Real Politicians Don’t Eat Quiche
By Michael Boyajian
There was a popular book in the 1980s titled Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche and it was meant to bolster the macho strength of Republicans. My how things have changed and nowhere is this more apparent then when comparing Mayor Michael Bloomberg to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Mayor Bloomberg likes to sit on the pink beaches of Bermuda sipping tropical drinks with tiny umbrellas sticking out of them. He enjoys Paris café society. He does ride the subway but surrounded by an entourage of muscular body guards like a Hollywood pop star. He refuses to hire rough hewn upstate people for city jobs. Rather than travel coach with the other budget travelers he takes his own cushy airplane. Rather than live in the people’s home, Gracie Mansion, he prefers parlor life in his Upper East Side townhouse. Rather than rip the lungs out of the Wall Street caviar crowd he defends them as civic minded citizens. You know them, Bernie Maddof of Ponzi Scheme fame and Goldman Sachs who sold hard working people one thing and then bet that it would all fail like Pete Rose betting on baseball.
It really makes you wonder if in defending his caviar buddies he was not as he says concerned about the welfare of average New Yorkers but more concerned with preserving the Golden Goose knows as Bloomberg Financial Services, the company that acts as a lap dog to Wall Street and allows Mayor Bloomberg to sip his tropical drinks and sun himself at Parisian sidewalk cafes.
I mean can you imagine if we privatized Social Security like his Republican salon friends wished? After the financial crash all our senior citizens would have been wiped out and begging for nickels at the Port Authority while the Mayor offered them slivers of cake for sustenance.
On the other hand you have a meat and potatoes guy like Andrew Cuomo who spends his time locking up the robber barons of Wall Street and throwing away the key while crushing predatory student loan companies that prey on our children. While working for the Clinton Administration he had the bare knuckles reputation of putting heads through office walls to get the job done. The mayor wears custom suits while Cuomo buys his off the rack.
Who would you prefer to dig New York out of its financial mess? A person with the soft creamy hands of one who has never done manual labor in his life or the guy with the calloused hands of a man who on a brisk day rakes his own leaves each fall?
The answer is simple because real politicians don’t eat quiche!
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