"He’s always been long on big ideas and short on follow-through."...
1/22/13, "An absentee mayor," "Too bored to save his legacy?" NY Post, Bob McManus
"Remember the time Mike Bloomberg jetted off to sunny Bermuda as a monster snowstorm bore down on the five boroughs? Never again, he said afterward, woefully, while the city ever-so-slowly dug itself out of the drifts. Well, some tigers just can’t change their stripes.
For there he was last week, down in Maryland giving America a firearms intervention while the United Federation of Teachers and his own crack Department of Education negotiators pulled his pants down on teacher-quality reform.
Transforming the city’s public-school system into a national model for quality and effectiveness was once right at the top of Mayor Mike’s personal legacy list....
But then came the third-term blahs, the departure of Joel Klein as schools chancellor, the ensuing Cathy Black debacle, the ascendancy of the thuggish United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew — and the now-pervasive sense that Bloomberg no longer much gives a damn about the city’s 1,400 schools.
Fact is, he’s always been long on big ideas and short on follow-through (congestion pricing, anyone?). The schools seem to be no different.
Bloomberg won mayoral control of the Board of Education early on — a signal victory, though one built on the largely unappreciated efforts of his predecessor, Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Then came a lot of churning, but not much change.
Certainly not when it came to dealing with Albany.
He dispatched naïve deputies to the capital city to negotiate charter-school and school-closure reform with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — and wound up with laws studded with subsections designed to weaken, not strengthen, mayoral control.
And that’s how it worked out.
Fast forward to last week’s teacher-evaluation horror show, a repeat of what had come before: Mike delegated, his deputies dithered and the UFT carried the day
More, the union can now credibly — if dishonestly — argue that the potential loss of hundreds of millions in state and federal school aid is all Mike’s fault.
The money is the carrot in a state law requiring that the city and its unions negotiate objective evaluation standards for teachers and supervisors.
This always was going to be a tough fight. Mulgrew would sooner jam hot needles in his eyes than allow even the most egregiously incompetent teachers to be dismissed.
But as negotiations closed in on last Thursday’s deadline, the union had an unexpected ally at the table: Shael Polakow-Suransky, the policy factotum forced on Bloomberg by Albany as its price for allowing Cathy Black to become chancellor.
Black imploded after just weeks on the job, but Polakow-Suransky remained.
And Polakow-Suransky, it seems, is no fan of standardized testing, a key tool — if not the key tool — in any credible teacher-evaluation regimen.
“He doesn’t believe in testing,” says one high-ranking participant in the talks. “He negotiated it away — and when Mike [came back and] found out, he exploded.”
This brought negotiations to an end in a spray of invective, with state Education Commissioner John King essentially (and not unreasonably) blaming the breakdown on Bloomberg while threatening to withhold perhaps $1 billion in education aid from the city....
Mike should have been paying much closer attention to what was being proposed in his name.
For while education isn’t as sexy as assault rifles, he started the reform fight. He really should devote what time he has remaining in City Hall to working for its successful conclusion." via Instapundit
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March 2011, "The Bloomberg Bubble Bursts" Commentary, Siegel and Stern
"In the narrative crafted by Michael Bloomberg’s public-relations team throughout the first nine years of his mayoralty, he was the fabulously successful businessman who saved New York’s economy after the 9/11 attacks and then went on to master urban governance without breaking a sweat. Along the way, we have been told relentlessly, Bloomberg became the nation’s leading education reformer, responsible for reducing by half the black-white achievement gap, while also launching lifesaving public-health and environmental initiatives.
And through it all, so the narrative went, he remained above the ugly partisan fray. A lifelong Democrat who turned Republican to run for mayor on the cusp of his 60s, he quickly transcended both parties and established himself as a true independent. And so, his consultants hinted, the nation’s emblematic “no labels” politician might be available for the highest office in the land so that he could help repair the politically fractured nation as he has repaired New York City....
In early 2010, the Bloomberg education bubble burst. State Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch and education commissioner David Steiner acknowledged that over the past several years, the test scores had been grossly inflated....
In reality, there never was greatness. There have been no lasting fiscal or education reforms.
The story of Bloomberg’s mayoralty is this: there is no there there.
It is now abundantly clear that the myth of Bloomberg’s accomplishments was the result of two forces: his own immense wealth and the city tax dollars generated by the stock-market surge of the 2000s. Both sources of revenue, private and public, were used to co-opt and silence his opposition and thereby allow the glamorized portrait of an indispensable manager and the guardian of the public purse to be drawn without countervailing criticism.
An objective accounting of Bloomberg’s tenure reveals the many ways that Bloomberg’s standing as New York’s richest citizen actually undermined New York’s democracy, even as the city’s fiscal health and essential infrastructure deteriorated."...
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Mayor Bloomberg’s armed bodyguards also carry their weapons when in Bermuda with him by special permission-NY Times
4/25/10, “New York’s Mayor, but Bermuda Shares Custody,” NY Times, Michael Barbaro
“The mayor also takes along a police detail when he travels, flying two officers on his private plane and paying as much as $400 a night to put them up at a hotel near his house; the city pays their wages while they are there, as it does whether Mr. Bloomberg is New York or not. Guns are largely forbidden in Bermuda — even most police officers do not use them — but the mayor’s guards have special permission to carry weapons. A spokesman for the Police Department declined to comment….
Mayor Bloomberg's house on his Bermuda estate, NY Times, 2010
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2011, "An Open Letter to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg," from Rabbi Dovid Bendory, Rabbinic Director, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership."
"Mr. Mayor, your citizen disarmament is an act of hypocrisy. Unlike
nearly all the rest of us, everywhere you go you are surrounded by
official armed guards, police escorts, and your highly trained personal
private bodyguards. (See adjacent photo). Mr. Mayor, is your life worth
more than the lives of your fellow citizens?
Or are we mere “subjects” in your eyes?...
Tyrants like Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao “pioneered” the bloody trail of “gun control” in the 20th Century. Why do you so thoughtlessly, in effect, mimic the insidious actions of these monsters?
This apparent elitism on your part makes your recent publicity stunt in Arizona even more cynical. You sent NYPD agents all the way across the country to purchase guns -- but you can't deploy enough police to protect your own City residents?...
This nation’s Bill of Rights is a sacrosanct public trust. You are a public servant. You swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. As you blatantly disregard the Second Amendment, the actual “Guardian” of all the rest of the Bill of Rights, I must ask you:
Did you knowingly lie when you took your oath of office?"
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11/26/10, "Officer on Bloomberg bodyguard team charged in shooting," Newsday, Matthew Chayes
"A police detective assigned to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's bodyguard team appeared before a judge Friday for allegedly shooting his girlfriend's former boyfriend, Queens prosecutors said.
Det. Leopold McLean, a 17-year veteran on the force, was released on bail after his arraignment on charges of second-degree attempted murder, first-degree criminal use of a firearm, first- and second-degree..." (subscrip.)
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12/15/10, "Bloomberg Bodyguard's Shooting Victim Suing The City," Gothamist
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