Uses (and Misuses?) of Local Media

Bloomberg and Term Limits:

As for Mr. Bloomberg, a packed press corps asked whether there wasn’t something undemocratic about his effort to persuade the City Council to whisk away term limits — which the public voted for twice — and engineer a third term. Sure, he likes the job, and sure, he’s very good at it, but there is that will-of-the-people thing.

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

The Daily News had to do something of a backflip, having frantically opposed any effort to change limits. The New York Times has historically opposed term limits for city offices, so it was less of a walk.

The New York Post was far and away the most enthusiastic: On Sept. 30, the day after the Dow dropped a historic 777 points, the far bigger headline on the cover of The Post nonetheless belonged to “Mike the III.”

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.