Bloomberg’s Record: Deep Cuts!

If you’re interested, Wayne Barrett takes a close, sober look at Bloomberg’s tenure, including his agency appointees, mayoral control of the schools, public employee pensions (and massive layoffs after November 3), illegal guns, public health and stadium financing (thankfully, the mayor’s glory-hogging, grandstanding, questionably effective environmental record seems to be missing):

When I was in high school, and John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were squaring off, my father helped me craft a list of the qualities and issues we should use to judge the two candidates, a score card so logical that it did not take into account the heart or the gut. I wound up the only kid in my class, at a small Catholic high school in Virginia, willing to champion Nixon in a debate.

There is only so far that a checklist of pluses and minuses can carry you, though this one is not as detached as the one I concocted in 1960. I won’t let my emotions rule, either, however. I believe that the self-serving reversal of term limits was the greatest abuse of power I have covered in more than three decades on this beat. But elections are choices between names on the ballot — not opportunities to file a protest.

You can view elections in a sober manner like this or you can, like me, be content to simply file a protest.