A Pint-Sized Big Gulp

Anyone who reads these posting knows I rarely have anything to say politically. At least in print, I refrain. There is SO much of it out there, what can I add? Well, here goes.

Maureen Dowd today harkens back to her best writing when she won the Pulitzer. And she has former NYC Mayor Bloomberg to thank.

For anyone who doesn't hear or read the news, Mayor Mike has not really announced he's running for president in 2020, but he's filed paperwork to compete in an Alabama primary. This is prescient, since Alabama's football team has more home games left.

Mayor Mike was to New York City what Rudy Giuliani couldn't be: a three-term mayor. During Rudy's tenure the City Council revised the City Charter and set a two-term limit on serving for mayor. A revision that was in effect, until it wasn't.

Mayor Mike convinced the Council to waive the the two-term limit, allowing to run for a third term. He didn't have to win, but go ahead, name his opponent and you get a MetroCard good for a month. (Not from me, however.)

In physical stature, Mayor Mike is short. Vertically challenged they would say these days. When NYC shook from an earthquake a few years ago the joke went that Mayor Mike took cover standing under his desk. Then held a news conference. Mayor Mike loved news conference.

And our current president loves to pick at physical attributes. In the primary, it was "Little Marco Rubio." The news of Bloomberg's interest in running already has the president referring to his former mayor as "Little Michael" as if he's Little Richard or a youngster named Micheal Jackson. Or maybe even the youngest member of the Corleone family about to undertake his first hit.

Mayor Mike, like most mayors who hit their third term, gets remembered for the near-last thing they did, and for Mayor Mike it was his proposal that the city ban 20 oz. Big Gulp soft drinks. Too much sugar. Obesity. Diabetes. Mayor Mike was looking out for the health of his fellow New Yorkers and suffered ridicule for it.

It is not quite the same thing, but consider New York City's banning of pate fois gras. What's that you say. Pressed goose livers, a staple of French cuisine.

Geese or ducks are purposely fattened so that their livers become enlarged and a more desirable part of the bird than their other parts. The forced feeding is considered cruel, and therefore is banned in California and New York City. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) says beef should be banned as well. Oh boy.

So Mike wanted New Yorkers to watch their diet. The current administration wants them to curtail their intake of foie gras, as if you can get it at Citi Field or Yankee Stadium between innings.

There were a few other instances of misapplied mayoral desires and wrong-headed ideas. Take the plan to build a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan for the New York Jets. The Jets have been co-tenants at Giants Stadium ever since they left the dinginess of Shea Stadium decades ago.

Nowhere is it written that every football team has to have their own stadium, but they do. They need their identity. The air rights over the railroad tracks could be used to build a stadium for say 60,000 or so badly clothed souls for eight winter dates (plus some pre-season) in the winter, no?

This of course would not be a stadium reached by auto, but rather by mass transit, or walking (what's that?) in what would be a new heart of Manhattan. The sanctified rite of tail-gating would have to take on a new format once the white wine and shrimp set from the U.S. Open crowds mixed with the  the grilled bratwurst and Budweiser crowd wearing bright numbered clothing and face paint.

The stadium only ever appeared as a model, one of those great looking scale things that HO trains should run around. West Side stadium plans? DOA.

Less ridiculous, but just as coolly received, was Bloomie's plan to show the world that NYC was an international art center, equal to the sidewalks of Paris, by allowing the artistic husband and wife duo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude to install 27! (a marathon) miles of orange laundry suspended from metal frames throughout Central Park in February 2005; an installation called The Gates. The color of the fabric, paid for by the artists and donations, nearly matched the color of Jeanne-Claude's hair.

This was part of Bloomie's bid to impress the Olympic committee to award NYC the rights to hold the 2012 Summer Olympics Games in NYC in as many locations as it would take to accommodate 100 meter dashes, rowing and badminton competition. Very wishful thinking. London got the games.

Mayor Mike is also a billionaire many. many times over whatever billions The Donald claims to be worth. Bloomberg is an audited financial statement. He lived in his townhouse rather than Gracie Mansion because home was better than living in a colonial home in Carl Schurz Park, surrounded by oil paintings of former mayors, good and bad.

Mayor Mike needs no donors. He financed his mayoral campaigns on his own, and there is every likelihood he'd finance a presidential run on his own.

Of course being a billionaire makes him fodder for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who tell us billionaires are the worst kind of species. Elizabeth's funding proposal for her Medicare-for-all program would whack Bloomie and his kind mightily.

But everyone else gets whacked mightily as well. Everyone in America would be placed on a financial diet. (Since I never gave a hoot about Big Gulps, I'd much rather they be banned rather than my money.) Elizabeth Warren, when pressed on the cost of her proposal retorts that what does a wall between the United States and Mexico cost?

It's a great retort for those who don't know that one proposal is an figure followed by billions (a thousand millions) and that Medicare-for-all is followed by the word trillions. A trillion is a thousand billions; 10 to the 12th power. At that point, we're not taking about real money, we're talking about the distance to stars. Or terabytes.

Mike's concern for New Yorkers' diets earned him the nickname Mrs. Doubtfire, a nanny to the world. The editorial cartoonists and writers will have endless hours of fun writing about him. One Twitter wag (@thomaswright08), a senior fellow fellow at the Brookings Institute, has cogently suggested that Mayor Mike buy Fox News as he runs for office.

This is the kind of learned commentary Mayor Mike will attract: credible advisers from think tanks. Think of Mayor Mike's cabinet. The quality of the Tweets alone will improve.

And Maureen Dowd will once again be worth reading.

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