For the past 12 years, New York City residents have lived in a reality-distortion field created by a man who spent $260m of his own money to get elected 3 times, and who expresses disdain for interest groups, which he can afford to ignore. Bars and businesses have carped about his smoking ban. Public-employee unions have denounced him as a robber baron. Anti-poverty organizers have assailed his budget cuts. Civil-liberties groups, the Times editorial page, and most Democratic candidates for mayor criticize him for allowing police officers to engage in racial profiling; last week, a federal judge ruled that the city’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional. But the job of mayor is to “say no.” “Everybody would like to have everything at no cost. That’s normal. That’s not the real world. It’s easy to say yes. It’s not easy to say no when people scream at you at a parade, give you the finger, criticize you in the paper.”

i don’t get why there are confused people campaigning on behalf of the losers now running for nyc mayor. none of them are in the least bit inspiring, and seem to be competing solely on the basis of who can roll back all the hard-won progress of the last few years the fastest.

For better and occasionally for worse, the rarefied experience Bloomberg brought to the job defined his tenure. Most obviously that began with his billions, which allowed him to self-finance his campaigns and remain largely unbeholden to the city’s clamoring interest groups. Freed from the obligations of retail politics, he could staff his government with top talent rather than people holding political chits. With a few conspicuous exceptions, he hired people of passion and competence. He invited them to experiment, a rare thing in the risk-averse culture of government, but he held them accountable with obsessive attention to metrics. His City Hall, like his eponymous company, was built on the power of information. The great urban contraption that is New York City government has probably never been so well run.

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