From the New York Times editorial on Mayor de Blasio's inauguration:
Too bad the speakers on stage with him didn't get the unity part, marring the event with backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug. Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In doing so, she made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James's hand as Ms. James called for a government "that cares more about a child going hungry than a new stadium or a new tax credit for a luxury development."
Dasani was profiled in a recent series of articles in The Times illustrating how bad things get for homeless families in the shelter system. Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg. So did the pastor whose invocation likened New York to a "plantation," and Harry Belafonte, who strangely laid the problem of America's crowded prisons at the feet of the former mayor, an utterly bogus claim, while saying Mr. Bloomberg shared responsibility for the nation's "deeply Dickensian justice system."
Mr. Bloomberg had his mistakes and failures, but he was not a cartoon Gilded Age villain. He deserved better than pointless and tacky haranguing from speakers eager to parrot Mr. de Blasio's campaign theme.
In Ms. James' defense, she might have actually read the Times series on Dasani, which did blame Mayor Bloomberg for her plight and portray the mayor, essentially, as a cartoon Gilded Age villain. Or perhaps Ms. James or the "plantation" pastor had been relying on the Times' recent farewell editorial to Mr. Bloomberg, which said that "Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly humiliated and alienated black and Hispanic communities by having stop-and-frisk turn into a generalized method of harassing law-abiding citizens" and said that Mr. Bloomberg's "unscripted comments, especially about the poor, can range from thoughtless to heartless."
I like the view expressed in this most recent Times editorial better than the earlier assessment, but it does seem a bit hypocritical of the Times to criticize the speakers at the inauguration for making criticisms that the Times editorialists themselves have made in the past. Maybe the Times already misses Mr. Bloomberg, or maybe word has come down not to risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg to the point where he is no longer available if he is needed as the sort of a billionaire bailer-outer who would allow the Ochs-Sulzberger family to escape, Graham-style or Taylor-style, with both their capital and their reputation intact.