Can You Smurfing Believe This Guy?

Things you need to know from Charles McGrath’s big Bloomberg profile in the New Yorker:

• “Booker and other ambitious younger mayors around the country, like Adrian Fenty, in Washington, D.C., call him Papa Smurf.” (Huh?)
• During the term limits hearings “it emerged that a few dozen pro-Bloomberg citizens had arrived in vans provided by the Doe Fund, a nonprofit organization that has received more than a hundred thousand dollars from an anonymous private donor known to be in charge of drawing up the municipal budget each spring.” (Wow . . . missed that one . . .)
• Robert Moses was single-handedly responsible for 400 years of waterfront industry (that’s a new one!!!!!): “The Bloomberg model, under the direction of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and Amanda Burden, the City Planning Commissioner, was based to a large extent on undoing the Moses legacy: rezoning for commercial and residential use large tracts of waterfront property that had once been the province of industry.” (Not that I care to defend Robert Moses, but for the record, this is total bullshit; of course it’s more convenient to read the Amazon blurb of the Power Broker than it is to bother to remember that Moses created more city beaches and public waterfront opportunities than Bloomberg ever possibly could — even if we got million dollar-plus condos on every “underutilized” pier left in the city. Remember also — and this is important! — that Moses didn’t just “rezone” like some pussy — dude actually made beaches . . . Moses may have cut I-95 through some nice middle-class areas and then supposedly rammed through that whole BQE thing — then again, try trucking anything through the city without those two roads — but blame him for that, and don’t make yourself look stupid by forgetting Orchard Beach, Jacob Riis Beach, Great Kills Beach, etc., etc., etc. — not to mention the miles of bike lanes — wow, you mean there were bike lanes before Bloomberg?! — along the waterfront roads through Brooklyn and in Manhattan.*)
• According to Bloomberg, “Today, you can go for blocks without seeing a piece of paper” on Atlantic Avenue. (Surely worth suspending term limits for.)
• Why we continue to want to read about him: “‘The gift he gives is that his personality is not just neutral,’ one political reporter later said of Bloomberg, and then added, ‘If he weren’t sometimes such a dick, it would be an unbearable beat.'”
• The mayor has no need for Viagra — in fact, perhaps the opposite: “‘I am a single, straight billionaire in Manhattan,’ he once told a reporter. ‘It’s a wet dream.'”
• “[W]hile Bloomberg, as mayor, may have been unwilling to discuss Anthony Weiner’s criticisms with the press, people close to his campaign let it be known from the start that the campaign was prepared to devote upward of twenty million dollars to ruining Weiner’s reputation . . . portraying him as, for example, a model-crazy bachelor without scruples. . . . A photograph of the congressman in his goalie mask was hung, scalplike, in the Bloomberg campaign headquarters, near Bryant Park.”
• On the pretext of the economic crisis necessitating a third term: “‘No, it was not the economic crisis,’ Mort Zuckerman told Joyce Purnick. ‘What else was he going to do?'”

*Idea of the Day: Were it not for roads like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that shifted the transportation of goods away from the waterfront, the Bloomberg Administration would not have been able to rezone places like Greenpoint that years later had an underutilized waterfront; Bloomberg therefore owes whatever “legacy” he’s bestowed on New York to Robert Moses.