Its just too painful to watch Bloomberg pretending to be interested in what non-billionaires have to say as we all wait for the fake election to be over with. This is an $85 million acquisition - not an election. We should at least be honest about it. The media should back off - cover it minimally and focus on something less predictable - like Halloween.
My nausea level boiled over last week watching Bloomberg sit quietly beaming as Guliani stoked up a conservative Jewish group with his trademark brand of race baiting and fear pandering. it was a reminder of why Guliani's poll numbers with New Yorkers were in the toilet before he (with the help of his close buddy Bernard Kerik)shamelessly exploited the nation's grief after 911 to market his "America's Mayor" brand. Let's not forget his venomous, sneering attacks on Obama last summer before whooping mobs of angry white republicans. Although, he has done one good thing - he resigned from the Donald Trump migratory fowl nest combover club.
Remember in September 2001 when Guliani tried to use 911 to extend his term because he felt New Yorkers couldn't live without him? Even in September 2001 the response was "whoa - what are you talking about - isn't this still a democracy?". Fast forward to 2008, and we all numbly watch as Bloomberg purchases a third term by driving his bankroll driven steamroller back into City Hall. In the path of his steamroller lies the flattened wreckage of what should have been an election - a "level playing field" a la Bloomberg.
I used to like Bloomberg because he was the anti Guliani - the non ideological, boring, competent, engineer whose billions had untethered him from this city's traditional power bases - the mayor as CEO. In this campaign Bloomberg does not appear to be untethered from anything and stands for nothing except as an unvarnished spectacle of American democracy as a rich man's hobby.
What would it have cost him to show a smidge of daylight between himself and Guliani' - a one trick pony - government by racial division and temper trantrums? Would Bloomberg's conservative base have threatened to vote for William Thompson if he had said even something bland like "I dont agree with Mayor Guliani on everything".
Of course what he should have said was - "I don't agree with Mayor Guliani's position that voting for a black person will cause NYC to go back to being plagued by crime and crack".
After Bloomberg's election in 2001 a cab driver asked me "what is it about that position that would make a man spend $60 million to acquire it?" I still don't have an answer to that question and now his campaign has spent $85 million - with a week to go before election day.
But I guess for a bored gazillionaire its alot more bang for ones buck than plunking down $35 million for a ride on the space shuttle.
See: The Wealthiest Entrepreneurs Splurge on Space Travel
http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2009/04/space.html
A response from a friend
Belatedly, you captured my take on Bloomberg. I've always vaguely disliked him, though not with any vehemence. For one thing, he appointed one of the worst HRA commissioners ever and stuck with her through one outrage after another (she had been an early endorser); seemed to me to be pretty deaf to the needs of ordinary and low-income people, though he looked like he might be going in interesting directions with the poverty stuff, but it seems to have been more for show and a few exotic looking pilot programs, but some of what I dislikd was just that he whined a lot and was utterly intolerant, I thought, of the slightest hint of criticism. Anyway, it all blew up for me, as for you, with the purchase of this election.
