Columnist Mike Lupica in the Daily News : “Who died and made the New York Mayor royalty?”
Lupica reminds us how Mayor Rudolph Giuliani decided he was indispensable post 9/11. Now his successor, Mayor Bloomberg, feels he needs more time (8 years is not enough?) to finish what he “started” — that New York City can not manage without him (his billionaire friends agree).
The fascinating thing with Mayor Bloomberg is the free pass he gets in the media most of the time. I watch cautiously but I feel he may just have hit the thing-that-will-bring-reality-out-into-the-open with this overturning Term Limits (or extending the “Term”) thing.
Lupica writes;
It’s clear how much Bloomberg likes his job, running the city as an imperial mayor. So did the guy before him. The problem is the same for both of them: same law, the one saying the job has to end. At which point it’s not the city’s job to find them something to do. …
Bloomberg … is as ambitious as Giuliani ever was in New York, and is never wrong, not on the Olympics, not on a West Side stadium for the Jets, not on congestion pricing, not when he wants the area on Broadway south of 42nd St. and almost all the way to Madison Square Garden turned into our big, bad city’s version of the Champs Élysées.
On Bloomberg toying with the idea of pushing the City Council to overturn term limits without quite stating his motivations (as if this is some secret?), Lupica states:
He does not quite come out and say this, because that is not his style. You read the accounts of the dance he is currently dancing with the City Council in general and Council Speaker Christine Quinn in particular, and there is one adjective constantly applied to Bloomberg, and it is the same one applied to Giuliani seven years ago. And the word is “coy.”
Yes, Bloomberg’s style (so to speak) is to the pull the strings behind-the-scenes. But the word I would use to describe this stated style of our CEO Mayor is not “coy.” It is duplicitous.
Mayor Bloomberg’s behind-the-scenes string-pulling can be linked to Washington Square Park‘s redesign as well as the major changes to Union Square Park, the giveaway of one-and-a-half Bronx City parks to the Yankee Corporation, and so much more.
It’s time for Mayor Bloomberg to accept that he will be packing up his bags soon. He never moved into Gracie Mansion so it should be easy, right?