Gilding A Pothole With A Noirish Pedestrian Plaza

There’s a great mixed message that the Mayor’s aides float out there in Michael Powell’s “Third Term Blues” piece in which Casey At The Bat baseball analogies are invoked. On the one hand, all the citizenry really cares about are getting potholes fixed while on the other, a third term is a big, beautiful, only slightly warped canvas for one’s legacy:

Reporters, he notes, fixate on trials and contracting scandals far more than voters do. If you look at the mayor’s poll numbers after Tropical Storm Irene, they have taken on helium, he noted.

“How do New Yorkers live their lives? They care about crime, about schools, about garbage pickup,” Mr. Wolfson said, “all of the things that are vital to the lifeblood of the city, and they run pretty well.”

. . .

More grandly, the mayor and his aides now gallop hard in pursuit of a technology corridor on Roosevelt Island, to be built with Stanford or Cornell and the City University of New York. If successful, and the mayor’s team appears to have skillfully laid the groundwork, this could turn Silicon Alley into a broad avenue of innovation and jobs.

But the emphasis, for now, remains on the conditional tense.

“They need a masterstroke that shifts all your attention off the last year and a half,” a former official who has worked in several administrations said. “They need the home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.”

Of course, as this official noted, the problem with waiting until the ninth inning is that, as with the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, you can step up to the plate and strike out.