Mike’s decision to fire solitaire guy reminded me of something Henry Stern wrote a couple of weeks ago:
“No commissioner has been publicly fired in the last four years, no matter how many innocent people are killed as a result of employee failures on his or her watch.”
And Bloomberg’s unwillingness to fire anybody, in private and public sectors, is kind of legendary. But then, the Mayor has been having a tough second term. For all the high-concept PR gambits (guns, Republicans, Ground Zero) there’s a sense that his control of the workings of government has faltered with the departure of the mechanics like Marc Shaw.
For example, it’s hard to think of a first-term snafu on the scale of yesterday’s property tax embarassment. Maybe Mike was feeling the need to assert control.
