Mayor Bloomberg, in Both the Elected and Foursquare Sense

New York City’s mayor might be out of office come December 31, but the network he’s spent the last dozen years building will endure.

Countdown clock from the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Credit: Nancy Scola

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“Michael Bloomberg, whose third and final term as mayor of New York expires at midnight on December 31, keeps a digital clock running in reverse in his City Hall office, counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left in his term,” Ken Auletta writes in the latest issue of the New Yorker. With fewer than 130 days to go, Auletta and others are in post-mortem mode. Bloomberg, he concludes, “is clearly vexed by the challenges of envisaging his own future and a City Hall without him.”

But saying that Bloomberg’s countdown clock implies self-centeredness isn’t quite right. Similar clocks are running in all sorts of city offices, as befitting a mayor who has conceived of himself as a node — the biggest node, but a node — on a network. Auletta attempts to figure out where Bloomberg, 71 and “conspicuously vigorous,” goes next, what bold-faced position befits his bold-faced name. Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense? “I don’t see myself as a full-time philanthropist,” he told Auletta.

So what then? “It is hard to imagine,” Auletta writes, “the endeavor that would sufficiently command Bloomberg’s restless ambition and vanity.” The endeavor, yes. But why would it be just one?

It makes sense, maybe, if you think about Bloomberg merely as a strong mayor. But the record shows that he has never seen himself that way. Michael Bloomberg has spent the last dozen years as, too, the self-appointed leader of a powerful network that isn’t going anywhere when the clock strikes 2014.

You get a sense of this in the other big post-mortem floating around this week, Jim Dwyer’s take in the New York Times. You see Dwyer, a reporter with deep New York roots, struggling to reconcile the differing versions of a man who could be visionary and imperious, a foe of sodium as a matter of public policy but who “sneaked shakes of salt onto slices of pizza.” But Dwyer’s approach highlights the fact that Bloomberg has been, often quietly, establishing, growing and pruning a network that has many branches.

This is, after all, the three-term mayor of one of the world’s biggest cities, and perhaps its cultural center, whose LinkedIn bio lists “entrepreneur” first:

[T]he durability of the experimental spirit that Mr. Bloomberg encouraged remains uncertain, as is the $383 million in private donations he raised in support of varied pilot projects: stopping domestic violence, preventing black and Latino young men from falling behind, manufacturing green roofs, getting salads into schools.

Keep in mind, though, that so much of what Bloomberg has done while in office doesn’t have anything to do with him being in office. At least, it doesn’t have anything to do with the powers vested in him by the New York City charter. His Mayors Against Illegal Guns was an entrepreneurial effort. “Preventing black and Latino young men from falling behind” was a project of his Bloomberg Philanthropies, for example.

That non-profit, too, has been without fanfare, funding Bloombergian ideas on good governance across the country. Chicago has gotten $6 million to put efficiency experts in its city hall. This spring, the organization ran a Mayors Challenge that offered millions to cites that “came up with the boldest and most replicable ideas.” Providence, R.I. was the big winner.

It’s possible to go too far with this thinking, and it’s worth noting that Bloomberg can have his infamous curmudgeonly side when it comes to the power of the network. At one memorable cocktail party to kick off a Google-hosted summit on political technology, held at Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 78th Street headquarters, the mayor dialed down the evening’s excitement when, in his welcoming remarks, he said that on some days all the Internet seemed good for was complaining.

But finding ideas with potential, testing them and getting them to ripple out has been his M.O. on everything from smoking bans to innovation hubs to hiring well-qualified technologies in government. Love or hate his actual policy approaches — and on that the public is mixed — Bloomberg has pioneered new ways of getting them traction in the world.

Part of how he’s done it, Council Speaker and would-be successor Christine Quinn said last week, has been to ask people to get involved in the workings of New York City, and government more broadly, without humility or a sense that smart people or rich people should have better things to do. “He asked with his head held up high,” Quinn said.

But in that, as in every other deal, Bloomberg’s reflex was to structure the dynamic so that an eagerness to help was complementary to getting something out of the deal. Of the coming tech campus on Roosevelt Island, Dwyer writes that ”the project was instigated by the Bloomberg administration and became possible when the philanthropist Charles F. Feeney pitched in $350 million.”

Bloomberg has joked in the past that perhaps his post-mayoral life would include a bit of teaching on Roosevelt Island. He could also, presumably, put in some time at his Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Or he could work against gun violence, or fund civic CTOs throughout the country (if not the world), or put up a building here and there.

The most likely outcome is that he’ll do some combination of all those things, plus more he’s yet to dream up. Bloomberg pioneered a new model for being a mayor. “As much as any mayor of modern New York,” writes Dwyer, “Mr. Bloomberg has been a transformative figure, a shaper of his time.”

But it was less by virtue of being “mayor” as it was by him choosing to stick his finger into all sorts of pots, and nudge others’ fingers into those pots along with him. Only some of that changes on January 1. If anything, the more interesting question than “What does Michael Bloomberg do next?” is whether any mayor can be the sort of mayor that he was without his billions.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: new york citymayorsshared citymichael bloomberg2013 mayoral races

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