Friday punditry, and still more blizzard talk.
NPR on NYC's Bloomberg:
ELVING: He's done a lot of things right, especially in the last 24 hours, but he made one big mistake, and that was that early on in this storm, after they had successfully kept services going, particularly on the island of Manhattan, which is clearly the focus for Mayor Bloomberg and a lot of people in New York. They essentially went on the air crowing that they were doing a good job. That is a fatal error.
Salon:
Two East Coast political superstars with national ambitions were caught completely unprepared for the most predictable of local political headaches this week: A blizzard. It was a bad one, to be sure -- two feet in parts of New York City and 30 inches in parts of New Jersey -- but the area is hammered by big winter storms pretty regularly. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- two names on the 2012 shortlists of some of America's most annoying pundits -- were both checked out and unprepared, and both should suffer dearly among their constituents.
Bloomberg and Christie are similar political animals, despite superficial differences. Bloomberg is prickly where Christie is belligerent. Mike's primary weapon is withering sarcasm, while Christie just out-shouts the other guy. Fastidious Bloomberg would ban fast food if he could, while Christie uses his weight to prove his "regular guy" bona fides. But both sell themselves as consummate managers, able to run government as efficiently as a small business. Both proclaim themselves unbeholden to special interests, while both imagine that the role of government is to not get in the way of the virtuous, job-producing rich. They're both rich, accustomed to the better things in life, and largely unfamiliar with and incurious about how the other half lives.
I wonder who those annoying pundits are.
Follow up on Jed's story from WSJ:
Part of the city's reorganizing plan had also been to use some of the savings in management costs to hire 100 new uniformed sanitation workers, meaning fewer people would be overseeing plows and more workers would be driving them.
Bloomberg dismissed the concerns Thursday.
"The budget had nothing to do with this," he said. "We thought we had an adequate number of people, an adequate number of training and the right equipment."
Mannion and Harry Nespoli, president of the Teamster's local that represents sanitation workers including plow drivers, also denied a city councilman's claims that sanitation workers' bosses encouraged a slowdown.
More from WSJ:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday his administration fulfilled a promise to plow every city street, but elected officials and others insisted some streets never saw a plow before the 7 a.m. deadline, marking another setback for the beleaguered mayor.
Mr. Bloomberg, who on Friday completes the first year of his third four-year term as the chief executive of the nation's largest city, has been besieged by a number of embarrassing episodes in recent weeks, with some saying he's endangering his image as an expert manager.
Then there's N.J., from the Hill:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) faces a barrage of criticism from New Jersey voters for choosing to continue vacationing in sunny Florida while voters were deluged with snow, ice and blizzard. His Republican lieutenant governor was in Mexico during the blizzard, visiting an ill relative. No fault in that, but the governor should have been at his desk dealing with the blizzard and not engaging in leisure, entertainment, sporting and bathing pursuits while New Jersey voters were suffering the snow.
Christie's public-relations machine then tried to escape responsibility. Everyone knows it snows in New Jersey, he said. Bad answer. Bad plan. Bad time for partying in the sun.
Christie's numbers were down significantly before his Florida visit, a fact the political chattering class that boosts Christie for 2012 is not yet aware of. He might turn out to be a good governor, or he might be a major flop, but he will not be on the Republican ticket in 2012. Not ready for prime time, not even close.
My predictions for the coming year:
Sarah Palin will continue to poll poorly, and doubts about Mitt Romney from all angles (driven by memories of Romneycare and his actual record as Massachusetts Governor) will pit his GOP establishment supporters against the hearts-and-minds frontrunner, Mike Huckabee, who will look and act like – and be - the frontrunner.
Social Security will be the #2 political issue of the year (jobs/economy are #1) and divide Democrats, while the deficit will fade in importance even below the meager interest the public has in it now. And as the 2012 primaries approach, we will hear far too much about New Hampshire and Iowa and not enough about the rest of the country (that, of course, is the safest prediction of all.)
Bloomberg and Christie are not on my shortlist, so I may be annoying but I'm not one of those annoying pundits. Other people's predictions here.
Paul Krugman:
Hypocrisy never goes out of style, but, even so, 2010 was something special. For it was the year of budget doubletalk — the year of arsonists posing as firemen, of people railing against deficits while doing everything they could to make those deficits bigger.