What's your opinion of Janette Sadik-Kahn?
FF of the FFs.
Of course I'd say "the best ticket ever" would be Bloomberg/Huntsman, but that stems just as much from my own peculiar preferences as the supposed brilliance of a Gore/Bloomberg ticket likewise does from WalterMitty's idiosyncrasies.
The soda ban was silliness, yes, but it was minor silliness, and
well-intentioned minor silliness at that, at least (which is more than can be said of most political silliness these days).
Why would Gore run with a Wall Street yuppie who mismanaged a city for a dozen years?
Bloomberg fought hard to make the right moves that would improve New Yorkers' quality of life and the well-being of the city as a whole: financial security, transportation, education, housing, job creation, economic diversification, security, sustainable budgeting, park improvement, tourism promotion, and so on.
This was all done, it also should not be forgotten, in the wake, firstly, of 9/11, which, while perhaps not quite as epic an event as Rudy Giuliani might have you think, did create a genuine crisis of confidence in the city and its ability to recover. Just about every major bank scrambled to secure a foothold elsewhere (really only UBS went through with it) as reasonable people predicted that, between security fears and the opportunities afforded by computing power, finance would flee Lower Manhattan into the four winds, never to return In the end it mainly meant moving to Midtown or in some cases New Jersey; most markers of economic activity rebounded in full by 2003-4.
This cannot be taken for granted, one cannot assume a mayor not as skilled as Bloomberg would have been able to produce the same result (it really
did help, it must be said, that the mayor was someone who had made billions by knowing the needs and wants of finance). Then you had the financial crisis, which devastated the aforementioned financial sector and, had the city been in less capable hands, could have been even worse for the city.
Instead the city
weathered the recession better than most of the country, and the city's economy emerged from the crisis more diversified and less dependent on finance than it had been before (even if it still was more reliant on finance than would be ideal), with tech and tourism leading the charge. The
growth of the tourism sector, in particular, has meant large scale blue-collar job-creation, and not just a few well-paying white-collar jobs for the "creative class" as the trope goes.
With this alone Bloomberg would have been a fantastic mayor. But the truly great thing he did was to parlay this financial and economic stability into the ability to take the kind of measures, as I described earlier, that would not only ensure future success and economic competitiveness for the city, but raise the standard of living and quality of life enjoyed by the common New Yorker. Bloomberg's transport policy was not that of someone solely concerned with travel by chauffeured sedan. His education policy was not that of someone only interested in private education. Self-interested plutocrats would not try the conditional cash transfer program in the country nor would they launch its largest affordable housing scheme., nor would they expend significant effort and political capital to improve the quality of education for low income families... and so forth.
I've waxed poetic about Bloomberg along these lines many times before (he's not very popular with the Atlas Forum, and so I've frequently felt the urge to refute what I see as outright derangement about the man), and if you really want to see more of this you can search for it. But I think I have made my point.
Poll
