Mayor To Get Aspen Public Service Award

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The New York Sun

The Aspen Institute is honoring Mayor Bloomberg with its annual public service award tomorrow, the first time the international nonprofit has given the award to a mayor.

Mr. Bloomberg will receive the award at the Rainbow Room before an audience expected to include more than 350 leaders in business, academia, and government, among others. The founder of Virgin Atlantic, Richard Branson, will be given the institute’s corporate leadership award.

Past recipients of the public service honor include a historian, David McCullough, senators Lieberman and McCain, a retired Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Justice Stephen Breyer.

A spokesman for the institute, James Spiegelman, said the nonpartisan organization is more interested in Mr. Bloomberg’s ability to unite the city than in his specific policy proposals.

“He entered office at a difficult time, post-9/11,” Mr. Spiegelman said, adding: Mr. Bloomberg “has done a commendable job in pretty much every measure.”

He said the award should not be considered a sign of support for a possible run for the White House in 2008 by Mr. Bloomberg.

With headquarters in Washington D.C., the Aspen Institute was founded in 1950 by a Chicago businessman, Walter Paepcke, to pull thinkers, leaders, and artists from their day-to-day work to reflect on the values of society and culture.

Last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival featured lectures and discussions by a host of national leaders, including President Clinton, a former secretary of state, Colin Powell, the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, and a former adviser to President Bush, Karl Rove.

After the festival last summer, the executive editor of the Washington newspaper Roll Call, Morton Kondracke, wrote an opinion piece that said Mr. Bloomberg should have been in attendance. “I’d bet this crowd would love Bloomberg — for his social views, his record or achievement in New York, and his denunciations of the dismal mire that partisan politics has created in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote.


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