Wall Street Journal - November 8, 2001
Commentary Bloomberg's Next Challenge
By Fred Siegel. Mr. Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union in New York and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington.
"It's a darn shame only one of these guys will lose." -- David Letterman
I should be smiling. Michael Bloomberg, a pro-business candidate who's promised not to raise taxes while continuing Rudolph Giuliani's crime-fighting legacy, and who seems to owe no debts to the public-sector unions, has defeated Mark Green, a longtime left-liberal who fought each and every Giuliani reform.
But I'm more worried than happy, because the silent partners in Mr. Bloomberg's victory were the anti-Giuliani coalition of Bronx Democratic Party boss Roberto Ramirez; the city's leading racial demagogue, Al Sharpton; the city's most powerful union leader, Dennis Rivera; and Fernando Ferrer, the man who had been their candidate for the Democratic nomination. These are the four men who nearly won the Democratic Party primary for Mr. Ferrer on an identity-politics platform of rolling back the Giuliani reforms.
John Lindsay?
During the campaign, Rep. Charles Rangel, a skilled politician, compared Mr. Bloomberg to John Lindsay, the Upper East Side Republican who was first elected mayor in 1965 on a law-and-order, low-tax platform, but who governed to the left of the Democrats. Mr. Bloomberg, who describes himself as a "liberal," was a Democrat until a year ago. Some of Mr. Bloomberg's advisers, like Alan Gartner -- a former Lindsay supporter who was one of the architects of welfare expansion in the 1970s -- are well to the left of the people alongside Mr. Green. So before I begin to smile, I want to see just how much John Lindsay there is in Mike Bloomberg.
It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that on Election Day, the offices of the Bronx Democratic Party headquarters were closed, the phones turned off. And on the morning after his victory, the first man Mayor-elect Bloomberg met with was not Rudy Giuliani, but Freddy Ferrer.
In America's war against terrorism, the partners President Bush chooses will have a considerable impact on how we pursue the conflict. In New York politics, Mr. Bloomberg's choice of partners will effect the kinds of policies he's able to pursue.
How did Mr. Bloomberg win the election? The answer is that the unprecedented events of Sept. 11 made it possible for Mr. Bloomberg to put together an unprecedented coalition that broke all the "rules" of local politics.
Rule One: If Rudy Giuliani supports something, minority voters will come out against it. So when Mr. Giuliani came out in support of school choice, it dropped 20 points among black voters. But this time when Mr. Giuliani, "America's mayor," endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, he galvanized white Catholic voters without producing a black and Hispanic backlash. That's because Mr. Bloomberg's silent partners worked effectively to demonize Mr. Green.
Rule Two: In New York the power of the free media means you can't win an election with paid advertising; this isn't New Jersey. But the concatenation of Sept. 11, the war in Afghanistan, the anthrax scare, the World Series, Mr. Bloomberg's unprecedented spending, and Mark Green's rigid adherence to dysfunctional campaign-finance laws that limited his spending, combined to allow Mr. Bloomberg to win largely on the basis of paid advertising.
Rule Three: Republicans in New York are only elected once every 30 years, and only after Democrats have bungled things badly. Mr. Giuliani changed that. Ever since he first ran in 1989, moderate white Catholic and Jewish voters have been deserting the Democratic Party primary in droves, preferring to wait and vote for Mr. Giuliani in the general election.
This produced Democratic Party mayoral nominees who, chosen by the remaining rump of the Democratic Party, were well to the left of even New York's electorate. White liberal candidates for the Democratic nomination have been whipsawed by the Giuliani factor. If they fail to gain sufficient minority support they lose the primary, as Ed Koch lost to David Dinkins in 1989. But if they defeat a minority candidate, as Ruth Messinger did in 1997 and Mr. Green did this year, they generate resentments that come back to haunt them in the general election.
Mr. Bloomberg has broken the rules to win. Can he break the rules to govern? He clearly knows less about the city and its government than any mayor of at least the last 100 years. When businessman Richard Riordan was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1993, he had long been involved in the civic life of his city. Mr. Bloomberg is a stranger to much of New York. He has talked about how New York brought down crime with "community policing." It didn't; it used "broken windows" policing, which is quite different (and more aggressive). When asked about New York's ongoing deficit in what it pays to Washington and what it gets back, he said he would "serve as our third senator," as if that would help. The doubters, such as New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, describe Mr. Bloomberg as a man with an "elemental misunderstanding about how New York is governed."
Mr. Bloomberg was almost as off target when talking about Sept. 11 as Freddy Ferrer. He spoke of our problems in terms of the national recession, but it's lower Manhattan, not the national economy, that lies devastated. His proposed solution to the city's problems changed little after the attacks. He wanted to refinance our enormous debt at reduced rates. This is a good idea, but of little immediate help for those businesses destroyed or displaced on Sept. 11. He insists that the city alone should handle the reconstruction, but the World Trade Center stood on state land, and Mr. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki have gone ahead and named a state-city commission to oversee the rebuilding.
Mr. Bloomberg will no doubt lean heavily on those Giuliani staffers who stay on to help organize his administration. But it's not clear how much help he will get from Mr. Giuliani himself, nor does it seem likely that two men of such gargantuan egos will be able to cooperate for very long.
In the rough waters ahead Mr. Bloomberg, who has never had to deal with unionized workers at his company, will have to negotiate labor contracts with policemen, firemen, teachers and sanitation workers, among others. In the words of one veteran journalist with conservative leanings, Mr. Bloomberg, "who thinks he can hire and fire as he pleases, doesn't have a clue as to what these negotiations are like." Mr. Bloomberg wants to bargain for "shared savings" plans, in which the unions get more money in return for greater efficiencies. A good idea, but will he have the skill to pull it off? This is where Lindsay failed famously. He didn't know how to negotiate with the unions -- they resented him as a representative of the rich and powerful -- and the city paid dearly as a result.
Two Winners
There were two winners on Tuesday: a nominal Republican with no experience in government, and identity politics. Mr. Bloomberg is going to have to cut back the size of government to meet the city's looming budget deficits. Those cutbacks will no doubt disproportionately effect the minority workers who depend on city jobs. It's at that point that Mayor Bloomberg, who won by telling black and Latino New Yorkers that Mark Green had run a racist campaign for criticizing Freddy Ferrer's non-response to Sept. 11, will be haunted by what Candidate Bloomberg said. In New York, no matter who wins, the city seems unable to overcome the toxic mix of racial and class resentments that define our dysfunctional politics.