Bloombergism

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

“Getting your feet wet” is what Mayor Bloomberg, in an interview with Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, calls his decision to pony up the equivalent of 8,500 ounces of gold for his new political action committee. No doubt it’s walking-around-in-puddles money for the mayor, who spent what at the time was the equivalent of 97,000 ounces of gold to get himself elected in 2009 to a third term. It’s unclear to us at a glance as to whether that total included the work he did to get the City Council to push aside a decision by the city’s voters, in referendum, to limit him to but two terms. But it’s clear the mayor is spending on the national campaigns of others but a tiny fraction of what he was prepared to spend on his own local campaign.

The central complaint of the mayor is that ordinary Americans have been using a system of pooling their money to win elections, and it frustrating his ambitions. This scheme that ordinary people have been using to pool their money is called political parties. The mayor is against them. Because there are so many of these confounded people, it is hard for any single individual, even someone as wealthy as the mayor, to control political parties. After all, a lot of little people aggregating their small amounts of money can add up to quite a war chest. It can drive a man of the mayor’s means nuts. This is what they mean when they complain about the lack of “independence” of party candidates.

It’s a central feature of Bloombergism — a noun, meaning opposition to ordinary people pooling their resources politically. The mayor tried to run the parties out of the municipal elections in 2003. He came at it via the charter revision process in the city. The New York Sun was but one of millions of New Yorkers who resented the scheme, and the mayor was roundly defeated. The mayor also threw the city into the constitutional battle against the system by which political parties choose nominees for judgeships in New York. We actually liked the reformer who brought the suit, Margarita Lopez Torres, but we were against her on constitutional grounds. Political parties are as American as apple pie. They are used by ordinary people to aggregate their money.

Anyhow, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration filed an amicus brief in that case, known as New York State Board of Elections v. Margarita Lopez Torres. The mayor sided against the political parties. He got the same result as he did when he tried to edge out political parties through charter revision. The Supreme Court came down on the side of the political parties by a vote of nine to zero. The court was unanimous, meaning Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, on one flank, and Justice Clarence Thomas on the other, and Justice Scalia writing for the majority. At least in the current fray, the mayor is spending his own hard-earned cash, even if it’s a tiny portion of the hard-earned cash he spent eking out a third term.

Not to be misunderstood, let us note that we like the Mayor personally. We endorsed him when he was a Republican. It is Bloombergism we oppose. We’ll see what it will buy him. Ostensibly, Mr. Bloomberg’s beef du jour, according to Mr. Rutenberg’s dispatch in the Times, is gun control. It seems to be that the only reason the mayor can perceive for the refusal of President Obama and Governor Romney to join him in a campaign for gun control is they lack independence. It’s the parties that are the problem. Presumably Mr. Bloomberg would try to fight for this cause within the political parties. But he doesn’t have enough spondulicks to go up against all the party individuals, who are too much like shareholders and are attached not only to their party but also to the Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment isn’t the only bale the mayor laments. Another goal of Mr. Bloomberg’s plan to bypass the parties with his Independence USA PAC is, as Mr. Rutenberg characterizes it, “to give the candidates a taste of the political freedom that he has enjoyed as a self-financed billionaire whose money helped him withstand the powerful opposition he faced because of his unpopular initiatives, including a smoking ban and an 18 percent raise in property taxes, to name just two.” In other words, an ordinary politician wouldn’t have been independent enough from political parties to raise taxes after running on a campaign not to raise taxes. He wants his own smoke-filled room, sans cigars. That’s the essence of Bloombergism.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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