Consider, for a moment, the end days of 2009: After spending a sum that would make the Prince of Dubai blush, Mike Bloomberg won re-election by 10 points under the predictions of the day-of polls. The New York City Council then spent an afternoon overriding three mayoral vetoes, a legislative trick they had turned to just 10 times in the previous four years. The week before, the Council voted to kill Bloomberg’s plans to redevelop Kingsbridge Armory after the administration refused a guarantee of living wage for all future employees there. It was the first time the Council had derailed a major Bloomberg administration land-use initiative.
“What happened here today is huge,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. at a boisterous rally following the vote. “The administration needs to realize that local government, local elected officials are partners with the administration.”
For eight years, the primary criticism of Bloomberg, among local elected officials at least, was that he and his administration have been anything but partners—to school parents, to community groups, and to them especially.
The cumulative effect of those votes, however, combined with the election of two new citywide officials a measure more aggressive than their predecessors, and a baker’s dozen of new energetic Council members, led many to wonder if there had been a distinct paradigm shift in New York City politics.
For at least four years, if not eight, the way to succeed politically in this town has been to, in one way or another, align with the mayor. That is what Bill Thompson did for most of the seven years he served as comptroller; Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s alliance with the administration was a point of pride. Even Anthony Weiner took to comparing himself to Bloomberg at what looked like the end, saying they were both outsiders and both independent, even though 10 years of government service and $16 billion separate them. After all, Bloomberg was the one with the envious approval ratings, and his vacation homes and private planes and fancy friends were almost enough to make the grubby world of politics seem glamorous.
And sure, he won a third term despite all the people that opposed the termlimits change, and never seemed to break a sweat. But that did not matter. Suddenly the game had supposedly changed. Voters seemed hungry for change, and angry at Wall Street and the political establishment—both of which the mayor symbolizes.
Instead of cozying up to the mayor, elected officials have been tripping over one another to scurry away.
“What changed?” said Corrections Officers union head Norman Seabrook, a Bloomberg supporter turned fierce critic. “People woke up.”
Talking about an election four years away can be uncouth, if not a little ridiculous. Ask any elected official about their political plans, and they stick to their just-concentrating-on-doing-the-job-the-people-elected-me-for lines.
But then came Bill Thompson. Just as the Bloomberg battering began, Thompson, who famously gave the mayor a D- in one of their televised debates, announced that he planned to run again. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer got caught hiring for a future citywide run. News accounts of Bill de Blasio’s inauguration were mostly about his mayoral prospects.
And you thought the last presidential race went on too long.
But just being another body on the Bloomberg pile-on will not be enough. They will need to stake out their roles and personae for the next four years— already, even in these early days of 2010.
“The fundamental question for these guys is, how do they differentiate themselves,” said veteran Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf.
His advice: “Find one issue and drive it. Do something that gets your face in front of people and makes them want to pay attention to you. That’s how you find relevancy.” he person we have to thank or blame for what may be the longest campaign in history is the man whose last campaign barely registered a blip on most New Yorkers’ radar—Bill Thompson. He warmly introduced John Liu at his inaugural party, ending with a bear hug and seeming ready to pass the torch. Five days later, he kicked off the Thompson for Mayor II campaign. No winking-and-nodding. No hobnobbing while holding down an empty think tank or corporate job. Surprise would be an understatement to describe the reaction. “It’s just bizarre,” said Democratic consultant George Arzt. “Everything he does now is tainted. Every move he will make in the next four years, people will say, ‘Well, it’s political.’” Thompson said the reasoning was simple: there was no way to finally put to rest the rumors of the comptroller and Senate campaigns he wanted to run, and still do candidate things like raise money or file a committee.
“Being coy I’m sure has its advantage,” he said. “But I made up my mind, and I didn’t see any sense in denying that.”
There are other advantages as well. Thompson can keep the African- American vote from drifting elsewhere, and he is the person reporters will turn to when they need a quick quote to counter Bloomberg. But presenting a convincing alternative vision was not a strength of Thompson’s campaign, which, according to critics, had a lot to do with a final vote count that was roughly the same as Freddy Ferrer’s in 2005.
Thompson says he will speak out about the issues he talked about in the ’09 campaign—affordable housing, the squeeze on the middle class, jobs and the economy. But unlike the others, he lacks a platform, and can be caught flatfooted as actual officeholders make their rounds.
The best scenario for Thompson could be if some of the other mayoral aspirants decide to stay in safe seats and he finds himself alone on a stage with Rep. Anthony Weiner. Assuming voters continue to tire of Bloomberg, and Bloomberg tires of being mayor, Thompson could be remembered as the one who challenged him when others took a pass.
These days, Weiner has been busy being a wide-ranging media antagonist on health care. He has kept an eye on city politics, but left the commenting to others. He may be a politician who seems ready with six sound bites rolling out of bed in the morning, but he declined to be interviewed for this story.
Weiner seems poised to take the position of someone who fights down in Washington on the big issues that get liberal New Yorkers’ hearts pounding— besides health care, immigration, climate change and the like—while arguing that he has delivered the most goodies to the city, courtesy of the federal treasury.
No one can needle Bloomberg quite like Weiner can, which could win him friends if the mayor does not regain his footing in the wake of the election. But in 2013, Weiner will be eight years older than the hotshot who nearly upended the 2005 mayor’s race. His task will be to transition from smart aleck to elder statesman, all the while explaining where he was in the could-have-been 2009 race.
Also complicating things: the 2013 electorate is looking to be much different from the one he faced in 2005.
“Demographics are only going to get worse for a candidate like Weiner,” said one political operative. “His natural constituency is just shrinking, and John Liu and Bill de Blasio are not going to be quiet while Anthony Weiner figures out how to be the smartest guy in the class.”
Most politicos cannot help but mention Liu and de Blasio in the same breath. Both came into office on the same day after eight years in the City Council. Both won on the strength of big Democratic constituencies—minorities for Liu, unions for de Blasio. Most Democratic consultants say Liu has an advantage, since he holds an office with clearly defined charter responsibilities that will affect voter’s pocketbooks.
When asked what he plans to do as comptroller, Liu’s first answer references that coalition that backed him in the primary and run-off, and which he feels has been largely ignored by the administration up till now.
“I still see a very closed process when it comes to the way the city puts out contracts,” he said over pizza at an Italian restaurant around the corner from where the risers had been installed in front of City Hall for the inauguration ceremony. He was sporting a purple tie emblazoned with the logo of the powerful building workers union, 32BJ. (“My staff said I should wear more purple,” he said with a shrug.)
“The same players get all the contracts.
I think it makes sense for us to develop more competency out in the marketplace, and one way of doing that is to make sure that more of the up-and-coming businesses get opportunities.”
Liu will need to expand his demographic coalition going forward, however, especially if Thompson or Diaz are in the race. One of his first acts as comptroller was to nab Council Member Simcha Felder, an Orthodox Jew, as his deputy, a move that was seen as an effort by Liu to reach out beyond his base.
Liu was a vociferous administration critic while on the Council, and has a knack for finding reporters. Bloomberg officials are steeling themselves for a Liu armed with subpoena power.
Liu said they had nothing to worry about.
“They should be more nervous about Bill de Blasio,” he said. “I didn’t run for this office to be a thorn in anybody’s side... I think I am a pretty amicable person to work with. I simply ask people to be straightforward, to follow through and to not blow smoke up my ass. I don’t think it’s a whole lot.”
So far, however, Liu’s Municipal Building neighbor has held his fire. De Blasio too took the administration as chair of the council’s General Welfare Committee, but he used his final hearing to actually heap praise on a Bloomberg program that dealt with juvenile offenders. De Blasio’s victory speech after his win in the September run-off included a shout-out to seemingly every trade union in the five boroughs—“The musicians! PSC CUNY! The Freelancers Union! The Fire Marshalls! The Theatrical Stage Employees!”—but he now appears to be attempting to make inroads to more typical Bloomberg voters.
When Liu pointedly avoided meeting with the mayor right after the election, de Blasio had a public cup of coffee with Bloomberg by the window of a downtown diner. In his second week on the job, he tried to rally support for lifting the cap on charter schools, a Bloomberg pet project.
In his first press conference from his new digs on the 15th floor of the Municipal Building, he marveled at the view of the Manhattan skyline.
“Sure beats the City Hall steps in the cold, huh guys?” he said, before launching into an outline of his approach to the office.
In many people’s minds, the public advocate’s office boils down to an official government press release factory, a government perch to support a mayoral run. They expect him to be in the news, firing hard at the mayor, as he prepares for a 2013 campaign. Yet he also declined to be interviewed for this story.
Liu actually has more responsibilities in the day-to-day running of government, yet de Blasio can set up an office that acts as a mayoral administration in exile, advocating for alternative policies and programs that call for the same thing the administration does, only doing them a little bit better.
But de Blasio is treading a difficult line. A former political operative, he has generated positive media coverage since his election by giving wellplaced leaks to the New York Times and receiving plenty of television coverage. Political consultants scoffed at one of his first initiatives, however, a communityorganizing plan that looked to some like a bald ploy to lay the groundwork for a future campaign.
“Organizing
communities and saying, ‘We’ll pick the winners’—that’s almost like you
are running spring training and looking for the good players to keep an
eye on,” said former Bloomberg campaign consultant Bill Cunningham. “If
Bill looks like he is setting up a field operation for a political
campaign, John could be the guy the public thinks is doing a good job,
and John could rush right past him.” ust like it is hard to talk about
Liu without talking about de Blasio, it is hard to talk about either
without Stringer, their neighbor in the Municipal Building, and, through
him, Council Speaker
Christine Quinn. The two both came from the politically active West Side, and most assume there is not room for both in the same election. Their policy goals coincide as well: when asked what they want to focus on over the next four years, both cited increasing affordable housing, adding new jobs in biotech, and getting the city a real food policy as top priorities.
Quinn sees her role in the next four years as that of a pragmatist, of someone who will be able to point to firehouses saved and affordable apartments opened due to her negotiations with the mayor while others are forced to hold sideline press conferences about their “recommendations.”
Like Weiner, Quinn will be able to point to a long list of items that she actually has delivered to New Yorkers over the past eight years. And she has 50 other Council members who she can appear alongside with at the far-flung corners of the city, and will have her hand in every decision that gets made in city government over the next few years.
“You see a problem, find a solution, vet the solution, commit to the solution, and you go out and organize around it,” she says of her approach to the new term. Quinn rejected the notion that the Kingsbridge vote heralded a more defiant four years, and stressed that results would be what mattered.
Hank Sheinkopf ’s advice: “Find one issue and drive it. Do something that gets your face in front of people and makes them want to pay attention to you. That’s how you find relevancy.”“I take great offense at people who think or state that this institution would manipulate the needs of the neighborhood, borough and city to make some political point at the mayor,” she said. “These are important land-use items. I am never going to manipulate the end game of them to make a point in some fictitious political chess game for which other people have laid out who the king and queen are.”
But she still gets jabbed for her perceived closeness with they mayor.
When Stringer was asked who would take the lead in taking on Bloomberg after the election, he joked, “I think that’s pretty easy—it’s Christine Quinn.”
Stringer has made no secret of his desire to be thought of as a citywide contender. He is trying to set up his office as an incubator of ideas that then get implemented far beyond the Hudson and East rivers.
“A lot of ideas to come out of this office have been adopted by the city,” Stringer says, pointing to his food policy program, his work on sexual harassment on the subways, and land use initiatives. “We put out a proposal and [the mayor and the City Council] adopt them. It’s amazing in a borough president’s office. I’ve introduced state and city legislation as borough president. Who’s done that?” Stringer is now turning his attention to the city charter, which Bloomberg promised to take up early in his third term. The reason may be self-serving— the mayor has talked before about eliminating the borough president’s office—but Stringer is using it to talk about the idea of full-scale government reform and to establish further his goodgovernment credentials.
His approach differs from that of his fellow borough president, Ruben Diaz. He has been whacking the mayor on Kingsbridge since long before the election, and now that Nov. 3 has come and gone, it is Diaz, more than the others, who has found that one issue and driven it.
“The Bloomberg economic plan of the last eight years needs to change,” he says. “And we will not be bullied, we will not be hoodwinked, we will not be railroaded, we will continue to do what we believe is right. And thousands of Bronxites agree with me.”
While Diaz has succeeded so far in changing the debate, political professionals wonder how well the Kingsbridge victory will play out in the future. In that dispute, Diaz held the line that it was not worth having jobs if they did not guarantee a living wage, and with jobs likely scarce for the foreseeable future, Diaz may not look so prescient.
But he sees an administration that has spent a lot of money on the Bronx over the last eight years—at Yankee Stadium, at Gateway Mall, at the Croton Filtration Plant—but without much benefit redounding to residents of the borough.
“I’m the borough president,” he says.
“I’m not here with pom-poms and a miniskirt. I’m not here to do some kind of flipping act and entertain anybody. I’m here to be the voice of the people who elected me. I’m here to be the voice of the borough of the Bronx. People are starting to notice that.”
Four years is still a long way away.
Other candidates could emerge—Adolfo Carrión or Eva Moskowitz, or someone coming out of the Legislature or corporate finance. Four years out of the 2001 election, the idea of Mike Bloomberg even launching a campaign for mayor was enough to cause snickers, so while all signs point to the next resident of Gracie Mansion being a Democrat, there is still more than enough time for a Republican to emerge and keep up the GOP streak.
They will be warring for the same constituencies. Liu spent the last few weeks of the general election campaign appearing all over town with Thompson. Thompson embraced Liu in return, helping connect his successor with crucial black voters. De Blasio and Liu were both propelled by the same labor/Working Families coalition. Stringer became one of de Blasio’s most prominent promoters,injecting him into the vote-rich Upper West Side. De Blasio called on Stringer’s political mentor, Rep. Jerry Nadler, to administer his oath of office. Weiner will be looking for many of the same white, progressive and Jewish votes that would form the base of a Stringer campaign, and fighting de Blasio for Brooklyn support. In both of her elections as speaker, Quinn has formed a coalition of progressive support and got the backing of the county leaders, and has had more time to ingratiate herself with the centrist business community that the rest of them will now be trying to hit.
And the biggest variable may be Bloomberg himself. Yes, everyone is throwing bricks at him now. But he still is the prime mover in New York City politics, he still is friends with all the opinion leaders in the city, and he still has billions at his disposal to drive the debate. He faced aggressive opponents before and taken his hits in the polls a couple of years after he was elected when his popularity sank to numbers that would make David Paterson blush.
Bloomberg easily could co-op the opposition, signing onto their initiatives. He could invite them inside the tent, put them on the upcoming Charter Review Commission, agree with their complaints when they rail against something the administration did or did not do. They will all need a record to run on, and no one could provide them with victories quite like Mike Bloomberg can. He has said he will reach out. Perhaps he will.
Or, perhaps he will not. Perhaps the mayor will grow tired of an opposition whose answer only seems to be “No.” If that is the case, the outstretched hand could easily become a clinched fist. He always talks about his disdain for political deal making, his independence. But insiders note how he always seems to be cutting political deals—with the unions, with the Council. He may, as he did with Kingsbridge, as he did when he first got elected and he pushed through a smoking ban that seemed downright fascist at the time, draw lines in the sand and say “No.”
This term is the mayor’s legacy project.
It is his chance to get the city on the firm footing Gotham needs to remain globally competitive. The political players may howl, but Bloomberg will be praised to the high heavens by the editorial boards and the history books. The would-bemayor, the anti-Bloombergs will then really have something to run on. Whoever yells the loudest, wins.
“Voices in this city are calling for change,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the head of RWDSU and a vociferous Bloomberg critic. “They are becoming louder all the time. Elected officials are going to have to listen to it. The mayor is going to have to listen to it.”
