I think Mike Bloomberg has been a very good mayor. Very rarely has he proposed a policy with which I disagree. He has been excellent on public health (smoking ban, transfat ban, calorie posting), on transit and environment (congestion pricing, PlaNYC, making the city bike- and pedestrian-friendly), has been a patron of the arts and an advocate for public art, and his record of managing race relations and police brutality has been a million times better than Giuliani's (though obviously that's not necessarily saying much). His record is less clear on housing and education, always complicated in New York, and I think some of his critics have valid critiques.

Of course, as any New Yorker will tell you, Bloomberg is also kind of, well...a dick. He's testy, catty, and dismissive of critics. This can be fun on occasion, but often it calls into question how seriously he takes his responsibilities. Asked last month about numbers from the Coalition for the Homeless putting the number of homeless families at a 25-year high, and the Coalition's suggestion that perhaps city homeless policies aren't working, Bloomberg replied,

Some advocates just desperately don't want things to succeed.

Really? It's one thing to argue that the Coalition for the Homeless has misinterpreted the evidence, that the city's policies are working. But to suggest that the Coalition is actually hoping that the city's policies won't work? That reveals, to my mind, a real inability to understand and appreciate the motivations of advocates for a given cause.

I was reminded again of this side of Bloomberg during his recent gratuitous press junket to Israel. He gave several exasperated interviews, expressing unflinching support for Israel's actions in Gaza in the tone of someone who cannot believe the blindness and stupidity of his interlocutors:

Well, let me just phrase it for you something that'll bring it home. If you're in your apartment, and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, 'I am going to come through this door and kill you,' do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command? Just think about it in that context. There is no so such thing as a proportional response to terrorism.

I'm consistently struck by this tick amongst staunch supporters of Israel: they seem to think that people who disagree with them just haven't yet inserted themselves into the proper analogy. But I digress.

For one thing, Jon Stewart's response to Bloomberg's analogy strikes me as the obvious rejoinder:

I guess it depends if I forced that guy to live in my hallway ... and make him go through checkpoints every time he has to take a shit.

But for another, the kind of rhetoric Bloomberg deployed in that interview and others is not the language of persuasion. It's the language of "I'm right and if you can't see that you're an idiot." And beyond the issue of Israel, this is precisely the attitude he is accused of having by his critics and many of his fellow elected officials.

Now, I happen to think that he usually is right. And if he has a hard-charging, don't-back-down attitude that gets the job done, great. But the really big projects, the revolutionary changes, can only get done through persuasion, cajoling, flattery...in a word, politicking.

Take congestion pricing. It was a great idea. It's been a great thing in every city where it's been enacted. And I shared Bloomberg's fury that the State Assembly killed the plan, sacrificing in the process $350 million in federal transportation money. I was even more furious that many Assembly members as much as said that they opposed the plan because Bloomberg was...a dick about it. I think it's a travesty to kill a plan that would be good for the city, the state, and the country because you've felt personally slighted.

But that's the way Albany - and all of politics - works. And I think it's equally a travesty that Bloomberg, despite being right, couldn't deign to to play the game he needed to play in order to get congestion pricing passed.

The same goes for the term limits battle. I don't have strong feelings about changing term limits, but I can't be the only Bloomberg supporter who soured on him somewhat during the protracted battle with the City Council. Again, it wasn't about the result - Bloomberg will almost certainly be able to run for a third term, and I'm fine with that. It was that his demeanor so clearly demonstrated he felt no need to make his case to the people of New York, no need to persuade anyone. He knew a third term was a good idea, so he would push it through the City Council. Suggestions for other ways to go about the change were brushed away in that famously dismissive Bloombergian tone.

Bloomberg will most likely have a third term. And I imagine that several more good things will come out of it. But will they be more than the incremental public health and environmental victories he's won so far? The common wisdom is that Bloomberg wants a third term to secure his legacy - to have another shot at leaving a large-scale mark on the city. But if he's going to achieve that - and if we're going to benefit from it - he's going to have to learn how to be a better politician, not just a rich, determined manager who's usually right.

We always say we hate politicians. And many of us who like Bloomberg like him because he's not a politician. But he also illustrates the limitations of a non-politician in a political world. If you refuse ever to kiss anyone's ring, you're never going to get the blessings you need.