Boss Pinstripes

„Along with being New York's first billionaire mayor, Mr. Bloomberg is the first one to have made his fortune in media. Buttoned-down and unscandalous, he is Berlusconi without, one might say, the sconi. If you work in media, you either know him, or know someone who knows him, or know someone who knows someone who is socially connected to the mayor in some way. And who can say what media property he'll buy next? Mr. Bloomberg's gravitational force affects everyone who might be in the business of consequentially criticizing him. (For example: Go after him, and you can forget about opining on the Bloomberg L.P.-funded Charlie Rose Show.) His enveloping wealth produces all the effects of corruption without, itself (as far as we know), being corrupt.

Machine politics derives its staying power from putting the »little people« on the payroll. Mr. Bloomberg doesn't need to do that. He puts business-executive friends like Robert Lieber, Daniel Doctoroff and Patricia Harris—many of whom shuttle back and forth between his media business and his mayoral administration—in charge of the payroll and centralizes the system so seamlessly that top-down management performs the ordering function of a political machine. The whole thing stinks of undemocracy. When Mr. Bloomberg's rich appointees boast that they are taking only one dollar as an annual salary, they want to demonstrate a public servant's self-sacrifice. But what they are really doing is displaying an investor's indifference to the relationship between money and work. They are redefining responsibility in government. If the public doesn't pay their salary, then they are not accountable to the public. The result is Tammany Hall with a Carnegie Hall face. Mr. Bloomberg is not Boss Tweed. He is Boss Pinstripes.

Mr. Bloomberg admirably made his fortune as someone who manages, and like everyone, his philosophy of life is defined by his path to success. Defending his choice of Ms. Black to John Gambling on the radio, he said: »This is a management job, John. It's 135,000 employees, it's $23 billion dollars of the public's money and 1.1 million kids that we have to get services to«. The idea that good teachers are professionals and no more »employees« than doctors or lawyers are »employees«, or that learning is not a »service« like getting broadband, will never occur to the businessman-mayor who bought his way to a third term in office the way someone with money simply buys what he likes. The scary thing is that this guy could well be thinking of running for president. To borrow from a famous song: If he can pull this autocratic business here, he can pull it anywhere.”