Mayor to president not so big a leap

The Michael Bloomberg presidential campaign took a look at Bridgeport City Hall circa 2015, and it liked what it saw.

Key pieces from Bill Finch’s administration are leading the former New York City mayor’s run for the nation’s highest office. Brett Broesder ran Finch’s communications; he now serves as Bloomberg’s Connecticut state director. Ruben Felipe was deputy chief of staff for Finch and has been named Bloomberg’s state political director. David Kooris, Finch’s economic development director, has endorsed Bloomberg’s campaign, joined by Finch himself. Also on board is Jordan Grice, formerly on Finch’s communications staff and, full disclosure, someone I hired at Hearst Connecticut Media in my previous job as business editor. He’s the Bloomberg state communications head.

The crossover interest isn’t hard to figure. Finch was an open Bloomberg devotee as mayor, and it makes sense that his team would feel the same way. “We need a president who will prioritize bolstering our urban centers and making sure that our infrastructure, housing and economic development doesn’t fall by the wayside,” Kooris said in a statement announcing his endorsement. From school reform to expanded parks, the Finch administration modeled itself on Bloomberg’s New York.

There was PlaNYC, released by Bloomberg in 2007 to enhance sustainability and prepare for climate change. The Bridgeport version was called BGreen 2020. Bridgeport had its own version of CityStat, which was meant to compile figures from across city agencies relating to crime and quality of life to ensure policymakers were dealing with reliable figures; it, too, was modeled on a

Bloomberg plan. Expanded mayoral control of schools followed the same trend.

And it’s not just Bridgeport. Mayors current and former around the country have rallied to Bloomberg’s side, including former New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, in part because of Bloomberg’s long association with the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Mayor to president seems like a big leap, but the jobs have a few things in common. As Broesder explained in a recent interview, “If you’re a congressman, you wake up and you’ve got four press releases you want to put out and committee meetings and very seldom does your day blow up. When you’re a mayor, you wake up and you’ve got six issues you want to tackle, and by 9 a.m. you’ve got 75 things on your plate including a fire, a shooting … you’ve got thousands of employees, political appointees. There are so many variables at play,” he said. “The training involved in executive leadership can really translate to the presidential level in a way that I don’t think very many elected offices do.”

All that makes sense, but it doesn’t explain why Bloomberg has been rising in the polls. He’s rising in the polls because he has a limitless budget and has far outspent everyone else in the field on ads. Democrats who are terrified of the president winning a second term in office are looking to Bloomberg as someone they see as maybe their only savior.

If it’s not Bloomberg making the mayoral leap, there’s also Pete Buttigieg, the ex-mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana and currently leading in delegates for this summer’s convention among Democrats. Buttigieg has impressed a lot of people, especially for someone who received about 8,500 votes in his last election as South Bend’s chief executive. For comparison, that’s about what Finch got the last time he was elected Bridgeport mayor in 2011.

Candidates love to extol their humble, small-town origins. The perception that rural America is real America is deeply ingrained in our political consciousness, and it’s actively harmful to bringing about the kind of changes we need to create a better society for the greatest number of people.

The greatest number of people live in cities or dense suburbs. Issues like housing, transportation and immigration directly affect the lives of people in cities in a way that is not true for people in the exurbs or far-flung rural areas. The country could use a leader with the firsthand knowledge of the everyday issues facing city dwellers.

With his stop-and-frisk policy, his nondisclosure agreements and his long history of supporting Republicans, Bloomberg probably isn’t that person. Buttigieg is an interesting candidate but it’s fair to say he lacks the experience you’d want to see in a president.

Time for some ambitious mayors to start thinking 2024.