killed in the World Trade Center.”
A worthier effort, if one handled just as badly, was Bloomberg’s campaign in 2003 to persuade voters to approve a ballot initiative establishing nonpartisan elections for mayor and City Council. The proposal was hardly revolutionary. Nonpartisan elections—already in place in eight of the country’s ten largest cities—open up municipal government to a wider range of interests. In New York City, such a reform would help to break the powerful hold of the public-sector unions, whose highly organized members dominate the all-important Democratic primary.
But it takes time to explain how nonpartisanship would make elections more competitive and politicians more accountable. Bloomberg insisted on rushing the matter, placing it on the ballot only a few months after it was officially proposed by a charter commission that he had appointed. Trying to replicate the stealth tactics that had helped him win the mayoralty, he blitzed voters with a last-minute, $7.5-million direct-mail campaign. The results were predictable. Although nonpartisanship enjoyed a slight majority of support among the electorate as a whole, the 12 percent who bothered to vote in this off-year ballot—many of them drawn from the same pool of public-sector employees whose influence Bloomberg was trying to limit—defeated the proposal by a margin of more than 2 to 1. In what Dan Janison of Newsday called his “Evita moment,” the mayor declared that what mattered was not the outcome but the effort: “I was a big winner yesterday.”
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Even a reform as intelligent as nonpartisan elections is no substitute for dealing more directly with the public-sector interests that have long been the fiscal albatross around New York City’s neck. Like Giuliani before him, Bloomberg was given a poor economic hand. The city was in recession even before 9/11, and the new mayor was saddled with rising pension and Medicaid costs imposed during Giuliani’s boom years. He arrived in office facing a budget deficit of $4 billion.
But unlike Giuliani, Bloomberg played his poor hand poorly, especially in his dealings with his “friend,” Governor George Pataki, on one side and with the public-sector unions on the other. In both cases his watchword was “partnership”—in contrast, presumably, with Giuliani’s vaunted confrontationalism. Thus, lavishing praise on the Republican governor and donating $1 million of his personal money to the state GOP, Bloomberg went so far as to support an obviously unpopular fare hike imposed on the city’s buses and subways by the Pataki-controlled transportation authority. What he got in exchange was worse than nothing. Pataki refused Bloomberg’s reasonable request to help reinstate the city’s small but symbolically important commuter tax, while permitting him to raise the city’s sales and income taxes, already the highest in the region.
The story was similar with the public-sector unions. Perhaps the most dramatic incident occurred in December 2002, when Roger Toussaint, the radical president of the Transit Workers Union, threatened to strike rather than accept changes in work rules that would allow, among other things, subway cleaners to change light bulbs and do minor painting. Placed in a similar situation, Giuliani had made clear how much damage he could do to the union under the law; Bloomberg, instead, spoke plaintively of how much damage the union could do to the city. “A strike,” he said, “would be more than inconvenient. It would endanger human life and devastate our economy.” Toussaint largely got his way.
The pattern of behavior that Toussaint capitalized on had been set earlier. In what he declared to be a new “partnership” between the city and its public-sector unions, Bloomberg had announced, before even sitting down to bargaining sessions, that he would do everything he could to avoid layoffs. Where Giuliani had restrained hiring through a vacancy-control board, Bloomberg quickly abolished the board. Where Giuliani had used the threat of privatization to win concessions from unions, Bloomberg promised to avoid such measures wherever possible. He also made no effort to renegotiate the unions’ health, benefits, and pension plans, all of which are far more generous than similar plans in the private sector and in most other big cities.
In exchange for this new spirit of cooperation, Bloomberg expected good will from the other side. Naturally, it never materialized. But the mayor’s naive expectation was costly, causing him to wait almost a year before imposing any kind of serious controls on hiring and spending. The results were devastating for the city’s overall financial health. Where Giuliani reduced spending by 3 percent in his inaugural year, Bloomberg increased spending by almost as much—increments that amounted to much more than peanuts in New York City’s massive budget. As the Manhattan Institute’s E.J. McMahon has noted, if Bloomberg “had duplicated Rudy’s spending restraint in his first two fiscal years, the city would now be spending about $2.5 billion less, and most of Bloomberg’s tax and fee hikes wouldn’t have been necessary.”
That Bloomberg has, in fact, closed the city’s budget gap primarily through those “tax and fee hikes” has been especially galling to many who supported him. Bloomberg ran for office on a ringing pledge of no new taxes, confirming this in his first speech as mayor when he warned that higher taxes would only “drive people and business out of New York.” But within a year, he had sharply raised cigarette, sales, and income taxes. Over the noisy protests of middle-class homeowners in every borough, he also pushed through a whopping 21-percent increase in the property tax. All of these hikes, insisted the mayor of a city that was already the most taxed in the nation, were unavoidable.
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By the last quarter of 2003, Michael Bloomberg had achieved the unhappy distinction of possessing the lowest approval rating ever held by a modern mayor of New York. To explain his deep unpopularity, it is not enough, though, to catalogue his policy missteps. Bloomberg is disliked, even hated, not just because of what he has done but perhaps in equal measure because of how he has done it.
A self-made man who has accumulated a personal fortune of $4.5 billion, Bloomberg possesses an overweening self-confidence, acting at times as if it were demeaning to have to explain himself to others. Plainly, he is someone accustomed to having his word taken as law. But City Hall is a very different place from the boardroom, and rarely has a mayor shown himself, by temperament or forethought, to be less prepared to govern a major city.
Like Bloomberg, Giuliani had never held elected office prior to his victory in 1993. But Giuliani had spent years in the public sphere as a federal prosecutor. More important, he had already made one unsuccessful run for mayor, and after his defeat had gone to work studying every aspect of city policy. Once elected, Giuliani was single-minded in the performance of his job, immersing himself for eighteen hours a day in the details of government operations while at the same time keeping the big picture in sight.
What has stood out with Bloomberg, by contrast, is his aloofness, not just from the city (he often quietly escapes by private jet for weekends at his home in Bermuda) but from city government itself. Unlike his predecessor, he has neither taken a direct hand in running the city’s maze of bureaucracies nor tried to give specific guidance to his appointees. Moreover, for a hard-headed businessman who now presides over a budget larger than that of all but eight states, Bloomberg can seem appallingly naive. When he insisted (to guffaws) that “corruption, waste, and meaningless programs hardly exist in city government,” he was declaring himself content with business as usual, and essentially denying that the city faced any sort of crisis.
For a great many New Yorkers whose wonted relationship to their mayor is visceral and intimate, this detachment has been too much to bear. Time and again, Bloomberg has proved that he simply does not understand average New Yorkers or empathize with their travails. As the possibility of a subway strike loomed, he dragged reporters along to watch him buy a $600 bicycle, and suggested that others should meet their transportation needs in the same way. At a time when middle-class New Yorkers were outraged by his tax hikes, he jauntily told an elite Manhattan business group that the city was “a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product.” Further stoking the anger of his critics, he jibed that he, for one, was perfectly willing to pay higher taxes.
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Has Bloomberg learned anything from the rocky first years of his tenure? Perhaps. In his State of the City address this January, he seemed intent on relaunching his mayoralty with an appeal to New York’s outer boroughs. The highlight of the speech was a proposal to issue a $400 rebate against the huge property-tax increase he had imposed. Striking, too, was the tone of the address, with its stress on crime control and the city’s quality of life—clear echoes of Giuliani’s priorities. For the first time, the mayor seemed to be talking to—instead of at—voters.
What remains unclear is whether Bloomberg now understands the deeper issue for New York: the enduring and now-desperate need to shrink and reform the city’s bloated public sector. If nothing else, he has certainly placed himself on a collision course with the unions, virtually all of whose major contracts are up for renegotiation this year. Working to close an estimated $2-billion deficit—and, thanks to his proposed rebate, with less money at hand—he has stipulated that any salary increase will have to be paid for by improvements in productivity. Needless to say, this position is fiercely opposed by the unions.
The grim reality facing New Yorkers concerned about the future of the city is that the billionaire incumbent, an accidental mayor who seems to have run for office primarily to test himself with a new challenge, may be their best hope among the available alternatives. Since the defeat of the initiative for nonpartisan elections, Left-liberal rivals have been making ready their campaigns. They include Fernando (Freddy) Ferrer, an ally of Al Sharpton who almost won the Democratic mayoral nomination the last time around, and Gifford Miller, the speaker of the City Council and a young and willing accomplice of the city’s spending interests. In short, Bloomberg could well be defeated in 2005 by a candidate backed by and ready to accommodate the same interests that are slowly strangling the city and driving away its middle class.
It is hard to exaggerate the danger of such a relapse. Bloomberg is fond of reassuring audiences that “smart people have to be here if they want to be successful.” This, however, has become less true with each passing year, especially as New York’s costs have risen in relation to those of its competitors. The last recession set a telling precedent. Usually the city and the region rise and fall together, but this time New Jersey and Connecticut, which have diversified their economies by attracting industries once based overwhelmingly in New York, recovered quickly—and left the city behind.
Behind the sparkle and dynamism of today’s New York is the mundane fact that, with the exception of San Francisco, no other American city has lost residents at a higher rate over the past several years. Poor and ill-educated immigrants have continued to flow into the city, while highly skilled people with intellectual capital continue to decamp for places that offer them more and tax them less. For the city’s Democratic politicians and the public employees they represent, this may be good news; the middle class has always been the chief political obstacle to their hold on power. For New York City as a whole—even for those precincts of it inhabited by the likes of Michael Bloomberg—such news is a portent of dark days ahead.
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