“In recent years, she has also got to know Mayor Bloomberg—‘a very nice man’—a little bit. ‘In fact, I guess Shania Twain, one of our country stars, he called her “Shenowia,” or something,’ Parton recalled. ‘He said to me, “I felt so bad saying your girl’s name wrong,” and I said, “That’s O.K., Mr. Bloomingdale.’ ”—Dolly Parton quoted in Lauren Collins, “Transients: Looking Swell,”
The New Yorker, May 4, 2009
Dolly—you gotta love her. Not for her put-on appearance, but for that down-home manner that knows how to take the air out of a male ego ever so gently. Few alpha males have needed deflating in the last year or so more than
Michael Bloomberg.
I didn’t make a systematic study of this, mind you, but in the three or four reports that I heard or read about the New York Mayor’s
third inaugural address, the operative word used to characterize his tone and demeanor was “
modest.”
It put me in mind of the late Sixties, when the Beltway punditocracy was broaching the possibility of “
the New Nixon”—a mature statesman who’d outgrown his youthful ruthlessness, or at least learned to use it for larger ends that would benefit America.
Well, no sooner did the perpetual GOP candidate finish taking his Presidential oath than he whipped off the
approachable, reasonable mask he’d been wearing so uncomfortably. Before our eyes, he morphed back into the ol’ paranoid “Tricky Dick” we all knew. We know what happened next.
After two terms of Rudy Giuliani’s 24/7 aria, the exhausted New York press corps were so delighted to find someone who spoke in subdued—make that
businesslike—tones that they lowered their guard.
Thus, while Don Rodolpho was nearly hooed and kicked off the Gotham stage after 9/11 for offering to serve a bit longer as mayor to surmount any possible primary voting disruption arising from that catastrophe, Bloomberg violated the public trust in a far more flagrant and enduring manner—circumventing the term-limits law that the voters made clear they wanted in two different citywide campaigns.
A compliant press rolled over for him, with the
New York Times even going so far as to decry term limits as an infringement on democracy that would deny New Yorkers the chance to re-elect “an effective and popular mayor.” That would be the same mayor who, with all the money from his communications empire, made a mockery of the campaign-finance limits that the Gray Lady has always—at least until recently—also declared are necessary for democracy in this republic.
All the while, like the city’s other dailies, the
Times kept telling voters that Bloomberg was so far ahead in the last mayoral race that the Democrats’ William Thompson could never catch him. The margin of victory was rather smaller than they—or the Mayor—had anticipated. That induced the "modesty" so widely remarked upon and, we can surely guess, so transitory.
More than two decades ago, when Malcolm Forbes was still alive, an editor who worked at one of his publications told me that the self-styled “Capitalist Tool” had given employees his birthday off. “It’s sort of like working for a medieval prince,” she marveled.
Bloomberg has had these moments, too,
giving a number of his campaign staffers very, very handsome bonuses for helping to get him elected—20% of each worker’s total wages.
The media have encouraged a view of rich candidates and officeholders that is pernicious in the extreme. Such men and women, we are told, have so much money that they run no risk of being bribed.
True enough. What does not get said is that they can spend money in all kinds of ways to influence voters—especially, but not exclusively, demonstrating to party elders that they have massive war chests to mount a blitz of TV ads before elections.
For three separate races since 2000, Jon Corzine spent $131 million on his own money to get elected U.S. Senator and Governor of New Jersey. You have to ask how megalomaniacal a person is to believe it’s worth it to spend all that money on himself rather than, as
an article by AP reporter Geoff Mulvihill has noted, “the entire property tax bill for a year for everyone in Corzine’s hometown of Hoboken.”
The only person in U.S. history who has spent more of his money to get elected is Michael Bloomberg, who spent twice as much as Corzine. I'm not sure I'd want that distinction.
