Fiorello La Guardia (New York Post)
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It was Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s greatest mayor ever, who said there is no Democratic or Republican way to pick up Gotham’s garbage.
Which, in case you haven’t noticed, hasn’t been collected for more than a week now — the current mayor having been brought low by a snowstorm in December.
What would the Little Flower have thought?
First, that his successor-nine-times-removed has been spending far too much time on ephemera — lately, the alleged evils of political partisanship — and not nearly enough on the basics of municipal governance.
And, as a result, he got his pants pulled down by a gaggle of mutinous garbagemen.
Correct on both counts.
La Guardia’s maxim spoke to attention to basics: While there necessarily must be partisanship in government, it rarely has much to do with the delivery of essential services. Keep the fundamentals under control and folks will overlook a lot.
But when a mayoralty comes to be defined by fanciful notions — political labels, bike paths, french fries and other irrelevancies — forgiveness following catastrophe will be a long time coming.
Especially when the mayor’s reaction to the debacle ranges from surly condescension to bewildered resentment to transparently feigned contrition.
Actually, there’s scant evidence that Mike Bloomberg even now knows what hit him — apart from 20-plus inches of snow, of course.
And the sanitation slowdown. Wildcat strike would be too strong a term — wild kitten, maybe. But, still, the mayor couldn’t cope. The truth is that while Mike Bloomberg was off trash talking Democratic/Republican rancor, he lost control of the New York City Department of Sanitation.
Snowstorms are among that department’s responsibilities — and it hasn’t been so overmatched by Mother Nature since John V. Lindsay was mayor.
There was a spectacular failure of field leadership last week. Supervisors couldn’t — some just wouldn’t — put down spot mutinies all over Brooklyn and Queens. The results were lethal.
Bloomberg should fire John Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, but he won’t — just as he refused to fire Nick Scopetta as fire commissioner after gross management failures at the FDNY conspired to kill two firefighters at the old Deutsche Bank building three years ago.
In Mike’s World, a fired commissioner would be a public confession that the mayor him self has failed. But last week’s mess owns Mike Bloomberg. The label “failure” is stamped squarely in the middle of his forehead. The fact that Manhattan bike lanes had been hand shoveled clear to the pavement before a lot of outerborough avenues had seen their first plow demonstrates yet again that Bloomberg has lost interest in core mayoral duties — as if more evidence is necessary.
Either the mayor is bored (again), or he has decided that the frictions created by vigorous leadership might generate too much heat for his on-again, off-again (but eternally quixotic) national ambitions.
Yet while Bloomberg may not be interested in trouble, it’s pretty clear that trouble was interested in him over the Christmas weekend.
And it caused him to boot the Fiorello La Guardia test: Labels don’t count, but competence sure does.