Those and other questions were put to Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor for government affairs and communications, on March 26 in an interview launching Fordham’s Oral Archive on Governance in New York City: The Bloomberg Years.
Wolfson was interviewed by Costas Panagopoulos, PhD, professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy. Wolfson offered an insider’s glimpse of the former mayor as person, policymaker, and visionary.
He said that, contrary to Bloomberg’s media image as billionaire technocrat, the businessman-turned-mayor was adept at wearing a politician’s hat and enjoyed mingling with the public during campaigns and other public events.
“People forget that the skills he brought to Bloomberg Industries were the skills of a salesman,” said Wolfson, who still works with Bloomberg on his philanthropic endeavors. “He knows how to sell a vision, a concept,” something he has done since he was designing and creating financial information terminals as an entrepreneur.
Nevertheless, Wolfson said that Bloomberg’s foremost talent—in fact, “his calling”—is in bullpen-style management and in the running of a complex organization. It was that aspect of being mayor that Bloomberg enjoyed the most.
Another asset was Bloomberg’s lack of political experience prior to his election—a plus because he didn’t know what “couldn’t be done.”
“He hadn’t spent 20 years in politics learning the ‘rules of the road,’ which tend to narrow people’s sense of what is possible,” said Wolfson. “It was easier for him to see his way toward ‘yes.’”
That Bloomberg vision, coupled with his willingness to push unpopular public policies, resulted in political wins, such as his citywide smoking ban, but also failures, such as congestion pricing and a ban on large sugary drinks.
Even then, said Wolfson, Bloomberg saw success in his attempt to pass regulations on sugar intake, because it inspired a closer look at the issue.
“What we tried to do with sugary drinks in New York changed the debate nationally,” he said. “Sometimes what one person might call a failure he would consider a success: Okay, the court struck it down but we changed the conversation.”
As a manager, Bloomberg showed fierce loyalty to staff, said Wolfson. Under his tenure, it was frowned upon to be unsupportive of a colleague; Bloomberg once told him that “the day that newspapers are going after you, that’s the day I walk around with my arm around you.” When questioned by news media, Bloomberg has refused to criticize the current mayor, Bill de Blasio–which Wolfson sayshe does out of respect for the office in which they both have served.
Those areas in which the Bloomberg administration faced public criticism— stop-and-frisk, low-income housing, income inequality, the disastrous school chancellor appointment of Cathie Black—were also raised.
Regarding Black, Wolfson said that Bloomberg would never use the word “sorry” with regard to the appointment, but acknowledges that she was not the right fit. As to poverty and income inequality, Wolfson said the mayor would not view himself as the “great leveler,” rather he sought to create opportunities for poor and middle-class New Yorkers, who he said fared better than the poor in other cities during economic downturns. In fact, he welcomed the rich as a means of strengthening the city’s tax base in order to redistribute monies to those in need.
Bloomberg took office in 2002, immediately following the single most tragic event in the history of the city. Wolfson speculated that he will be remembered as “the guy who came in after 9/11” and created the memorial museum to honor those who died. The larger legacy, however, will be the mayor’s vision for rebuilding an economically collapsed, spiritually broken city.
“At a time of enormous difficulty in the city’s history, he was able to assume leadership [and]give people confidence in New York,” he said. “He believed in the promise and the future of New York. [Even today] he sees it as a gateway to opportunity.”
— Janet Sassi
]]>Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and associate professor of political science, has ranked which polling organizations were the most accurate of the 28 organizations he analyzed, based on their pre-election polling.
“For all the ridicule directed towards pre-election polling, the final poll estimates were not far off from the actual nationwide vote shares for the two candidates,” said Panagopoulos.
For all the derision directed toward pre-election polling, the final poll estimates were not far off from the actual nationwide voteshares for the two candidates. On average, pre-election polls from 28 public polling organizations projected a Democratic advantage of 1.07 percentage points on Election Day, which is only about 1.13 percentage points away from the current estimate of a 2.2-point Obama margin in the national popular vote (Obama 50.3% versus Romney 48.1%).
Following the procedures proposed by Martin, Traugott and Kennedy (see Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 2006, pp. 342-369) to assess predictive accuracy, Panagopoulos analyzes poll estimates from 28 polling organizations. Most (22) polls overestimated Romney support, while six (6) overestimated Obama strength (indicated with a * below), but none of the 28 national preelection polls he examined had a significant partisan bias.
The following list ranks the 28 organizations by the predictive accuracy of their final, national pre-election estimates (as reported on pollster.com).
1. Democracy Corps (D)*
2. Pew Research
2. Hartford Courant/UConn
3. ABC/WP
4. Angus-Reid
5. National Journal*
6. Ipsos/Reuters
7. YouGov
8. PPP (D)
8. Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP
9. Purple Strategies
10. NBC/WSJ
10. CBS/NYT
10. YouGov/Economist
11. UPI/CVOTER
12. IBD/TIPP
13. CNN/ORC
13. Monmouth/SurveyUSA
13. Politico/GWU/Battleground
13. FOX News
13. Washington Times/JZ Analytics
13. Newsmax/JZ Analytics
13. American Research Group
13. Gravis Marketing
14. Rasmussen
14. Gallup
15. NPR
16. AP/GfK
In 2008, Panagopoulos released the first such report following the 2008 presidential election. The good news is that for the past two presidential elections, pre-election polling has been fairly accurate.
– Costas Panagopoulos
]]>The initiative, a collaboration between Fordham’s Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., George Mason University’s Michael McDonald, Ph.D., and Harvard University’s Micah Altman, Ph.D., is designed to raise awareness about the 2012 redistricting cycle taking place in New York state and to encourage citizens to get involved in the process.
It’s supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and includes a series of six workshops scheduled throughout the state where experts will discuss key elements and issues related to redistricting.
Each discussion will be followed by a hands-on demonstration of “District Builder,” a free, user-friendly software platform developed by McDonald and Altman that enables citizens to design districts and to submit these to legislators for consideration.
The project also includes a student competition to encourage teams of students working with a faculty mentor to submit Congressional and state legislative maps for consideration. A panel of experts will award three, first place prizes of $1,000 for each level of office (Congress, State Senate and State Assembly).
“For far too long, ordinary citizens have been left out of the decennial redistricting process, and back-room deals have often led to heavily gerrymandered districts that compromise democracy and representation,” said Panagopoulos, director of the Redistricting Project and Fordham’s Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy.
“This year, all of that is about to change. It has never been easier to get involved in the redistricting process,” added Panagopoulos. “We’re partnering with institutions across the state and going on the road to show New Yorkers exactly how to do that.”
Panelists for “Redistricting New York 2012: Issues and Controversies,” will include:
Costas Panagopoulos, Ph.D., Fordham University
Michael McDonald, Ph.D., George Mason University
Nathaniel Persily, J.D., Ph.D., Columbia University Law School
Michael Halberstam, Ph.D., S.U.N.Y Buffalo Law School
Wednesday, Oct. 5
3 p.m. Panel Discussion
5 p.m. Public Mapping Software Demonstration
7 p.m. Reception
12th Floor Lounge
Lincoln Center Campus
Free and open to the public. For more information, click here.
RSVP: [email protected]
“Resurrecting the GOP: Bringing Back the Party of Lincoln in the Era of Obama”
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 | 6 p.m.
McNally Amphitheatre, Lincoln Center campus,
With Richard A. Galen, columnist and Republican strategist and former press-secretary to Vice President Dan Quayle and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Galen has frequently appeared as a guest on MSNBC as well as NBC, ABC, FOX, and CNN, including CNN’s Larry King Live.
The events is free and open to the public. RSVP to:
Deborah Moore
Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics (New York University Press, 2005), written by De Luca and long-time friend and colleague John Buell, a former professor of political science, and now a columnist for the Bangor Daily News, highlights the rise of what the authors label the “demonization” of American politics, and calls for a return to civil debate where democracy and freedom of speech can coexist in a productive, idea-rich environment.
“This is not an argument against rough-and-tumble politics,” De Luca said. “It’s an effort to analyze some of the human temptations, and American political and cultural pressures toward demonization of opponents, and to argue that now is the time to restore a respect for individuals and groups with whom we don’t agree politically. De Luca asks: What about American political culture promotes demonization? And what in our culture can serve as resources to combat it?” For De Luca, these two questions are paramount.
The authors identify what they call the “politics of moral personae,” a characteristically American form of political attack, where a leader’s personal character is assailed. These purported flaws are presented by opponents as moral defects that are representative of that leader’s political platform and supporters. Retaliation often mimics the attack, and the demonization perpetuates itself.
Tough criticism should not slip into demonization—by which an opponent is transformed into consummate evil—De Luca insists. Terms like “evil” should be reserved for those who really deserve them, like Osama bin Laden, he said. Otherwise, we corrupt our ability to have serious moral discourse.
The concept for the book originated during the media frenzy surrounding the Clinton scandals of the late 1990s, De Luca said, and continued to grow through the polarized political environment that manifested itself in the elections of 2000 and 2004. According to De Luca, the media fueled animosity between the opposing political parties during this time, and distracted the country.
“The competition among talk shows prompted many of them to devote virtually every show for a year to charges and countercharges, leading up to and through Clinton’s impeachment, ratcheting up the rhetoric … Meanwhile, the planning for 9/11 was already underway.“
The book is a product of a 30-year discussion between De Luca and Buell, who met in the early ’70s as Ph.D. students in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the “simultaneous needs in politics and society for both individual and community, for liberty and justice,” according to the book’s introduction. It illustrates a growing trend of character attacks fueling political campaigns and offers strategies for finding where to draw the line between critiquing public service and political platforms—and demonizing personal character. The authors call for a “Democracy without demons.”
“Sometimes in the name of righteousness, whether from the right, left or center,” De Luca said, “people go beyond the pale in their attacks.”
“This book is a modest effort to re-inject a higher moral purpose back into politics,” he said, “to discover how we, as a people, can together achieve a higher quality of life-including our spiritual life.”
]]>