Thrice mayor of New York City?

Thanks to his wealth and lack of strong opposition, Michael Bloomberg is poised to be re-elected New York's mayor
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg is all but certain to win a third term as mayor of New York City. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty DON EMMERT/AFP

I remember when Michael Bloomberg was first thinking of running for mayor. I was a political reporter in New York at the time, and evidently considered important enough to court, so I was summoned up to his office one day to have an off-the-record chat.

I don't remember much, except that I got the sense of a guy who didn't know a lot about politics. He was a pretty liberal Democrat, but he decided to run as a Republican because the Democratic primary was too clotted with time-servers who'd dispensed 20 years' worth of booty to local community groups and the like. And he was – history has obscured this – a terrible candidate at first: clumsy, leaden, horribly dull.

Well, $250m can change things. By the time he wins re-election Tuesday night against Democrat Bill Thompson, Bloomberg will have spent nearly that much money on his three mayoral victories (and a lot more besides, which we'll get to).

He's still horribly dull, but he's now the farthest thing from a clumsy neophyte. He rules the city like some information-age Borgian principe, controlling dissent and democracy itself with his millions.

It's really kind of shocking what Bloomberg has pulled off. At first, he didn't even want to run for re-election. But then, of course, he caught the bug, as they all do, so he did. New York had a law limiting the mayor to two terms. For a while it seemed he might just return to private life. But as the clock ticked down on term two, he decided he needed a third. So he did what he does with everything: he bought it.

By law in the city, voters – who'd approved the term limit – were supposed to be the only people with the power to repeal it. Bloomberg just went around them and got the city council to approve the repeal.

In the process, he did things like "asking" non-profit groups in the city that he happened to support as a private citizen to back his term-limit repeal. Gosh, do you think that these groups felt any pressure to back his plan?

It's mind-bogglingly medieval: a multi-billionaire – his personal wealth during his tenure, by the way, has ballooned from around $4bn to more than $20bn – in essence handing out indulgences to struggling little community non-profits and arts groups, which know that a place in financial heaven can best be secured by going along with what the mayor wants.

People should be outraged, and they sort of are. The repeal-by-city-council move was vulgar even by New York's latitudinal standards. But they're still about to give Bloomberg another four years. Why?

Well, the trains run on time, as they say. Crime has continued to go down. The city is clean, mostly. The schools are a disaster, but they're somewhat less of a disaster than usual, and nobody thinks anybody else could do any better anyway.

That last bit is the main point. The New York City Democratic party is like one of those New Yorker cartoons with the people sitting around having grown cobwebs as they listen to a bore natter on about his vintage Medoc.


In the cartoon-version of the local party's demise, the bore is chattering on not about his Bordeaux, but about a glorious past that no one remembers or cares about anymore, and a set of secondary issues aimed more at clubhouse job-seekers than regular people.

New Yorkers' Democratic-ness is all about national politics. It's about supporting candidates like Barack Obama and opposing people like Sarah Palin. But locally, New Yorkers believe in the old adage about there being no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage. They want what works, and they suspect that the local Democratic party can't and won't.

So they'll vote for Borgismo. New York City, once the greatest city of the 20th century, will carry on for the foreseeable future being the greatest city of the 15th.