Adam's blogbox: Why can’t the US administration be like the NYC administration?

I’ve just been looking at our great Mayor Mike Bloomberg on TV, briefing New Yorkers. Our city lies blanketed under a fluffy fur coat of snow, the biggest snowfall since 1996.

New York looks beautifully monochromatic -- hushed in the calm of nature, sparkling in a universal white-out, as saturated in its Winter purity as a few months from now, Spring will be saturated in a splendiferousness of colors.

Up and down the roads, city workers are working to clear this blanket that, although beautiful, gets in the way of making the city work.

With Mayor Bloomberg, were grizzled department heads in their winter vests and parkas. It is obvious that these guys are what we call dedicated civil servants: hands-on men who work to serve the civil polity. They looked like guys who had worked themselves up in their departments. They had working-class faces and voices.

I trust them implicitly.

And I was reminded of the lot in Washington, the folks in our administration, the political appointments to civil servant jobs, the Busheviks, the Michael Browns.

And I was thinking of how much I distrust Washington, and of how much I trust the officials in New York.

I was thinking of the fact that the last thing on the minds of NYC officials is politics.

And the first thing on the minds of Washington officials is politics.

I was thinking of how the one thing the NYC guys are into, is doing their jobs.

And that all the Washington guys are interested in, is how they’re looking -- when they should be doing their jobs, never mind how they look doing them.

I was thinking of how efficiently NYC runs, and how inefficiently and incompetently Washington runs. I know my taxes in New York are being spent well, while Washington is blowing my taxes on god knows what.

I was thinking there could be many Americans who trust the officials in their towns more than they trust the folks in Washington. There seems to be this miasma in Washington that turns even good men into posturing blowhards (the women less so).

I was thinking that I wouldn’t want Michael Brown on my side in a bar fight, but I would feel covered with any of the NYC guys on my side. One NYC official is worth a thousand Michael Browns.

And I was thinking how lucky I am to live in New York -- and how unlucky I am to live in America.