Will Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign staff get their bonuses?

One of the things in the Election the mayor didn't pay for (Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife)

It’s become an article of faith that one-time media mogul Michael Bloomberg was effectively buying his way to a third term as Mayor of New York City. And with the amount of his money he was dunking into his campaign effort, it was almost like he had declared himself too big to fail. Why else would you need to spend $35,000 an hour when you were up against a lackluster Democratic city bureaucrat who is about as recognizable to most New Yorkers as the blue-hatted guy standing next to Where’s Waldo?

The whole thing really did take on something of a Wall Street mentality. Not only was Bloomberg spending megabucks on his bet that he could win a third term. He was also taking out something like the credit default swaps that were at the root of our financial crisis. Just like the big banks took out insurance on their shaky bets on the subprime housing market, Bloomberg was spending lots of money making sure that clever and powerful campaign consultants couldn’t work for the other side (see Jason Horowitz in the New York Observer). He basically bought up all the talent that might help Bill Thompson beat him. Unlike the CDS’s issued by AIG, it looks like it worked.

But not as well as you’d expect.

If you’re going to spend more of your own money on your campaign than anyone has ever spent on their own campaign, you’d think that Bloomberg was going to get some real bang for his buck. One would expect that he would get a massive turnout of voters in his favor, giving him large margin of victory that he could spin as proof that the people really wanted a third term.

Instead, we got one of the lowest turnouts in modern New York City history. And a Mayor who went from a commanding lead in the polls to a victory by less than 5%, a far cry from the ~19% margin that re-elected Bloomberg in 2005.

So, with the election basically a failure in every aspect for the Mayor, except for his four-years of assured lame duckedness, do we just blame the Mayor for being heavy-handed? Or do we blame his staff for running a campaign so toxic it made a lot of voters stay home and a lot of other voters want to come out and vote against Bloomberg just for being a jerk?

If we do blame them, obviously we have to ask about their bonuses. Because Bloomberg’s campaigns are self-financed, he’s in his rights to pay his staffers whatever he wants to. But isn’t the point of the bonuses that he’s rewarding the high levels of success they have produced for him?

And these bonuses are no small matter. The Times recounted one staffer who was warned not to bug out when his bonus hit his bank account after 2005:

“The world of Mike Bloomberg is a charmed place,” said Jonathan Capehart, who worked as a policy adviser on Mr. Bloomberg’s first bid for mayor.

Mr. Capehart recalled being warned a few days after Mr. Bloomberg’s 2001 victory not to be surprised when he checked his account balance, where a $25,000 bonus awaited him.

“I was shocked,” he said. “I knew big campaign operatives would negotiate bonuses — the campaign manager, the advertising buyer. But I was just a policy adviser.”

Or how about the campaign staffer who barely dropped in and got a six-digit bonus, a big chunk of the million-plus he spent in bonuses over all for 2005, more from the Times:

In 2005, Mr. Bloomberg gave Patricia E. Harris a $350,000 bonus after less than three months of campaign work after she left her deputy mayor’s position. She was appointed first deputy mayor after the election. The bonus was in addition to the $46,476 she was paid for her campaign work from late September through the November election.

Mr. Bloomberg, whose lavishly self-financed campaigns have been criticized by good government groups, paid out $1.55 million in bonuses to 79 staff members that election.

Here in 2009, with so many New Yorkers hurting economically, I would say that the Mayor could find a better use for $1.55 million than rewarding bonuses to the campaign staff who helped put heavy clouds over what is probably his final term in office. Unless of course this is just like AIG where executives argued that massive bonuses had to be paid to the ‘talent’ who almost brought down the global economy because otherwise the company wouldn’t be able to retain it.

On the other hand, if the Bloomberg campaign’s entire goal was in fact to depress voter turnout, then I guess they executed the nefarious goal they envisioned flawlessly. And if that’s the case, Bloomberg’s staff was less like AIG and more like Goldman Sachs.