So what to make of Mike Bloomberg's overwhelming victory over Fernando Ferrer in yesterday's mayoral election?
Today's New York Observer shrewdly argues that Bloomberg can now be pronounced New York's first imperial mayor. In a certain sense that's true: Bloomberg may be the most powerful mayor of modern times, by dint of his overwhelming victory, the disoriented state of the opposition, and various recent reforms that have enhanced the mayor's institutional clout.
Yet in another sense, the significance of Bloomberg's landslide win is that he may have permanently shattered the idea of the imperial mayoralty. I mean this in a different sense than the Observer does. The idea of the imperial mayoralty, which held sway in the last century, was that a New York mayor couldn't be successful unless he had an overwhelming, larger-than-life personality with which he could tame the city's archipelago of competing interest groups. The two mayors most often described as successful in the last half of the 20th century -- Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani -- were both imperial mayors in this sense. They made the bully pulpit worthy of its name, each building majorities with crude and theatrical verbal attacks on minority leaders and interest groups in ways designed to stoke the fears of culturally conservative white voters, mostly in the outer boroughs. In Giuliani's case, such tactics ultimately lent a sinister subtext to what was undeniably an extraordinary achievement -- his victory over crime and urban disorder -- because he seemed devoted to advancing the idea that one couldn't defeat crime without exacerbating racial tensions.
In many ways, Mike Bloomberg's first term -- and his huge victory yesterday -- stand as a partial repudiation of the mayoralties of Koch and, more directly, of Giuliani. Among Bloomberg's first acts were reaching out to Giuliani nemesis Al Sharpton and hiring the police commissioner of former mayor David Dinkins, who was associated in the minds of many with crime-ravaged, pre-Giuliani New York. Bloomberg quietly but insistently went on to undercut Giuliani's mayoralty in other ways. He showed that a mayor could keep crime falling and improve racial tensions at the same time -- which in a rational world would be seen as a partial blow to Giuliani's legacy. He also showed that a mayor could competently manage the city without building a personality cult at City Hall, without the unsightly histrionics so often unleashed by Giuliani. And his vision of expansive government -- his argument in favor of raising taxes was essentially that good government services are worth paying for -- clashed directly with the anti-tax, government-is-bad bromides offered by Giuliani's loudest supporters.
To be sure, Bloomberg has had his share of Mussolini moments, such as when he tried to impose a misguided stadium on an unsuspecting electorate. And Bloomberg has failed to achieve -- or even try to achieve -- some big reforms that will be imperative if New York is to achieve total fiscal health. What's more, Giuliani's supporters will no doubt point to a historical irony: Bloomberg, of course, would not have been elected mayor without the support of Giuliani. In the days after September 11, Giuliani had been so deified by the national media that New York voters would have elected one of the Coney Island freaks his successor if he'd told them to. Giuliani cultists will also add that by raising the bar on what's expected from mayors, he made it less likely that New York would elect an old-style pol.
That's partly true. But in the broadest sense, Bloomberg drove a stake into the heart of the idea of the imperial mayoralty as practiced by Koch and, more importantly, by Giuliani. His win yesterday showed he could build a majority larger than Rudy's -- even as he proved that a mayor could be effective without indulging in crude racial appeals and with an unapologetic embrace of tax-hikes in exchange for better government. In a sense Bloomberg's win was a victory for smart-government liberalism.
The news is hardly all good, though. One downside of Bloomberg's win is that it has revealed that the city's civic culture is in awfully rough shape. The city's self-appointed elite guardians of good government -- the civic groups, the Times editorial board -- proved themselves utterly incapable of coping with an enormous abuse of power: Bloomberg's huge campaign expenditure, which may have topped $75 million. That level of spending essentially made a mockery of the electoral process. By blanketing the airwaves with endless ads, Bloomberg made it easier for himself to get out his message while agreeing to the minimum of debates. That made a fair hearing of the challenger impossible, and made it that much less likely that New Yorkers would fairly judge Bloomberg's failings -- which frees him to duplicate them next term.
Yet the city's elites essentially sat on their thumbs and politely ignored Bloomberg's spending onslaught. Sure, the Times editorialized against his spending and the good-government groups tsk-tsked a bit. But they supported Bloomberg anyway, which -- let's face it -- made their scattered noises of objection meaningless, particularly given that New Yorkers are less civically engaged than at any time in memory. Given Bloomberg's spending, it's hard to call what happened yesterday a real election, at least in the sense that real elections are supposed to involve vigorous, extended debates about the city's future and amount to genuine referendums on the incumbent. The Times and civic institutions might have recognized this. They might have demanded that Bloomberg curtail his spending, and should have made their support for him conditional on whether he did.
The city's civic elites also settled on a narrative of the election that was unfair to Ferrer. Throughout the race, pundits have described this contest as one of non-ideological management versus the ethnic politicking, clubhouse backslapping, coalition-building, and partisan hackery of the past. Yet this simpleminded view begs a few questions: Why is it cynical "coalition-building" when Ferrer reaches out to white voters, but enlightened "reaching across racial lines" when Bloomberg appeals to Latinos? Why is it "ethnic" or "tribal" when Latinos support Ferrer, but not when white voters support Bloomberg? Isn't it possible that a Latino might be in Ferrer's camp on the merits, or are only whites acting on the merits when they support someone of their color? Yes, Ferrer made partisan appeals, but can't partisan appeals be underpinned by matters of policy substance? Does anybody really believe that Bloomberg was "nonpartisan" out of the pureness of his heart alone, and not because he was running as a Republican in a Democratic city? Why is it that Ferrer is “ideological” when he talks about combating poverty, but Bloomberg is “nonideological” when he touts his own anti-poverty measures?
It's true that Ferrer made racial appeals such as including salsa music in his radio ads. Yet the bottom line is that the official pundits' narrative of the race largely insisted on seeing Ferrer as exclusively motivated by race. Ferrer's "two New Yorks" theme was a class-based appeal -- a sensible tactic against a billionaire, after all -- but nonetheless, some opinionmakers never allowed it to be interpreted as anything but racial.
None of this is to say that Bloomberg's victory over Ferrer isn't a good thing. In many ways Bloomberg earned a second term, and Ferrer, an undeniably flawed candidate, never could make a cogent case for removing him. But Bloomberg's immense spending in the face of elite dithering and hand-wringing, combined with a relentless barrage of unfair commentary directed at Ferrer, make this anything but a total victory for New Yorkers.
Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes a bi-weekly column for The American Prospect Online. He can be reached at
greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com
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