‘Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington,” New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told Time magazine in 2007. Bloomberg, according to Michael Grunwald’s cover story, was the diminutive half of a dynamic duo revolutionizing American politics. The other partner: California’s then-still-shiny governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Together, they were “The New Action Heroes” who, according to Grunwald, were “doing big things that Washington has failed to do.”
The article was mostly a clever way to slap George W. Bush. But there are still important lessons to be learned, particularly as the Big Apple remains immobilized not by partisan politics but by Bloomberg’s arrogance. Hizzoner was more concerned with getting salt off of New Yorkers’ plates than he was with getting it on the snow clogging their streets.
“The Governator,” meanwhile, leaves California $28 billion in the hole, his former presidential ambitions an absurd joke and the state’s GOP in tatters.
Both Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg were deemed heroic for abandoning ideology for pragmatism. Bloomberg has made this something of a crusade. He helped launch the laughingstock group No Labels, which seeks to get the “politics out of problem-solving.”
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