Politics: Third Terms

Sometimes I think we should do Mayor Michael Bloomberg a favor and vote against him.
Third terms tend to be a disaster. I’m old enough to remember the third Ed Koch term. It didn’t go well, maybe less, in retrospect, because of things Koch did than the way New Yorkers began to feel about him. They got tired. After eight years, the romance begins to wear off, politically speaking, and the third and final Koch term—like an awful lot of third terms around the country—began to be more about keeping track of the corruption cases than actual achievements.
With Bloomberg, corruption is not a particularly pressing worry. He hires, by and large, fantastic people. But I worry that he’s going to get grouchier and meaner and that it will matter more. He started out as a relatively amiable chap, even with his passion for private getaways and his disdain for what he saw as dumb questions from the press. Fair enough. But in the last year, his attitude itself became the story on several occasions. Remember the mayor yelling at the handicapped reporter?
This is not, after all, a man who is used to being publicly questioned, much less chastised. You could see that much last week, during the NY 1 mayoral debate. Most of the fun was in seeing Bloomberg’s Democratic challenger, Bill Thompson, say to the mayor’s face the things that so many New Yorkers would like to say. I know there are issues that loom larger than extending term limits, but the mayor's mishandling of that issue embodies the rules-don’t-apply-to-me attitude of the incumbent. Watching Thompson take it to Bloomberg made for great TV.
It does not necessarily follow that Thompson would be a better mayor than Bloomberg. But last week’s debate did remind me that elections can be fun—and are sure as hell necessary.