Two Sides / Monsieur Bloomberg

Liking and disliking Mayor Bloomberg is easy. His two most noteworthy decisions of the fall highlight his ability to charm and irritate. First, he hired as New York's new chancellor of public schools Cathleen Black, a longtime friend and successful media executive who has no experience in education and never went or sent her children to public schools. (The Bloomberg administration eventually also promoted someone to the district's no. 2 position to focus specifically on academics, so that state officials would confirm Black.) Second, when New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, shrunk from building additional lines between Penn Station and his state's Gold Coast, Bloomberg stepped in and decided to extend the No. 7 subway line farther west than originally planned, to Secaucus, N.J.

As an entrepreneur who went from the working class to one of the country's wealthiest people, Bloomberg believes in the private market's power and its benefits. He's been one of the finance industry's most vocal defenders during the past two years. He knows a woman who's run newspaper and magazine companies very well before, and assumes she will bring the same acumen and have the same results with the country's largest public school system. This is a nearly blind faith in the private market. Aren't there many educators who also know how to administrate? But then he realizes, as Christie misses, that for a place to remain relevant for the long term, it needs to make serious long-term investments in its infrastructure. Of course these projects are expensive. However, without them, places ossify and don't adapt well to new waves of businesses, people and investment. All three decide to head elsewhere.

Bloomberg understands the need to think comprehensively and strategically about what his city is today (or in the past, his company, and in the future, his philanthropy) and what it should be in 20 years, and knows how to work so that both visions are executed properly. Both sides of him are bold, more so than perhaps any other working politician today, which is why, even if one side is disagreeable and the other is winning, he always earns my respect.

Thanks to Spoon for inspiring the post's title. The record from which it comes has grown on me in the five years since it was released, not least because several acquaintances from my alma mater are in liner notes' main photo, standing in the front row at one of the band's shows.