Klueless Klaxon Klan!

So which is more annoying? The scourge of crack cocaine, cigarette butts or car alarms? Car alarms! And no one’s doing a damn thing about it:

Despite a flood of noise complaints over sleep-destroying car sirens, only four tickets were handed out in the city last year for faulty alarms, according to the city Department of Environmental Protection.

“Pest! Grip Lotion, Cross” Is An Anagram Of “Progress Not Politics”

Here’s a figure for you all — Bloomberg probably spent $100 million to win a third term with about 550,000 votes (about 200,000 fewer than he received in 2005). That’s somewhere around $180 a vote. There’s your mandate.

The Bloomberg victory speech was horrifying in several ways, not least of which being that the mayor conflated his “squeaker” with talk of a Yankees ticker tape parade. Talk about wishing bad luck on oneself:

Thank you. Gracias. What a week this is turning out to be. Tonight, a hard-fought victory in a very difficult year, and — who knows? — maybe in a few days, the biggest victory parade that Broadway has ever seen.

Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, that was maybe the nicest thing a Red Sox fan ever said about a Yankees fan, and I appreciate it.

. . .

Will the Yankees win Game 6? You better believe it.

The problem here of course being that Jimmy Fallon only became a Red Sox fan after running around like an idiot for that one movie, and his true allegiance is basically disputed. No matter — baseball, like politics, is full of bandwagoning idiots.

But Jimmy Fallon aside, the mayor really needs to purge Howard Wolfson from his mental space (I need to purge Howard Wolfson from my mental space) — the spin of this being “a very difficult year,” which Wolfson also tried using last night, is especially specious. The mayor’s narrow victory wasn’t because the economy sucks, it was because he overturned the will of the voters without a referendum and poured $100 million into a campaign. Be upfront about this. Quit bullshitting. The election is over.

Speaking of the narrow victory, I also think the media is to blame for making this out to be a landslide from day one:

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

How no outlet could have honestly reported the closeness of the race in the weeks leading up to it seems particularly egregious. Here’s one example of bullshit spin from October 30:

The Thompson campaign keeps insisting that momentum is on their side in the closing days of the mayoral campaign. But a poll released Friday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion suggests otherwise.

The survey, like other recent polls, shows Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with a commanding double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller.

. . .

On Thursday afternoon, the Thompson campaign released the results of an internal poll that portrayed the race as much closer, with Mr. Bloomberg leading Mr. Thompson by just 8 percentage points. But internal polls are notoriously suspect.

In a news release on Friday, Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman, dismissed Mr. Thompson’s poll, saying that it “gives new meaning to the term margin of error” and that every other reliable public poll done over the past month confirms Mr. Bloomberg’s comfortable lead.

There are so, so many other examples that it’s hard to pick just one. But a prime example of conventional wisdom appeared in the election day Times op-ed from Joyce Purnick. Purnick is someone who is very up on Bloomberg’s machinations, having just written a book about the mayor, and her tone — like the tone of nearly every piece written about the election — was that the result was always a foregone conclusion:

Memo to the 108th mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg: You didn’t have to do it. You didn’t need to set a new national campaign spending record. You didn’t have to become a one-man stimulus program, employing costly campaign consultants, ad producers and all those “volunteers.” You didn’t need that barrage of television ads, those wasteful glossy mailings or maddening robocalls.

None of it. You are the incumbent. You are in and destined to stay in after today’s mayoral election because — unless unduly provoked — New York voters don’t reject their incumbent. They’re pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish. You could have spent more on your philanthropy and less on yourself and still be leading your Democratic competitor, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., in the polls.

Even columnists unfriendly to Bloomberg bought into the inevitability — again, pick any, but here are two I remember: Patrice O’Shaughnessy in the Daily News and Clyde Haberman, who while continuing to go after the ridiculousness of the Bloomberg machine, did it in a way that telegraphed a depressing inevitability.

All of which brings me back to the Phillies’ Game 4 meltdown in the ninth inning, after the team tied the Yankees in the eighth, and Brad Lidge self-destructed, giving up three runs and ensuring that Rivera would close out the win; yes, the game was only tied, but the momentum was there for Philadelphia. The series was so close to being evened at two games a piece, and was especially painful for Phillies fans to watch. So was this election. Thompson lost by about 50,000 votes with somewhere around 1.1 million cast. What if things went a little differently?

What if, for example, Cory Booker wasn’t bought off by Bloomberg? What if Obama hadn’t been such a pussy? (And all that Corzine support got him exactly nothing in the end.) And most importantly, what if the media had been a little less incurious about polls and not actively worked to dissuade voters from actually participating? It’s true that this would have cut both ways — I’m sure many voters supportive of Bloomberg were apathetic about voting in a landslide — but the inevitability of a Bloomberg reelection was overpowering to watch day after day, and had to have had an impact.

Going back to that disgusting Times article about the campaign that they only published last night hammers home two big points:

Mr. Tusk, extremely self-confident and forceful, talked about “taking the oxygen out of the room”: hiring so many staff members, rolling out so many endorsements, and tossing up so many television ads that opposition seemed futile.

A sky-is-the-limit ethos, unfettered by spending limits, infused the effort. Mr. Tusk told his outreach coordinator for Asian voters, Oliver Tan, to find him a Bollywood star to endorse the mayor. After weeks of transcontinental phone calls, he did.

“It was selling inevitability,” a campaign adviser said.

Selling inevitability — and everyone — everyone! — bought it. Maybe we need to look at ourselves a little bit, too. The other part, the oxygen sucking, is well illustrated with the Cory Booker quid pro quo. Thompson just couldn’t get a break with any free airtime of the kind that Bloomberg got over and over again. It wasn’t so much the endorsement that Cory Booker gave Bloomberg as it perhaps was Booker actually shepherding the mayor around to black churches in Queens on the Sunday before the election — that of course became a big story for Bloomberg. If Booker had simply sat this out — and not crossed party lines to endorse a Republican — this story doesn’t exist, and oxygen remains intact. But Booker going as far as actually campaigning in Southeast Queens with the mayor was just one of many non money-related examples of Thompson’s huge, huge disadvantage over the course of this race.

The whole experience — from the furtive talk about running for president through to the City Council overturning term limits to the obscene spending and consolidation of power during the campaign — was profoundly discouraging. But you know what really got my goat? That insipid fucking new Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling,” which was played before Bloomberg came out to speak; it’s lazy songwriting, tailor made for opening montages of televised sports events and, now we know, campaign appearances.

The other day I bemoaned the deleterious effects of this campaign on younger people. On our way out of the polling place last night, a cheerful high school student handed us one of the glossy pieces of Bloomberg campaign literature that this morning are littering the sidewalks of our neighborhood. The student insisted she wasn’t getting paid, though she did admit that a pizza party (Bloomberg spent thousands on pizza this campaign) was in the cards. I’m sure she was also angling for a letter of recommendation of some sort as well because, ultimately, everyone is in it for something. And that’s the real legacy of this dispiriting campaign.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

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.

Is Bloomberg Using City Resources To Stage Campaign Appearances?

Robert Sietsema* asks:

NY1 reports this morning that 18-20 sanitation, anti-graffiti, and steam-cleaning trucks recently descended on Inwood in preparation for a campagin appearance by Mayor Bloomberg scheduled for that afternoon.

. . .

Don’t such over-the-top cleaning efforts, in neighborhoods normally neglected and left filthy by the Sanitation Department, for the sole purpose of creating a pristine stage for the mayor’s campaign appearances, constitute an expropriation of city resources for the mayor’s own uses?

*Didn’t realize he was blogging this kind of stuff in addition to food-related items.

La-La-La-La, They Can’t Hear You . . .

The three most important things about the 2009 mayoral election are term limits, term limits, term limits:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign can generate reams of statistics on how quickly the city repaired potholes in each neighborhood. It can produce memos on climate change and public health, and even translate fliers into Creole.

Just don’t ask about term limits.

Rosemary DeStefano found that out on her doorstep in the Bronx the other day when a Bloomberg volunteer showed up, asking for her vote.

When she complained about how the mayor had the law changed to stay in office, the volunteer recited details of his economic plan. When she persisted, he extolled Mr. Bloomberg’s promise to create 400,000 jobs.

“They missed the whole point,” she said.

. . .

Those involved in the mayor’s campaign said the issue has unexpected staying power, a year after City Hall introduced the legislation allowing officials to serve three consecutive terms, not two.

“It comes up a lot with voters,” said one campaign staff member. In the fall of 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg and his aides fought to change the rule, they made two predictions: that voters would be distracted by the presidential election, and that any anger over the move would recede by Election Day 2009.

They may have been overoptimistic, pollsters and analysts said.

“The anger in the electorate remains an inconvenient truth for the Bloomberg campaign,” said Bruce N. Gyory, a political consultant.