City of Power

So former Mayor Mike Bloomberg is running for president and just about everyone in the media  and public at large thinks he has no chance of winning. He probably doesn't except for one thing -- he's so mind-bogglingly rich, worth around $60 billion, that he can definitely make an impact on the election -- win, lose or draw.

Bloomberg has the kind of power that no elected office can give.

No mayor of NYC has ever become president. It's kind of amazing to think that being the CEO of the country's biggest city has never been a stepping stone to being the CEO of the country. The current British PM used to be the mayor of London. Former French Presidents have been mayors of Paris. But in these United States we have (until recently) mostly elected Governors and Senators to the presidency. Running a big city -- even the biggest! -- just hasn't been a route to the Oval Office.

If you think about it, there's a reason for this -- this is a country that worships the "heartland", the Norman Rockwell-ish concept of the "small town" (never mind that most Americans don't live in small towns and Norman Rockwell himself was from NYC). Americans like the idea of their presidents representing the "real America." One of our Founding Fathers, and our nation's third President, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, lionized the idea of America being full of "gentlemen farmers", his idea of the rural life being inherently superior to the urban one -- the country was for saints, the city for sinners. The "real" Americans, the saintly Americans, were too be found tilling the soil and plowing fields, not engaging in trade and making money in the streets. 

In NYC, we know what people mean by the "real America" -- it means white America. Racism is basically why no NYC mayor has ever been president.

For most Americans, cities are too Jewish, too black, too Hispanic, overall too brown and swarthy, to be, you know, "real." Any NYC mayor running for president carries that kind of "baggage" -- the baggage of being from a place that is majority non-white, that is decidedly non-rural, that has a whiff of sin and sordidness, etc. etc. etc. Even though the current Prez might be from NYC, he presents himself as being a champion of the heartland, a virtual enemy of the very city where he made his name. Yes, he's as big a sinner as this city has ever produced but he's white and a self-proclaimed champion of all white people, sinner and saints alike -- so the "real" America gives him a pass.

But even though NYC is not the nation's capital, even though no NYC mayor has ever ascended to the presidency, this is and always will be a city of power -- financial power, cultural power, media power, and people power. DC might make and enforce our nation's laws but it's NYC that makes our country's magic, that captures and powers the country's information and imagination -- and money. 

We New Yorkers love our power. We love our comic-book superheroes and supervillians like Spiderman and the Joker. And we love the power behind the power, people like Robert Moses, currently being resurrected as a fictional character in the movie version of Motherless Brooklyn.

NYC is a city of power. 

We might not be the "real" America but we possess the "real" American power -- power that comes not from the government but from the imagination, power that comes from money and not from laws, power that comes from culture and not from elections. We are the most important and dominate city in the country, and we weild a power over the vox populi that no president ever will.