Bloomberg Inexplicably Emerging As Hero

I've been without power for 28 hours, so maybe I missed something, but I see an emerging media narrative that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a hero for how he has handled the storm.

Jason Farrago says Bloomberg is striking just the right chord while Christie, Cuomo and Molloy are grandstanding.

I disagree.

Part of the reason people didn't take the storm as seriously as they should have is because Bloomberg didn't take it as seriously as he should have.

On Saturday he told city residents that the storm was not going to be as dangerous as Irene.

Let me repeat that: on Saturday he told city residents that the storm was not going to be as dangerous as Irene.

Most meteorologists said quite the opposite - they told people the storm was going to be worse than Irene, that the surge would be devastating near rivers and the coast.

Those meteorologists were right and Bloomberg was wrong.

He didn't make the call for mandatory evacuations of Flood Zone A until the next morning at 11:30 AM.

The MTA was shutting down at 7 PM, so many people had just a few hours to get out before mass transit would be down.

That was his second mistake.

Third mistake - Sunday morning when they knew the surge was going to hit Zone B, they did not share that information with the rest of the city.

Bloomberg is lucky that there were not mass fatalities in this city due to his poor preparation for the storm and ho-hum downplaying of the storm before it hit.

The media narrative that is emerging that Bloomberg has been magnificent in his handling of the storm relies on a revisionism of what the city and Bloomberg did before the storm.

Go back and review the tapes of the press conferences Bloomberg gave on Friday and Saturday and see the lack of concern about the storm emanating from him.

Yes, he says people should heed the warnings on the storm, but he also said things like:

Monday would be "just a regular work day."

The storm would hit in Delaware or Maryland (when all the reliable forecasters had it for South Jersey - where it actually hit.)

The storm was "less dangerous" than Irene.

Schools would be opened even if the MTA shut down.

People should try and go to work.

City offices would be opened and city employees were expected to be come in to work.

These were not the statements of a man who a) had gotten good information about the storm and b) was informed about just had bad things were going to get.

Sorry, maybe I missed something here and I have been without power for a while so I missed lots of things going on on in the media, but quite frankly, I think Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie were the political figures who handled the storm response well, not Michael Bloomberg.

I can't speak to Bloomberg's handling of the aftermath of the storm because all I heard were a couple of press conferences on WCBS 880.

But I do know that he ho-hummed the storm beforehand and the tapes from Friday and Saturday show that.

I will have more later on the political figure who in my opinion really handled this storm well -and that figure is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.