One small complication with the Bloomberg campaign’s push to blame Bill Thompson for the city pension funds’ under-performance over the last seven years is the fact that Bloomberg has appointees on the pension boards who, as far as we know, did not object to any of the investments that were made.
In a Q&A with reporters this morning, Bloomberg campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson handled that issue by saying, “the results of Mr. Thompson’s mismanagement have only become recently apparent.”
Wolfson also suggested that Thompson had set himself up to be more vulnerable to criticism about the funds’ performance.
“[I]f you look at his web site, he’s running on the fact that he was the Comptroller. He’s running on the fact that he was the President of the Board of Ed. And he’s going to have to own the results and the set of decisions that were made at those two institutions when he was in charge. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say ‘Oh well, I’m going to take the good things, but I wasn’t in charge of the bad things.’ If he’s running on his record he’s going to run on his record.”
