The New York Times link.

If my recollection is correct, Michael was at the Daily News when we were in the Hall.  Always fair minded.

Nice start to the 20th anniversary of the election of the first African-American mayor of NYC.  The mayor’s book (written by Peter Knobler) will be published in 2010.

With the publication of Patrick Gaspard: Obama’s Glue Man, The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein countered the drumbeat from MSNBC and others that questioned whether President-elect Obama’s appointments were “change we can believe in.” One needs only look at Gaspard’s career to see the change the electorate, never mind the world of pundetry, demands.

Mayor Bloomberg’s chief political strategist said it best in the article: ”Patrick is the best political mind of his generation in New York and maybe the nation.”

The road was dark as we came within miles of Paul O’Dwyer’s home in Goshen after midnight. It was a Friday night in April 1989 and Paul had just spent a couple of hours with about 100 bus drivers and mechanics, helping them sort out the issues of economics and race, though race never came up.

They were white and residents of New York’s whitest borough, Staten Island. Ninety-five percent of the people working at the New York City Transit Authority who were members of the Amalgamated