http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/135182p-120256c.html'You forget that every single decision
, everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race. ... That's not true anymore."
Thus spake Mayor Bloomberg in the current issue of Vanity Fair. Now, apparently, he is trying to back off from that statement, pay some political homage. But why should he? For God's sake! He was speaking the truth.
In fact, things have been so calm since Bloomberg took office that it wasn't until I read his Vanity Fair statement that the bad ol' days of Oil-on-the-Fire Rudy came flooding back. The meetings he refused to hold with black leaders. The disparaging tone he would use to describe anyone unlucky enough to be roughed up by police. The blind eye he turned to the tactics of the NYPD street crime unit, even as it frisked thousands of blacks and Hispanics. Only a fraction of these searches yielded any weapons.
Now contrast that demeanor with our current mayor's MO. "He called me on the morning after his election," says former Mayor David Dinkins, speaking of Bloomberg. "We met the next morning at 7. He didn't publicize it. In fact, we spent most of our time talking about the homeless." Compared with Giuliani, says Dinkins, Bloomberg "is just a different kind of animal."