Some silver linings behind mayor's loss to Shelly

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

On its face, Mayor Bloomberg's failure to win his beloved West Side stadium - and any real shot at the 2012 Olympics - has to be seen as the biggest loss of his mayoralty.

No other defeat comes close, in terms of the political capital spent by Bloomberg, whose voice noticeably cracked yesterday when he began talking about the city's all-but-doomed effort to win the Games.

But there are plenty of silver linings here for the mayor, especially when viewed through the increasingly important prism of his reelection bid, experts said.

With the stadium all but dead, his Democratic rivals lose an important campaign weapon - using the $2.2 billion arena to paint Bloomberg as an out-of-touch dictator more concerned with football stadiums than city schools.

"Now what will they do?" asked Bloomberg campaign strategist Bill Cunningham. "If they can't be against something, they have no vision."

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) will serve as an easy scapegoat for the nation's doomed Olympic bid.

And the mayor, as he did yesterday, gets to say he was simply fighting on behalf of workers and most city elected leaders to create tourism and construction jobs.

"Those that were on the other side will have to explain why they were against jobs," said Bloomberg, who quickly ticked off other economic development projects City Hall is undertaking in every borough.

"For the mayor, it's a campaign positive - he sheds the [stadium] issue and deflects blame for it at the same time," said Baruch College political science Prof. Doug Muzzio.

"But it also epitomizes all the problems in Mike Bloomberg's approach to problems," he said.

Indeed, a loss is a loss. And as much as anything else, yesterday's defeat exposed the weaknesses of Bloomberg's my-way-or-the-highway approach to governance.

It's a style shared, many say, by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, who had to watch 10 years of effort as the city's chief Olympic backer go up in smoke.

But in creating a stadium that skirted all the usual public approvals - from local community boards to the City Council - Bloomberg failed to build consensus for the project.

And that gave Silver and the Public Authorities Control Board, the project's ultimate arbiter, all the leverage needed to kill the stadium yesterday.

As for Silver, he may be a goat in City Hall, but he's a hero in his own district, where sentiment ran strongly against the stadium.