Ever-Growing Image of a Stumbling Third Term
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: April 7, 2011
To observers of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the appointment ofCathleen P. Black as schools chancellor was potentially a jump-the-shark moment: a man famous for ignoring advice, relying on his own instincts and doing the opposite of what an ordinary politician would do had chosen as leader of the nation’s largest school system a woman with no relevant experience whom he knew socially.
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In forcing her to resign on her 95th day, Mr. Bloomberg was reverting to a type that predated his mayoralty: the bloodless businessman, cutting his losses on an investment that was very evidently going nowhere.
Yet the speed with which Mr. Bloomberg abandoned his education chief underscored what is his most embarrassing reversal yet, and magnified the image of his third term — which was made possible only because he helped overturn a term-limits law — as an episodic drama of debacles large and small.
Botched snow removal — and tin-eared suggestions that snowbound residents take in a Broadway show. The CityTime automated-payroll scandal, with its hundreds of millions of dollars wasted and tens of millions allegedly stolen by contractors. The homicide charges against a child welfare worker and his supervisor in the death of an emaciated 4-year-old girl.
“It all suggests that things are not in as good shape as they should be,” said Joseph P. Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College, who even lumped in the mayor’s ill-received joke about inebriated Irish-Americans as proof that the public had stopped forgiving his missteps.
“These things tend to accumulate and develop a certain image,” Mr. Viteritti said. “And he always had done well.”
For his part, Mr. Bloomberg seems aware that symptoms of “third-term-itis” have manifested themselves. For weeks now, he has been using his own money to pay for campaign-style advertisements, nominally to bolster his battle with the teachers’ union, but widely taken as an effort to lift his sagging approval ratings.
William C. Thompson Jr., the former comptroller who lost the mayor’s race to Mr. Bloomberg in 2009, said he also noted a change in the mayor’s tone on Thursday as he announced Ms. Black’s departure.
“It is a different Mike Bloomberg who finally admits to failure, and failure on this public a position,” Mr. Thompson said. “This is him saying he was wrong about Cathie Black, and that everyone else was right.”
From outside City Hall, meanwhile, veterans of Mr. Bloomberg’s inner circle say that the dynamic between the mayor and his deputies appears to have changed in unhealthy ways since his first two terms, following the departures of some senior officials.
“His administrative style works best when he has really smart people working for him who understand that he’s the leader, and you cover the leader,” said one former aide, who insisted on anonymity to avoid damaging relationships with people still at City Hall. “He’s covering for everybody else. He didn’t have to do it that much in the first or second terms. I just find it so extraordinary that there are so many people he’s having to cover up for.”
The former aide cited Stephen Goldsmith, the deputy mayor for operations, who is in charge of snow removal, and John B. Mattingly, the commissioner of children’s services, adding: “How many dead babies do you need before you make a change?”
“You’re always dependent on the people behind you,” the former aide added. “Where are these people?”
Replacing Ms. Black, at least, came as a sharp break from the pattern of sticking by those under fire.
According to someone who spoke to the mayor about his decision, Mr. Bloomberg had hoped the drumbeat of damaging publicity about Ms. Black would eventually die down.
But it did not. A poll released on Monday gave Ms. Black a 17 percent job approval rating. And the Department of Education’s leadership was disintegrating around her: two deputy chancellors resigned this week, and nearly half of the city’s top education officials have departed since Ms. Black’s appointment.
As people inside the Education Department grew increasingly frustrated and felt rudderless, the person who spoke to the mayor said, Mr. Bloomberg decided to put his loyalty to Ms. Black aside for the sake of salvaging his education agenda.
“Mike’s a numbers guy,” said Mark Green, the former public advocate, who lost to Mr. Bloomberg in 2001. “While you can’t govern according to weekly polls, you also can’t ignore a poll that ratifies an unblinkable truth: She didn’t have the respect of core constituencies, including parents, the staff at Tweed, the teachers’ union and the wider public. She couldn’t govern.”
While Mr. Bloomberg’s choice of Dennis M. Walcott as the next chancellor was greeted warmly because of Mr. Walcott’s experience aiding the mayor on education matters, Kenneth Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College, warned that it was symptomatic of the insularity that often plagues third terms.
“It shows you, again, that the mayor isn’t searching,” he said. “This is the typical third-term problem. You just fall back on friends and allies who have in some fashion earned it by their service and loyalty, instead of engaging in a national search for the best person who can be found.”
The mayor also might have turned his turnabout to his advantage, Dr. Sherrill suggested, had he taken a page out of Fiorello La Guardia’s book.
Mr. Bloomberg’s buck-stops-here statement — “I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as either of us hoped or expected” — lacked the humor or humility of, say, La Guardia’s line about one of his judicial appointments: “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”
“Everybody knows that he’s responsible for it,” Dr. Sherrill said. “And it confirms what people also know: that they don’t like him, and they’re tired of him.”
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