Oddo Boy!

The budget battle between the city council and the mayor has at least one salutary aspect to it-it's allowing some of the council members to open their eyes about the mayor's limitations. In particular, one prescient observer, CM Jimmy Oddo, has begun to wonder about the necessity of giving Mike Bloomberg a third term.

Gotham Gazette has the story: "Council members took aim at the administration over a slew of other slashes — from cuts to outreach for homeless youth (which we cover today) to funding reductions at libraries. Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer, the chair of the Cultural Affairs Committee, said some libraries could reduce service to two or three days a week under the current cut. And, of course, the conversation turned to politics. Councilmember Jimmy Oddo, the council’s minority leader, questioned the administration’s reasoning for extending term limits — an argument based on its ability to use creative solutions for fiscal problems. “We needed this administration because it was uniquely qualified. What in this modification would you argue is unique?” Oddo asked the budget director to a round of applause. “Where’s the payoff for the term limits vote? Where is the radical idea?”

We hate to be right more or less posthumously here, but we have to say we told you so-but before, and not after the fact:

"But the role of Bloomberg, in both creating as well as exacerbating this situation, is left unexamined by the Mort Zuckerman, the hagiographer at 33rd Street: "Finally, New York is beset by unprecedented economic ills that will force the next occupant of City Hall to do more with far less. Who would you trust to get that mountain of a job done?"

Breathtaking! No critique at all of the way in which Bloomberg has outspent even David Dinkins, raising taxes to unprecedented levels-shuttering small stores all over the city as a consequence; and has obligated the tax payers for the next fifty years with bloated pensions for a municipal workforce that has increased in the manner of Mickey Mouse's duplicating brooms in Fantasia's Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Let's face it, we have as free a press when it comes to this mayor as the old Soviet Union-at least as far as the tabloid editorial boards are concerned, And did anyone think that Pinch would come out swinging against the $100 million man? Sorry, this Pinch hasn't grown an inch.

Just as the editorial boards of the Post and the News have walked away from the truth about Mike and his record-so intent, as they are at acting as an amen chorus for their leading classmate. We can't wait for the fallout when the financial sh#t hits the fan-and when it does, the shameful sycophancy of the editorialists will stand exposed."

As it does now, at last, for the observant Mr. Oddo-who finally pulls the curtain away and discovers that the Great Oz is just a little man with a lot of money and not all that much fiscal acumen. Which reminds us of the old adage, "Better late than never; but better yet, never late.