It really does surprise me that Mayor Bloomberg’s absence from the site of this weekend’s train derailment has drawn so much comment.
Bloomberg has been at this job for 12 years. We know him. Or we sure should. He has demonstrated time and again that he sees little or no value in turning up at emergencies.
His remarks this time, after he returned to New York from his golfing visit to Bermuda, were quintessential Bloomberg: What was important, he said, was that the emergency responders performed their job well: “It was a textbook kind of response.”
Logically speaking, there is no arguing with Bloomberg’s reasoning. Mayors, governors and Presidents don’t do much of anything substantive at accident scenes. What, we expect them to dispatch ambulances, direct police officers, stage crews of emergency responders? They can do more — logically speaking — getting on the phone or sitting at a command center, weighing in when they find it necessary. But note the language: logically speaking.
This departing mayor of ours prizes logic above all qualities. He is the Mr. Spock of mayors — a proudly unemotional technocrat, a manager who prides himself on picking solid, reliable advisers and agency heads and letting them do the work on the ground.
Being in Bermuda wasn’t Bloomberg’s big error during the 2010 Christmas blizzard; it was failing to provide for effective leadership to run the city in his absence. Nobody took control. It was Bloomberg’s greatest mistake — and it is baffling that with ill-disguised arrogance, he still refuses to say when he is leaving town and who will be in charge. At the least, New Yorkers deserve to know who is running their city. Never happened, and with just 27 days left to Bloomberg’s term, not going to happen.
Not that he hasn’t evolved (a bit). If he had been in the city in 2010, or last weekend, I am confident he would have turned up at the scene — not because he would have wanted to, but because he has reluctantly accepted that he should.
His advisers once told me that early in Bloomberg’s first term, they could not persuade him to rush to a water main break in the Bronx. Why, he asked, what can I do there? Well, be there for the people, show your face to the city, they told him. No way, he said: I can do more here in City Hall.
Logical — and, logically speaking, correct. The idea of reassuring the public, showing the people out there that he feels their pain — or will at least pretend to: not Bloomberg’s thing. He has never mastered, or even bought into, the idea of personally cajoling and persuading the public. Bloomberg coolly makes his case based on facts and expects people to accept his statistically inarguable logic: smoking kills, so stop smoking; illegal guns kill, so get rid of them.
If not the grand persuader, he has other strengths, many of them. I suspect that despite Bloomberg fatigue and the vastly oversimplified arguments about a tale of two cities, history will record him as one of the city’s most effective mayors. But somehow, we want our elected officials to conform to our view of who and what they should be, how they should behave, even what they should believe.
We want President Obama to be more emotional, to all but canoodle with angry, recalcitrant congressional Republicans. Really? Americans ought to have figured out his temperament by now, after electing him twice following long campaigns. This President is not the bombastic master legislator and manipulator that LBJ was. Nor is Barack Obama Bill Clinton, who felt our pain all right, but caused plenty of pain, too.
Back home, we wanted Mayor Ed Koch to be less combative and to quiet down. We wanted Rudy Giuliani to be, uh, kind. Both were as likely as getting nonbeliever Bill Maher to end his monologues with a prayer.
And the same premise goes for Bloomberg. New Yorkers still want him to emote. Forget it. If he’s in town he will perform for the cameras — but dismissively and reluctantly. The man will be 72 years old soon. He is who he is.
As he would say: Get over it.
Purnick is author of “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.”
