Did seven years of methodically treading a calculatedly singular, iconoclastic path catch up to Gary Silbiger in his hour of need at last night’s City Council meeting?
When you are elected to a political group, the First Commandment of winning politics is to act collegial toward your colleagues.
‘The similarity of the two words is not coincidental.
From Opening Day of his first term, Mr. Silbiger positioned himself well to the left of every person on both editions of the City Council on which he has served.
No problem — if only he had authentically reached out to his peers. None of them ever have seen the palm of either hand.
A prominent political axiom is that outliers never are elected President, unless everybody else in the world dies.
Allies are your oxygen. Without them, you may as well live on the moon.
The Value of Getting Along
Ostensibly, Mr. Silbiger, who appeared outraged that Andy Weissman would have the chutzpah to challenge him, lost the Council election for Mayor because Mr. Weissman won the voting hand of Mehaul O’Leary before Mr. Silbiger could court him.
But many of the brick walls that Mr. Silbiger routinely has encountered while pushing his extremely specific agenda would have melted overnight if Mr. Silbiger had been a team player the last seven years.
People have to like you first before you can have the chutzpah to ask them a favor.
Unless you are related, colleagues are not going to rise and fall according to the flapping of your wings, especially if you walk around grumbling and wearing a permanently dour expression.
Even those handicaps are surmountable — if you can learn to treat your colleagues more tolerably than if they were members of the Taliban.
Gary Silbiger is the hardest line politician I have ever met — No Compromise at No Time is his mantra.
Loner Doomed to End up Alone
There is not a politician on earth who is going to succeed with that attitude, unless he lives by himself and converses only with his mirror
Yesterday afternoon at this hour, Mr. Silbiger’s desperation to gain the office that he has coveted for the past 12 months was reaching the breaking point.
Belatedly, he had learned that Mehaul O’Leary, the pivotal vote on the Council, was committed to Mr. Weissman, which, likely, cooked the most fragmented chance that he could realize his last dream before being term-limited.
He was telephoning every logical supporter who could piece together back-to-back sentences and had transportation to City Hall.
This was not the old Silbiger crowd that first brought him to power a few months after Sept. 11.
These were mostly shiny new faces.
Except for the candidate’s son Karlo and Democratic Club veteran Darryl Cherniss, the other 12, members of the Downtown Neighborhood Assn., were mostly or entirely recent converts to the Silbiger camp.
Change You Can Believe in
If we can’t help the personalities we were born with, everyone has the ability — nay, the mandated obligation — to adapt, to get along.
Suddenly on Election Night, you can’t wipe out seven years by slamming your peers over the head with an amorphous, non-existent rulebook that has less credibility than Winnie T. Pooh.
No matter how sweetly you demand of them, “You will vote for me because tradition says so,” have your bags packed. You are going away.
Past and present City Council members will tell you that Mr. Weissman is extremely likeable, a sharp, pleasant colleague/partner on the dais. Not everyone would vote for him to be King. But by instinctively getting along with your fellows on a daily basis, you stand a decent chance of getting your way, especially when you are being squeezed.
Eschewing oral traditions, the School Board, by curious contrast, has a written policy that determines the rotation of its five officers.
Here it is:
Election of Officers —The Board shall each year elect one of its members to be vice president. This member shall be the one who has served on the Board for the longest period, without holding the office of president or vice president. After serving one year as vice president, the elected member shall serve one year as president of the Board. In the event a prior term vice president is not available to move into the presidency, an election for president shall precede election of vice president. The Superintendent shall serve as secretary to the Board.
Which reminds me of a story I have told before. A rabbi of my acquaintance boasted for years that he had a lifetime contract with a certain Los Angeles synagogue.
When a new generation of youthful, exuberant, skeptical leaders took office, they demanded the rabbi produce the proof of his alleged lifetime agreement.
He couldn’t find it because it never existed. Summarily terminated, the rabbi was humiliated by his treatment, and shortly he left the country.
To be a leader requires having followers — not just in the audience but in seats of power.
The rabbi didn’t. Sadly, neither did Mr. Silbiger.
