He got what he wanted, so who cares?

From the NY Times:

Michael R. Bloomberg was testifying this month about his diamond-encrusted campaigns, but he might as well have been talking about the balky state of his mayoral enterprise after 10 years.

The mayor likes to insist that he was de facto drafted for a third term, that City Council members and corporate worthies pulled at his hem, begging him to overturn term limits and run again. “A number of people kept coming to me and asking if it were possible,” the mayor also testified. No doubt some importuned. But many, not least his own aides, counseled against it.

A third term is a politician’s Death Valley. It’s a land of the lost in which third-stringers are press-ganged into becoming first-stringers, midlevel managers space out as you talk, and City Council members start to talk back. Not to mention that miscreants and consultants often grab for what is not legitimately theirs.

And true to historical form, very little has gone swimmingly for our potentate in chief. He purchased a third term at not inconsiderable personal cost — he spent a tidy $105 million on his re-election — and now his headaches proliferate.