There was something pathetic, and yet somehow reassuring, about watching D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser “decide” to endorse former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for president.
The almost reassuring bit was how meaningless the gesture was. There was a time in this fading republic when an endorsement from the mayor of “Chocolate City” might have had a real impact on Democratic politics. In those days, being the mayor of D.C. was something like being the president of black America. Then Barack Obama became president. That’s progress, anyway.
The pathetic bit has a lot more depth. “Mike” Bloomberg — grimacing earnestly as he listens to black folk in that constant stream of YouTube ads — is pitching himself as the answer to the crisis of world capitalism. He fails to realize he embodies that crisis. We all suffer from the overproduction of upper-class twits.
Consider this: Bloomberg builds a global business news empire and ascends to the mayoralty of the cultural capital of Earth. And this innovator, this titan of the new economy, can only think to have his cops harass black people and to ban the Big Gulp?
Bowser’s point of view is easier to appreciate, if even more depressing. Local D.C. may not be Chocolate City, but it’s always been Munchkin City, a sick parody of civic government. Like so many local politicians, Bowser is a sizzling mediocrity eager, even desperate, to be taken seriously by anyone. The polite deference Bloomberg has shown her — even as he “mentors” her through a rising crime rate, collapsing public infrastructure, and endemic corruption that manages to be both brazen and horrifyingly cheap — is worth its weight in gold.
Then again, so is Bloomberg’s ridiculous campaign. Conservatives love to bang on about D.C.’s decadent culture of government. They fail to appreciate that the real racket here, and one that exploits them just as ruthlessly and efficiently, isn’t the government. It’s consulting: those who make their living by what is unironically called “the permanent campaign.”
It’s true you can make a nice bourgeois living in government, but if you want generational wealth, you need to get on the “public-private partnership” gravy train that Bowser and Bloomberg have dedicated their public lives to conducting. Whatever else Bloomberg’s campaign is “about,” it’s part of one of the most efficient wealth-transfer systems in the world, whereby the filthy rich line up to give their money to the merely awfully rich.
Seven of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are D.C. suburbs. The District itself is one of the most expensive places to live. The area is choked with people who may well make a lot of money, but sure as hell don’t earn it. Their lives are an endless array of “comms team” meetings, of “circling back” to “engage stakeholders,” and, of course, sending invoices — lots and lots of invoices.
These are Muriel Bowser’s people. Her Honor is more careful than her other mentor, former Mayor Adrian Fenty, about making sorrowful faces in black neighborhoods and paying tributes to “the struggle” but her government is, and has ever been, by, for, and of the nouveau riche. (I’m actually surprised she didn’t stand next to Bloomberg bellowing, “Gentrification today, gentrification tomorrow, gentrification forever.”)
That Bowser would endorse Bloomberg, and that he would accept it, says enough about both of them. It’s proof that mediocrity knows no regional border, that no idea is too small, and that we have nothing to fear but Big Gulpery itself.
Bill Myers (@billcaphill) lives and works in Washington, D.C. Email him at [email protected].
