Evicting Wall Street Protesters Would Be a Disaster for Bloomberg

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "postponement" of the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters came about because it was going to do him a lot of harm and the protesters a lot of good.

The mayor had said the protesters would have to temporarily leave Zuccotti Park, which they have been occupying for the last four weeks, so the city could clean it. He also said protesters would be allowed to return but without their sleeping bags, tents and other gear -- effectively ending the protest. The protesters responded by A) vowing to stay, and B) cleaning up the park themselves.

The real question is why is the mayor so worked up about this? There is no question his Honor was scheduling a PR nightmare for himself. Any event like this would be covered by so many networks and news organizations that it might be hard for the police to find the OWS people. It would give the protesters a world-wide stage. Also the story that would be told is "Billionaire Mayor Sets Cops on Protesters to Protect Rich People Property." (It does not help that the mayor's domestic partner, Diana Taylor, is on the board of directors of the company that owns the park.)

If I were the protesters I would be writing the mayor a thank you note for doing something like this.

Bloomberg has taken the protests personally from the start. To him they are a threat to the financial industry which made him amazingly wealthy and which he sees - reasonably - as vital to the city's economy.

What they're trying to do is take away the jobs of people working in the city, take away the tax base that we have. We're not going to have money to pay our municipal employees or anything else.

With his rhetoric and his actions the mayor has inflated the protesters into a threat out of all proportion to their actual capabilities. He has made them seem powerful and effective and in so doing created the very thing he is so afraid of.

The public backlash around the nation and in his city would be a lot greater than the mayor is ready for. Despite being a three-term mayor, he is not overly popular in New York. To get that third-term Bloomberg had to overturn the city's term-limit law and spend $102 million to eke out a 50.6 percent to 46.0 percent victory. He outspent his opponent by 14 to 1. The New York Times estimated Bloomberg paid $20 million for each percentage point he won by.

While the mayor is unpopular, the protests are not. A survey from Time Magazine found 54 percent of Americans with a favorable impression of the protests, while just 23 percent have a negative one. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found 37 percent of people "tend to support" the movement, while only 18 percent "tend to oppose" it.

That support is a major reason for the mayor backing down. On his Friday morning radio show, Bloomberg said property owner Brookfield Properties was "inundated" by calls from elected officials about the eviction:

"Brookfield got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying if you don't stop this we'll make your life more difficult."

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