“Betsy, you’re unstoppable!”

The public advocate’s young aide shouts upward, already most of a flight behind the 68-year-old woman bounding up the stairs of the Lucille Murray Day Care Center in the South Bronx. The Administration of Children’s Services has announced plans to close the center mid-year because of a $600,000 bill to fix a leaky roof.

Gotbaum has just finished leading a press conference to protest the decision, complete with follow-up interviews in fluent Spanish. Now she wants to see the roof, but the elevator was taking too long to arrive.

Arriving at the top well ahead of the pack of reporters and parents, she is already being briefed on the condition of the roof tiles by the time most of them arrive.

She stands with her arms folded but no coat in the frigid air, shaking her head. The repairs to this roof should not cost $600,000, she decides. When she is told the landlord has offered to undertake the repairs himself, she shakes her head again.

“There’s something else going on here,” she announces, almost to herself.

She walks to one side and peers toward one edge, then circles back and peers at the other.

“There’s something else going on here,” she says again.

She turns around and heads back down the stairs, just as most of the photographers have caught their breaths and started shooting what would have likely made a strong photo-op.

A hidden policy decision, a bureaucratic error, an issue of oversight—Gotbaum is ready to accept many explanations for the closing of the center, but she feels she has learned enough about how city government functions to be confident that she has not yet heard the full story about the Children’s Services’ decision. In her minute-and-a-half speech during the press conference she led—enough to draw the cameras but put the spotlight on the parents and community activists—she called on Children’s Services to reconsider, then said she would actually just call Children’s Services Commissioner John Mattingly and ask him to reconsider. She was optimistic that this might get the center, one of the city’s largest, reopened.

Though this fight continues, Gotbaum, now halfway through her second term, speaks proudly about the victories she claims in fights like these over her six years as public advocate. It is the kind of record, she thinks—especially coupled with her history of winning twice citywide, being a prodigious fundraiser and spending 35 years in and out of city government—that would make her a very strong candidate for another citywide office next year.

Her interest in being mayor is sincere. The rumors of her weighing a comptroller bid are true. But she is resolved to almost certainly skip both. Betsy Gotbaum is ready to accept that 2009 looks like the end of her political career.

The question is not winning. She believes she could beat the expected Democratic fields for mayor and comptroller. But that does not matter. Based on a very different calculation, she is neither planning nor preparing to run for anything else.

“Right now,” she said, “I’m not.”


One of Gotbaum’s great political assets, most agree, is her husband Victor, whose political advice and revered last name clearly helped her get elected to the city’s second-highest office in 2001, then re-elected in 2005, despite a spirited primary. Though two decades have passed since he was at the helm of powerhouse union DC 37, he remains a well-known and beloved character to many New Yorkers, directly and indirectly influencing his wife’s political appeal.

More than anyone else, Victor has been promoting his wife as a candidate for mayor, talking up the idea to her and everyone else he can. More than anyone else, though, she makes clear, Victor seems to have emerged as the single obstacle to her making the race.

“It’s very hard,” she said.
In and out of hospitals the past two years, Victor, now 86, suffers from a range of serious physical and mental problems which prevent him from being able to be left alone. With the Gotbaums living on her government salary and his pension—no small amount certainly, but hardly great riches—there is no around-the-clock care. She spends most nights at home with him.

Gotbaum is a woman with a reputation for frankness, just as likely to call Bloomberg sexist for not inviting her to more sporting events as she is to brag that the blue-striped Calvin Klein suit she is wearing only cost her $100 at Filene’s Basement. But her discussion of Victor’s health remains vague, referred to only as “my personal situation.” 

But absent this looming factor, she says, she would be a more active presence at civic events around the city, building up her profile, if only for the sake of gathering political capital for a future campaign.

“My problem goes back to the issue of most of the events are at night,” she said. “I have to figure out with them how I run my personal life at the same time that I do these things.”

Gone too is her taste for campaign fundraising, often cited as her greatest political asset. She has put together some money for her Fund for Public Advocacy non-profit and helped several charities and causes, but she expects the $163,000 in campaign donations she filed last July to mark a high point for her for the foreseeable future.

“At this point in my life, it’s just hard for me to raise money for myself, for personal reasons, for a political campaign,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

So while she has no doubt that at this point, she could do just about any job in city government and insists that she would revel in all that another citywide campaign would entail, she says the prospect of having to campaign has made continuing her career in politics impossible.

“The most important reason is the  running,” she said, hitting both syllables and stretching the word out.

She wants to continue being involved and relevant. She wants to be mayor. But with the experience of running two citywide campaigns informing her decision, she has concluded that she will not run in 2009 to make that happen.

“For obvious reasons, I can’t mount a campaign right now,” she said.


Unless. Unless Kevin Sheekey’s dreams come true and Michael Bloomberg runs for and wins the White House this fall. Then, come Jan. 20, 2009, Betsy Gotbaum will suddenly find herself mayor of New York. And her campaign to keep that job would start right away.

Forty years ago, Gotbaum was living in Recife, Brazil, under deep cover with the CIA, which trained her and her first husband in Portuguese and set up a life for them on the interior of the country. While her husband, the main agent, set up rural cooperatives through the Catholic priests, Gotbaum—code name: Kate Borgzinner—was responsible for typing documents and occasionally transporting cash in a false pocket of her purse.

“They needed somebody to help with the real work that was going on,” Gotbaum recalled.

The experience in South America is long behind her, evident, if at all, in her taste for Tabasco sauce dribbled on the low cholesterol omelet she orders for a late breakfast at a Broadway diner. Still, she has enough experience in espionage and in politics to appreciate a good stealth campaign, like the one that Bloomberg is generally seen as at least flirting with for the presidency.

She has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and would have campaigned in New Hampshire for the senator if not, yet again, for her “personal reasons.” But she admits her interest in seeing a Bloomberg for President campaign actually come together, and she says she and her staff have begun to examine exactly what that would mean.

“We’re checking the charter to look at all those things. Of course we’re looking at it,” she said.

If catapulted into office, she said, the Gotbaum ’09 campaign would get a very swift and certain kick start. She would run for re-election as mayor in the special election which would be set for 60 days later (March 20, were Bloomberg to vacate the mayoralty on Inauguration Day). And she would fight hard to hold onto the job.

“You don’t look at your whole career which leads you to something like being mayor and you are handed it—of course I would run,” she said. “Yes, I would have to do that.”

If she is able to become mayor initially without having to campaign for the job, she is confident she would then be able to win the special election and the November 2009 election for a term of her own. Mayor Gotbaum for 60 days would soon become Mayor Gotbaum for nine months, she believes, then for another four years, and perhaps for another four years after that.

She knows she does not have much time to plan. But taking a cue from the man whose own supposed political ambitions may inadvertently make her mayor, Gotbaum says that the normal time frame for laying the groundwork for a campaign might get scrambled.

“Bloomberg has done this brilliantly. He’s still a player, and everybody doesn’t know what he’s doing,” she said.

Though she will probably not have raised much money before then—which, she acknowledges, is the main reason people do not generally consider her a likely candidate, despite her consistently high approval ratings—Gotbaum said she could easily put together a big enough war chest to get re-elected if she becomes the interim mayor.

“If I were in office for 60 days, yes, I could do it. I have no doubt about it,” she said.

Alternatively, she might wade into the comptroller’s race, but said she would not consider any other office, even if the Manhattan borough presidency were to open in 2009.

But even if next year marks the end of her time in politics, she plans to remain an active and influential force.

“No matter what happens, I am not going away. I’m going to be around to haunt everybody,” she said, a smile creeping across her face. “I’ve worked too hard and it’s been too great a career, and I’ve had a really fabulous time as public advocate.”

Nonetheless, she has come to terms with her decisions, though she is reluctant to call anything final.

“These are all issues that can change,” she said, looking ahead to the Super Tuesday presidential primaries that are expected to finalize the major party nominees and prove decisive in determining the fate of Bloomberg’s presidential plans. “All this can change in February. February 5, isn’t it?”

---

Defending Her Record and Her Office

Perhaps in order to ensure that no one doubted his candidacy for mayor, perhaps because he was up against the more aggressive Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R), perhaps because of his media-hungry disposition, Mark Green was in the news constantly throughout his two terms. He tangled with a wide range of New Yorkers in and out of government.
Not so for Betsy Gotbaum.

She thinks about her own experiences as parks commissioner for Mayor David Dinkins (D), when elected officials would call her with complaints about broken glass in the grass or problems with playgrounds. The calls most effective on her, she says, were from the people out to work with her instead of embarrass her. So when she calls commissioners and agency heads, she tries her best to appeal to them and collaborate.
Sometimes this works. Sometimes it does not.

The plan, she says, is to issue a report card sometime before the end of her term rating the various commissioners and agency heads on their responsiveness. Like the teacher she once was, she is hoping that getting the word out about the report card might spur some of the delinquents to clean up their acts ahead of time. The point is to make them be more responsive, not to embarrass them, she said. All she wants is for the commissioners to hear a simple message from her: “I am trying to make things better for New Yorkers. So respond to me!”

She and her staffers claim credit for many changes in the administration of city services over the last six years. Her record with the Administration of Children’s Services is a perfect example, she said, noting the child fatality report issued last June which found a spike in 2005 mistakes the agency made in child fatality cases. Her numbers were all wrong, she was told. Two months later, the city Department of Investigation came to similar conclusions, prompting Children’s Services to announce a plan to increase the number of former law enforcement officers who work on investigations with the protection staff from 25 to 125. Five months after another report from her office on high turnover among Children’s Services attorneys, the agency had hired more attorneys and reduced attrition, and Bloomberg announced a $3.4-million increase to its legal services division. Another report on the dangers of adults rolling over and killing children with whom they are sharing a bed got Children’s Services to launch a $1.5-million “Take Good Care of Your Baby” public education campaign, she said.

All of these results are important, she says, and all of them were achieved only by her quiet, behind-the-scenes wheedling and negotiating. She contrasts that to her acknowledged reputation for doing nothing and having no follow-up.

“It’s amusing,” she said.

What she sees as an overwhelmingly positive and effective record, she believes Bloomberg sees as largely a waste of time. The mayor, she believes, would rather see her office abolished entirely.

“I think that he’s dismissive of it,” she said. “I suppose he doesn’t think that a lot of the things we do should be done.”

Part of the trouble, she said, stems from a decision that predates their time in office. They were social friends in the years before they ran, and during the 2001 campaign, she said Bloomberg asked her to endorse him for mayor over Green, by then the Democratic nominee. Gotbaum declined. She says he then asked for her to make no endorsement in the race, but again Gotbaum declined, citing her Democratic allegiances.

“He has a tremendous thing abut loyalty, and I think he felt that as his friend, I should have stayed neutral,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it.”
The relationship was also hurt when media reports surfaced about information discussed in private meetings Bloomberg held with Gotbaum and Comptroller Bill Thompson (D) early in their terms. Bloomberg was annoyed by the confidentiality breach, and blamed Gotbaum for talking to reporters. She denies that she ever did.
These days, she has little contact with the mayor anymore. The meetings of the citywide officials are a thing of the past.

“I think he probably has them with the comptroller, ’cause he needs the comptroller,” she says.

(In fact, Bloomberg does not have a set regular meeting time with Thompson anymore either, though Thompson’s office notes that the two have no trouble accessing each other or communicating when either has something to discuss.)

Nor does she see Bloomberg socially anymore, which Gotbaum attributes to their mutual busyness, though she notes that Bloomberg’s appearance at the shiva for her stepdaughter-in-law in October meant a great deal to her.

Bloomberg, who pushed for a 2002 charter change that would have stripped the office of much of its power, is not the only one who has been dismissive of the office. Calls to eliminate the position have continued to appear on editorial pages throughout her tenure, with Gotbaum herself or the inactivity of her office generally cited as the main rationale for abolition. “I’m very sensitive to the fact that people say it, and I just keep saying they’re wrong,” she says.

A perfect example, she says, is last February’s controversy over the mid-year school bus re-routing, conceived of in consultation with a company called Alvarez & Marsal. Though the mayor dismissed her objections, Gotbaum helped lead the successful push to get the administration to reverse course on the decision.

“Should I have had 20 press conferences about that?” she asks rhetorically.

“Yes,” her press secretary answers quickly.

Gotbaum considers this.

“It’s not who I am. It’s definitely not who I am. I’m not going to have more press conferences. I can’t. I just can’t do it,” she says.

Besides, she insists, she was more effective working behind the scenes on the issue than she would have been holding all those press conferences.

“What more was there to say except ‘Get rid of Alvarez & Marsal?’” she says. “And I was pretty good at doing that.”

Nonetheless, she does want to give the office more teeth, she says, perhaps through establishing a fixed budget outside of the mayor’s control, perhaps through convincing the Legislature in Albany to give the public advocate some official oversight over education or creating an independent office of child advocate under its aegis. A change to the City Charter, she has decided, is unlikely.

Green has refrained from commenting on his successor, but he has no trouble expressing his frustration that talk of abolishing the office itself persists. He says the time for debating about whether to have the office should have ended after he took office in of 1994.

“In the immediate eight years following, we had a real world test of whether it should continue,” Green said. “If we look at the scores of laws and reforms, a combination of William Buckley and Bill Clinton couldn’t successfully argue against the actual record we produced.”

He laid claim to a long list of accomplishments, including reducing police abuse and domestic violence, reforming the child welfare system, ending mob control of carting and increasing hospital safety. New Yorkers got a pretty good deal for an office which he calculates costs 30 cents per taxpayer, Green said.

But though he will not challenge most of Gotbaum’s record, he did note that the past six years have presented more of an opportunity than he had in one area with Giuliani: good government reform. He believes Gotbaum could have gotten more reforms passed if only she had tried.

But no matter the complaints, he warned people not to judge the office just on the person holding it any given time.

“You cannot base the existence of an institution on its momentary leader—otherwise, you’ll abolish the mayoralty because of some clunkers I can think of, or the presidency because of Bush,” he said.

By the end of her term, Gotbaum hopes to have cleared away any of these questions, through the many personal stories of the individuals she and her office has helped and by providing studies of problems with Children’s Services or other agencies, like the Department of Education, through projects like the Commission on School Governance.

Convened at the request of Assembly Education Committee Chair Cathy Nolan (D-Queens), the 11-member, privately funded group Gotbaum leads is planning to make recommendations on how to tweak the current city school system in time for next year’s scheduled consideration of renewing mayoral control. From the testimony and academic papers the group has commissioned, Gotbaum is starting to determine how to recommend increasing parent involvement, which she says she heard has already convinced 70 legislators to try to bring control back to Albany. Gotbaum supported Bloomberg’s efforts to get control of the school system. With the recommendations done right, she believes she can help keep the next mayor in control of the schools—even if she is not the next mayor herself.

—EIRD

---

A Formidable Candidate, If She Runs

 

If Betsy Gotbaum decides to run for anything—whether in an open race for mayor or comptroller, or for re-election as interim mayor—those who have campaigned with and against her agree that she could be a very formidable candidate, even with a late start.

Norman Siegel, whom Gotbaum beat twice for public advocate and is now seeking the office a third time, said her prospective opponents should be very careful not to dismiss her, noting that in 2001 and 2005 she proved a more appealing presence than he would have ever anticipated.

“In the debates, I didn’t think she did very well. She very often had cards that she would read from and she would clutch on to them,” Siegel recalled. “I always in my own world said if people need to read from cards, voters will pick that up. But voters did not.”

That appeal, coupled with her last name, her ability to draw female voters and the ease with which she is able to raise massive amounts of money, could prove difficult to overcome again, Siegel warned.

“People underestimate her,” he said.

If she runs for mayor, Gotbaum said her she would root the campaign in the idea that moving to Gracie Mansion would be a natural next step for a woman with her extensive résumé of positions in and out of city government.

“Look at my career, starting with my first stint in city government with John Lindsay,” she said. “Of course I’m ready. I think I could handle it extremely well.”

She is also keeping the comptroller’s race open as an option, citing her seat on one of the city pension boards as experience that could strengthen a campaign to be the city’s bookkeeper. Her management skills could help her run the office. Her background studying agencies as public advocate could provide the foundation for overseeing audits, she believes. And her negotiating skills could help her sway the pension board trustees to her point of view. Plus, she said, at this point she knows city government better than almost anyone. She also points out the week she spent in Philadelphia in 2006, attending the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program on Pension Fund and Investment Management.

Importantly, the campaign for comptroller, a lower profile office, would be significantly calmer than the mayor’s race, she believes, which might allow her to balance a run with her care for her husband. But even that, she said, would create difficulties.

“It’s the same situation, but a little less poignant,” she said.

But she could be a formidable candidate for comptroller, said Hank Sheinkopf, her consultant for her two public advocate races.

“Being a person who has high citywide identification, good favorables—regardless of what the idiots say—means that she’s immediately a candidate for anything,” he said. “Should she make up her mind to do something, she would be very difficult to beat.”

—EIRD

eidovere@cityhallnews.com