Silvercup Runneth Over.
Four Benjamins Offered
To Private Homeowners.

Henry J. Stern
January 9, 2004

The State of the City address, delivered Friday in the cavernous Silvercup Studio in Long Island City, was a set piece which may have signaled the opening of Mayor Bloomberg's campaign for re-election. You can access the mayor's remarks by hyperlink.
 
The backdrop resembled a Karl Rove production: supersized flags of the United States and New York City, and enormous photographs of Manhattan skyscrapers. Stage right displayed a huge photograph of the Unisphere, the 140-foot steel sculpture of the globe, centerpiece of the 1964-65 World’s Fair and a symbol of Queens, the populous host borough for the mayor’s address .At center stage, we saw an enlarged photo of a modest private house, whose owner the mayor would like to benefit with $400 in tax relief. On the great Silvercup stage, the usual elected officials and their appointees were gone. Dozens of military reservists, some recently returned from Iraq, and selected Queens schoolchildren, in three rows of bleachers, shared the stage.

The mayor spoke vigorously and firmly, in a baritone voice. It was not his normal speaking voice, but he has learned that you cannot address an audience of 700 people and hundreds of thousands on television, in conversational tones. It is different when you are on a TV interview or debate, when credit goes to the coolest speaker, the one who can appear most intimate with the viewers and least rattled by the artificiality of the setting.

When you speak before a crowd, you try to capture their mood, to reach out to them to sense how they feel, and to modify your delivery when needed to strengthen rapport with your audience. You do not sail along, reading your script from the teleprompter, oblivious to how your listeners are reacting. The mayor did it right yesterday, and whether his new style is intuitive or learned, it made a more satisfying impression on all those in the room. It also makes for better television, which, of course, is the far larger audience. If people feel that you are absorbing their mood and reacting to it, it makes them more ready to listen to you and to think favorably of what you are saying.

Does the perception of involvement make a difference? Sure it does. But “show me the money.” The substance of his remarks: the $400 tax rebate for homeowners, and condo and co-op dwellers is the important message being delivered. But even there, it is not only the money, it is the awareness that the mayor knows that this group feels that it has been injured, and is trying to make it up to them.

Should the tax relief, if justified, be handled in this way? Tax policy is always a matter of rough justice, or injustice. No one can judge precisely the most equitable way of distributing largesse, or relieving the public of exactions. But when the mayor acts on the principle of “I feel your pain”, people are more likely to be favorably disposed to him. It is also evident that owners of private homes are a core constituency for the mayor, since he is unlikely to score heavily in public housing.

The usual “fiscal experts,” consulted by the Times, were skeptical of the proposed tax cut. Some objected because the cut favored homeowners, and not large landlords. Others wondered whether it was fiscally responsible to cut taxes at all, even though the city’s surplus this year will approach a half billion. Their qualms are described in an article by Michael Cooper.

The once-mighty Democratic Party is now in its eleventh year of exclusion from the mayoralty of a heavily Democratic city. It is in its tenth year of powerlessness in a state where it has a substantial majority in voter registration. They will do their best to muddy the waters, to switch the targeted real estate tax relief to other areas, in order to assure that whatever is enacted bears as little resemblance as possible to the Bloomberg proposal. Then they will claim credit themselves for lowering taxes. That's how it's done.

Meanwhile, back at the City Council, Speaker Gifford Miller, having successfully passed legislation extending his term in office despite referenda in 1993 and 1996 establishing term limits, and successfully defending his term-extension in the Court of Appeals, was unanimously re-elected, although he will be a lame duck unless his term can be further extended. In the speaker’s defense, it must be said that the lawsuit that the Council exceeded its powers in modifying the referenda was contaminated by a Brooklyn judge who overruled his law assistant, and then had the assistant’s work destroyed. This made it appear that the case was a scheme by the Brooklyn organization to wrest the speakership from Manhattan, a view which could contain a kernel of truth.

Various Councilmembers from Brooklyn and Queens will try to succeed Miller in January 2006, but the decision on the Council leadership has historically been made by the Democratic county leaders, just as Mr. Miller was chosen in 2002 by an alliance of Tom Manton, the Queens leader, and the Bronx team of Roberto Ramirez and Jose Rivera. At that time, Mr. Rivera’s 23-year-old son, Joel, was elected the Council’s majority leader, the No. 2 leadership position. The previous speaker, Peter Vallone, was selected by their predecessors, Stanley Friedman of the Bronx and Donald Manes of Queens. That deal was consummated just two days before Mr. Manes’ first, unsuccessful suicide attempt on January 10, 1986. In politics, timing is everything.

The speaker’s conduct at the Charter session of the Council, held January 7, is well described in an article by Winnie Hu in Thursday’s Times, which we have hyperlinked. Since we have written so much about the mayor, it is only fair that you should keep up with our local legislature. After all, New York is governed by a mayor-Council system. Keep an eye on both.