The fact that one of Bloomberg’s main strategies of winning the election was by publicizing his personality as a charismatic CEO is astonishing. With all of the popular CEO’s taking their prominent role in society, Bloomberg could not have been running at a better time. It was as if fate was allowing him to take on the role of mayor with the events of 9/11 and the political turmoil within the Democratic Party. In addition, the fact that Bloomberg paid for his entire campaign and did not owe anything to any politician was a great strategy as well. Although he ran as a Republican, Bloomberg appeared to be in his own political party, which was good. New York City needs someone who could examine the financial situation and draw up an objective solution. Honestly, the way his electoral campaign sounded, if I had the ability to vote for mayor at the time I would have voted for him.
The whole approach of Bloomberg’s campaign was to run New York City like a business, however as Osborne and Gaebler state, “government cannot be run like business.” Bloomberg had been a businessman his whole life, so in order to run the government like a business he first had to change the government into a business format. By allowing transparency, autonomy, and governmental capacity, Bloomberg believed that he could run New York City like a business. Now I don’t have any problems with the transparency and autonomy, but when it came to Bloomberg hiring the right people to achieve governmental capacity, I could not get on board. Hiring people based on meritocracy is great, people who deserve the job deserve to have that job, but did Bloomberg have to hire all of his close CEO friends. As Nicki said, if it ever came down to deciding on an issue that would personally benefit these CEOs, I feel they would decide subjectively. On the other hand, this could happen to anyone in these positions because corruption, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Other than Bloomberg’s choice of people for positions, I like the idea of being able to see what’s going on in office, and if anything goes wrong we know exactly who to blame.
Since this whole third chapter was on transforming New York City into a business-oriented government, I would like to see how it plays out in practice. Presently, things don’t seem to bad in New York City, but I’m not one to talk because I barely follow any politics or issues. Right now my only problem with New York City is the budget cuts towards education. What happened Bloomberg, couldn’t find enough money to put towards a couple of books?
