Mike Bloomberg, John Lindsay, and a Storm

By on December 30, 2010 10:27 pm in Government, History, Weather

The British Telegraph continues its coverage of the blizzard here.

The Telegraph: A blizzard dumps tonnes of snow on New York, crippling large sections of the city. Outer borough residents go for days without seeing a snow plough, and complain furiously as people begin to die. The mayor, a popular, party-switching chap tipped as a future US presidential candidate, suddenly finds his administration – which was slow to react – is in crisis. The year? 1969.

Despite Lindsay’s February blizzard, he was re-elected the following November, a feat that’s been attributed to the good feeling created by the Miracle Mets. There’s an obvious distinction, though. Bloomberg isn’t up for re-election as Mayor (he’s in a third, and final, term that he was able to get by a controversial political maneuver), and has all but made a Sherman statement concerning Presidential ambition.

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  • lori

    The thing I remember about Lindsay, aside from his ignoring the borough of Queens during the snowstorm, was his disastrous handling of Mike Quill and the Transit Authority which resulted in the terrible transit strike of 1966.

  • http://selfabsorbedboomer.blogspot.com Claude Scales

    Actually, the transit strike began on the first day Lindsay took office as Mayor, so the conditions that led to it can be blamed on the previous administration of Robert Wagner. Nevertheless, Lindsay’s response to it can be argued to have prolonged it needlessly. (I’ll never forget how Quill, sadly soon to die, kept referring to the new mayor as “Lindsley”.)

    Besides the transit strike and the blizzard, the other major controversy marking Lindsay’s mayoralty, which occurred in his second term, resulted from his support of a proposal to build “scatter site” public housing in Forest Hills.

  • http://www.r8ny.com/blog/gatemouth Read it there first

    From Gatemouth on Room 8:
    http://www.r8ny.com/blog/gatemouth/a_true_lindsay_republican.html

    And Bloomberg has not made a Sherman statement–it has only been interpreted that way. His statements are way too close as to what he previously said about a 3rd term and we all know how that turned out.

  • yolanda

    First thing: Bloomberg needs to fire all the sanitation workers who should have been plowing the snow.
    Second thing: Bloomberg never gets elected to any public office ever again.

  • AEB

    Wow, I’m amazed at the off-with-his-head acrimony directed against Bloomberg.

    He certainly fumbled the NYC storm response, but shall we not look at the job he’s done over the past years as a whole? Which job has been positive.

  • Andrew Porter

    The Telegraph is notorious for its right-wing views; indeed, it’s often called “The Torygraph”. It’s also part of a long-standing tradition in the UK of newspapers being allied with the various political parties, and all the news articles are filtered through these sorts of policies. It’s the same sort of thing that Rupert Murdoch has done here with the papers and cable channels he owns.

  • http://heatherquinlan.com Heather Quinlan

    I just love Mike Quill stories.

  • Ben

    Bloomberg is a great guy and thats a fact. Rudolph Gulianni cleaned up this city of street crime and Mayor Bloomberg maintained that. Does anyone remember Montague Street in the mid 1980s when deralicts and drug addicts smashed car windows, etc. looking for money?

    Ok the blizzard was a disaster but otherwise Bloomberg has been an excellent mayor – better than Dinkins remember NYC when Dinkins was Mayor?