IT'S GOING ON 9 YEARS THAT WE HAVE BEEN UNDER THIS GRINCHES REIGN! FINALLY MAYOR BLOOMBERG GETS CALLED OUT FOR BEING DRUNK WITH POWER!

Michael Bloomberg said this week that he doesn't want to be President of the United States, really he doesn't, he just wants to be remembered because of the job he has, third-term imperial mayor of New York.
"I want to go out being, having a reputation as a very good, maybe the greatest mayor ever," Bloomberg said one week ago on "Meet the Press."

So Bloomberg, like his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani, becomes another mayor who seems almost intoxicated by the power that comes with the office and the title. Only it is never the mayor who is great, always the city.

Bloomberg thinking this way, thinking out loud this way on national television, is just another example of the jockey confusing himself with the horse, as if Ron Turcotte had confused himself once with Secretariat.

It is the city that is great, as New York makes it to the end of another year. Somehow it just hits you with more clarity at this time of the year, when the city seems to be at its best. That does not just mean the New York of the tree at Rockefeller Center, the New York of Fifth Ave. Christmas shopping, the New York of Times Square, so many people out on a Friday night as if they are rehearsing for New Year's Eve there, when these few blocks seem like the capital of the whole world.

So many on these Times Square weekend nights are tourists, here from other parts of the country, or from other countries, here to see the tree or the stores or maybe walk west one block and see a Broadway show, maybe Al Pacino out of East Harlem and the South Bronx and the School of Performing Arts, performing these days in "Merchant of Venice." Pacino is a headliner here in the days before Christmas and so are the surprising Knicks, reminding us again of how one of our teams can make the big city feel like a small town all over again.

But so does the Salvation Army guy standing outside Barneys on Madison Ave. in the cold of Thursday afternoon, smiling away and chattering away, telling the people passing him by, "Keep smiling. That's what I'm talking about. You know what that smile is right there? It's one more light going on in the city."

There is never just one New York City at this time of year. It is never just the Rockefeller Center Christmas, or the Christmas of the Radio City show, or the lines outside FAO Schwarz. It is never just the city of money, where the mayor who wants to be remembered as the greatest of them all talks about $80 million disappearing from a mosh pit known as the CityTime project this way: "Big projects have big things that slip through the cracks."

Even at Christmas, there is the food-stamp New York, women on Walker St. in the early morning looking for the Benefit Card Pickup Center. Usually they have a child by the hand, sometimes more than one, hands you know they have held on the subway getting here, from Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. Not Christmas shopping in New York, not looking to buy presents, just looking to feed a family in the greatest city on Earth.

Sometimes you see the women checking a piece of white paper in their free hand, the paper with the right address on it, a brown door a few doors from Church St., at the uptown end of Tribeca. Then they are through the brown door and picking up the benefit cards that allow them to buy food.

And it is not just single mothers, often it is mothers with someone in the family working who are still eligible for the food stamps, the husbands already at a job.

Even here, all those taking this walk in the morning on Walker St., you see the heart of the city, and its greatness. Because sometimes just getting through another day is a triumph in New York, for people who do not quit, who keep coming, even moving in the opposite direction of lights on the big famous tree uptown, the famous Christmas shows.

Those on their way to 39 Walker St. light the city, too. So do the people who pulled a man in a motorized wheelchair off subway tracks the other day. And all the languages you hear in SoHo, the streets as crowded as the F train. And the man at his pushcart on Prince St. Saturday afternoon, really selling chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Always at this time of year they come from everywhere to watch New York celebrate Christmas. Really they come to see the city celebrate itself.


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