Mike Bloomberg For Mayor

Like many of you on Facebook, I was invited to join Mike Bloomberg's on-line affinity group. (I don't know how else to describe it.) Some of my more liberal purist friends will cringe a little bit because I usually share their healthy suspicion of people who are asking for a third term they said they didn't want.

Having lived in NYC for nearly 25 years, I can tell you that Mike Bloomberg has done more good things for the city than many of his predecessors, regardless of party affiliation. I don't mean to discount Ed Koch's or David Dinkins's contributions. Had Dinkins won a second term, my opinion about Mike Bloomberg might be a little different, but millions of New Yorkers were treated to two terms of Rudy Guiliani, the only mayor in my memory that did not appear to like many New Yorkers and was downright nasty when anyone disagreed with him. He claimed credit for community policing - a Dinkins era program already underway when Guiliani took office - and spent much of his time playing vindictive games with state and city agencies.

His welfare to work program forced thousands of recipients into dead-end job paths while paying them peanuts. He offered thousands of "Work Experience Program" participants to the NYC Transit Authority to supplement station cleaning but when he demanded that the Authority forgo millions in revenue (from the City) to offer school passes for free transit and was rebuffed, he stopped the payments anyway and then reneged on his promise of providing a meaningful way to move welfare recipients from welfare to work by providing only a fraction of the people he promised. He must have been really angry when he found out that many of those WEP participants actually got full time jobs and a real career path at Transit that paid Transit scale rates of pay. The WEP participants in the NYC program got nothing like that.

I give Mr. Guiliani credit for one thing - an important thing. He was a steady hand during the 9/11 attacks and did help to heal the City for the last several months of his term. Bloomberg inherited that catastrophe and a economic crisis that could well have turned out to be worse than the fiscal crisis during the mid 1970s. He did a remarkable job on both fronts.

I am convinced that Mike Bloomberg actually likes New Yorkers - not just ones that look like him, but even those who disagree with some of his proposals. He generously and publicly gives credit to his staff, perhaps the most talented staff in recent memory. Call them cronies if you want but I'll take Bloomberg's cronies over what we put up with before he held the office.

A third term? Why not? I have a mental list of a few alternatives for the office but I can't say that any of them would be better than what we have right now.