Moral: Stick To Low-Hanging Fruit

You know, traffic congestion and greenhouse gasses are important in an Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of way, but access to health insurance is an equally powerful bipartisan issue, you know. Just saying is all:

A sickening 1 million New Yorkers don’t have health insurance, even though 700,000 of them have jobs, according to a report released yesterday by the city Health Department.

More than a quarter of them are young adults ages 18 to 24. The problem is most prevalent among Hispanics: 1 in 4 of them lacks insurance, compared with 1 in 10 whites.

Men are also more likely to lack insurance than women: 1 in 5 of them has no insurance while 1 in 8 women lacks coverage.

(And there are lots of fresh fruit this time of year.)

The Easiest Sister Souljah Moment Ever

Maybe there are some people left in the world who would accept the premise that Council Speaker Christine Quinn represents the tyranny of The Man. Who exactly that would be, I have no idea:

In a move sure to be remembered during her expected run for mayor, the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, cracked down yesterday on a fired council aide, Viola Plummer, barring her from the council chamber floor, with police on hand to enforce the rule.

A defiant Plummer and the council member she worked for as chief of staff, Charles Barron, left the chamber after three police officers and four security guards moved in on them before the official portion of the meeting.

Mr. Barron, a former Black Panther, rolled up his sleeves and stood as a buffer between Plummer and the police before she agreed to walk out. As he strode from the chamber with Plummer, Mr. Barron called out, “Christine, you’ll never be mayor.”

Reporters and television cameras swarmed the pair, who stopped on the steps of the rotunda of City Hall to say the ejection was racist and reminiscent of segregationist policies.

“This was a selective enforcement of the law so that they can continue the harassment, the retaliation, and the discrimination against not Viola Plummer and Charles Barron, but black people in general,” Mr. Barron said. “This is another form of Jim Crow-ism. They want us to sit in the back of the bus, in the balcony, anytime you are an assertive black, and that’s the problem in City Hall.” Plummer, who appeared visibly shaken by the standoff, said it should make no difference where she sits during a council meeting. What Ms. Quinn “thought she could do, and what she almost did, was to provoke me,” Plummer said. “I have a history, I have a history, of dealing with the likes of Christine Quinn.”

Steamroller, Jr.

For the mayor, the worst thing about his failed congestion pricing plan might be how badly he comes off in an executive role. Because if he can’t be bothered to bring along the Democrats in the New York State Legislature on congestion pricing (and reducing traffic and helping the environment is a natural ideological fit here — it’s not like he’s trying to get a flat tax or something!) then how would he be much better at bringing Congress together on stuff like Iraq or immigration or whatever else will be an issue during a Bloomberg Administration? Which is to say, Kevin Sheekey’s aspirations to become the next John Podesta or Andrew Card are over:

It was supposed to be different this time. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his aides conducted elaborate analyses and an intricate media campaign, not to mention all the detailed strategy sessions with advocates and experts, to develop and promote the mayor’s traffic congestion pricing plan.

Yet, despite ads on cable television, a video on YouTube and the mayor’s passionate pleas from church pulpits, the proposal never got very far in the State Legislature.

At a news conference in Brooklyn yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg denounced lawmakers for failing to even take up his plan, suggesting that they lacked “guts” and that their inaction would result in children being exposed to polluted air. “Albany just does not seem to get it,” he said.

But state officials and political operatives said it was Mr. Bloomberg who did not get it as he and his aides pursued a doomed strategy, one that all but guaranteed a replay for congestion pricing of the failed efforts to bring a football stadium to the Far West Side of Manhattan and the 2012 Olympics to the city.

Last night, state leaders grappled with whether to give the mayor a second chance as they negotiated with him to see if some version of his plan could be salvaged. But whatever ultimately emerged, state officials said, was unlikely to resemble what the mayor originally proposed.

State officials and operatives on both sides of the issue described what they saw as the strategic missteps made by the administration over the past few months.

Rather than engaging either Gov. Eliot Spitzer or legislative leaders from the beginning, they said, Mr. Bloomberg and his aides sprang a complex proposal on the Legislature at the end of its session, seemed unprepared to answer questions or revise details, missed opportunities to sway legislators, and then used the deadline to apply for federal financing as a bludgeon to shove the plan through.

“The constant drumbeat of the deadline may have done more harm than good — people got their backs up,” said Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried, who favored the plan. “People don’t like to have a gun to their head.”

The missteps that led this latest ambitious project to the verge of collapse, said the officials and operatives, many of whom would speak only on condition of anonymity because they feared jeopardizing the negotiations, showed how Mr. Bloomberg’s operation, increasingly adept at promoting the mayor’s national reputation, has not yet learned to navigate the city’s business through the politics of Albany.

. . .

Then, as Mr. Bloomberg became increasingly confrontational over the past week — saying on Monday of legislators who said they needed more time to weigh the issues, “It’d be pretty hard to not know about congestion pricing if you can read,” — he sowed ill will, confirming for some legislators a sense that he and his aides held them in contempt.

“I just don’t think they hold the legislative process in high regard anyway,” Mr. Brodsky said. “They see it as an obstacle to getting things done.”

And posting a video on YouTube is not what they mean when they talk about the “YouTube Presidency” . . .

In the Post-9/11 Era, people seemed to love badasses. Bush basically ruined that for everyone, didn’t he (Elliot Spitzer comes off as so 2004!)? I doubt voters really desire another cowboy. Hang it up, Sheekey — I want to read about something else in New York Magazine!

The Lobbying Effort Is In The Mail

Even with all that presidential hype he’s still just a lame duck:

Lawmakers on Monday shelved Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge a fee to drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan, dealing a setback to the mayor as he tries to raise his national profile and promote his environmental initiatives.

The State Senate, which had convened in a special session, adjourned without taking up the plan after it became apparent that the votes for passage were not there.

Meanwhile, the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, proposed sending the issue to a study commission that would also consider other ways to reduce traffic, and giving the Legislature until next March to act.

The developments suggested that passage of the mayor’s plan, or one resembling the original, was unlikely. Asked if congestion pricing was dead, Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who supports the plan, said, “It doesn’t sound like it’s alive, that’s for sure.”

Mr. Bloomberg had lobbied hard and backed an extensive publicity campaign to pressure lawmakers to approve his plan by Monday, the deadline for the city to seek as much as $500 million in federal aid. But legislators complained that he had failed to answer basic questions about the proposal, which has never been tried on a broad scale in any American city. Still, last-ditch talks continued late Monday night.

. . .

In a tense meeting on Monday, testy exchanges erupted between the mayor and the Democratic state senators he was trying to win over. At one point, according to several people present, Mr. Bloomberg told the senators that his administration had sent plenty of information about his plan in the mail, and that it was not his fault if they had not read it.

“If the mayor came in with one vote, he left with none,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat.

“His posture was not ingratiating,” he said. “He says he doesn’t know politics, and he certainly bore that out by the way he behaved.”

So angered were Democrats that they decided to vote as a bloc to defeat the measure, and there were not nearly enough votes among the Republican senators for it to pass.

The mayor moved from meeting to meeting in the Capitol, his expression grim, and he declined to take questions from reporters. He did take a shot at his critics on WROW-AM radio in Albany on Monday morning, saying, “Anybody that says we didn’t have enough time to look at this is ridiculous.

“They don’t read the mail or they don’t read the newspapers,” he said, adding that it would be difficult “to not know about congestion pricing if you can read.”

Or maybe they actually did read the newspapers (nice lobbying effort, by the way — sending over a stack of op-eds!) and felt that there were certain outstanding and/or unanswered issues including but not limited to the potential increased traffic just outside the congestion pricing zone, the incomprehensible notion that Manhattanites below 86th Street would be charged to leave the zone (and reduce congestion in the process!), or the astounding observation that the 6 train is actually not that crowded if you go to work at quarter to seven . . .

Perhaps They Mean A “National Run” At An Idaho Resort? Maybe A Jog At The Lodge Fitness Center?

Does the Sun know something the rest of New York doesn’t? Ten percent is impressive, but not nearly even Ross Perot numbers:

As he prepares for a national run, Mayor Bloomberg is more popular than ever at home.

A poll released yesterday by Marist College and WNBC found that a record-breaking 66% of New Yorkers think he is doing a good or excellent job.

Another poll predicted that a Bloomberg run for president in a three-way race with Senator Clinton and Mayor Giuliani would benefit the former first lady in the battleground state of Ohio.

The Quinnipiac University poll found that in a two-way contest, 44% of Ohio voters would choose Mrs. Clinton and 42% would pick Mr. Giuliani. Add Mr. Bloomberg, and Mrs. Clinton widens her lead — 40% would pick Mrs. Clinton, 35% would pick Mr. Giuliani, and 10% would pick Mr. Bloomberg.

To compare, Ross Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, and in June of 1992, opinion polls had him at 39 percent. Maybe Romney will help (though I hear Big Love is really good this season). (Fred Thompson will probably not help — and his New York credentials are secure!)

In other news, Hizzoner seems serious about this congestion pricing thing. Or maybe he knows something the rest of New York just assumes:

Governor Spitzer seemed to take a swipe at Mayor Bloomberg yesterday for jetting to a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, rather than using the final days before a federal deadline to convince Albany lawmakers to support his plan to charge drivers to enter certain parts of Manhattan.

“I hear the congestion in Sun Valley . . . is tougher than the congestion in Manhattan right now,” Mr. Spitzer told reporters in Washington. “But I think Mike is going to get involved between now and Monday, working with us to see what we can do.”