He took an experimental small pilot program and chose to expand it citywide by appointing Bratton as commissioner.  He then indeed fired Bratton out of jealousy over media attention. I think that a mayor should get credit for selecting strategies and competent people to implement them. Giuliani IMO is just as entitled to praise for Bratton as Bush is rightly blamed for Brown and the rest of his incompetent appointees and chosen strategies.

Steve and I disagree. I should note that I am a lot less partisan in local elections than I am in races for national office - there's no way I'd vote for a Repub for Congress, very unlikely for state office, while for local office partisan affiliation is merely a tiebreaker for me.

Steve's opposition to Bloomberg seems to be based on three factors.

1. He's a Republican (see above)
   
2. His civil liberties record on demonstrators, particularly during the Republican convention is atrocious (I agree)
   
3. He hasn't done anything for the poor half of New York. (I feel that within his very limited means he's done ok and that Steve doesn't take into account the horrible budget situation he inherited from Giuliani and the fact that there's only so much a mayor can do)

On the plus side.

1. Brilliant handling of the budget crisis through modest across the board spending cuts and sharp tax increases targetting the wealthy and upper middle class.
   
2. Making government far more responsive to the average New Yorker through his '311' system. What that means is that instead of having to navigate the byzantine bureaucracy on our own, we can just call '311', explain what our problem is, and the people working their figure out how we need to handle it, and then track how well the relevant department deals with the problem.
   
3. The handling of the crime issue (see my original comment on Bloomberg)

Ferrer on the other hand is unproven - maybe he would be a competent administrator like Bloomberg, maybe not - in other words the same problem that made me wary of Bloomberg four years ago.  Less relevant but worth mentioning is that he has a record of being very conservative on social issues and did a reverse turn when he decided he wanted city wide office and thus had to get the liberal upper middle class white vote. Bloomberg was your standard issue liberal Democrat wealthy New Yorker until he decided that he wanted to become mayor and that it would be much easier for him to win the Repub nomination than the Dem one but he's remained socially liberal and economically centrist. (In New York the standard electoral calculus is that a credible Republican candidate will win the socially conservative ecnomically centrist white working and middle class outer borough vote overwhelmingly, a non-white Dem candidate will do the same with the socially conservative economically left wing working class Black and Latino electorate and that whoever gets the socially liberal economically centrist upper middle class white vote wins. Ferrer is in serious trouble because he isn't doing anywhere near as well as he needs among non-white voters.)

If the race were close I'd vote for Bloomberg. As it is I might vote for Ferrer as a protest vote since I'm not sure I want Bloomberg to win in a landslide.