Stopped Clock Gets it Right This Time

In this morning's NY Daily News, the paper's Mike Lupica calls out Mayor Mike on term limits-and gets it just right:

"Nobody ever wants to leave. Rudolph Giuliani, who decided he wasn't just a total hero mayor but also totally indispensable, did not want to leave City Hall at the end, whatever he said. Now neither does the successor, Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani once carried across the finish line. Whatever Bloomberg says these days. Or doesn't say. They do not want to leave City Hall, they do not want to leave the spotlight or the stage, and they do not want to leave the best job either one of them is ever going to have in politics. And the closer they get to the end of their terms, they certainly don't want term limits to get in the way of what they really want, which is a third term that turns the office of mayor into what they really think it should be: a monarchy."

And while Lupica simply cannot let his animus for Ruddy slip by, and his misplaced approbation of Mayor Mike, he dramatizes the same power grabbing impulses in both of them: "Bloomberg has been 10 times the mayor that Giuliani was. His administration is more civil, and so is the city, and he is a more competent manager, just on his experience in business alone, than his predecessor ever was. But he is as ambitious as Giuliani ever was in New York, and is never wrong, not on the Olympics, not on a West Side stadium for the Jets, not on congestion pricing, not when he wants the area on Broadway south of 42nd St. and almost all the way to Madison Square Garden turned into our big, bad city's version of the Champs Élysées."

So Little Mike may not be the best of political analysts, but he sure does get the issue of self-aggrandizement; something that, as the NY Sun reports this morning, is sure to galvanize the folks over the next few months. What with Ron Lauder up on the tube with ads and a new coalition of grass roots groups in formation, it's only a matter of time before Mayor Mike does his Lily Tomlin routine: "Never mind!"

Oops Update

As Doug Muzzio reminds us, it was the late Gilda Radner, not Lily Tomlin, who coined the "Never mind" phrase.