Did it amuse any of you (if bitterly) that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad respected term limits in Iran over the weekend, but Mayor Bloomberg didn’t do the same in New York four years ago? Bloomberg has done his share of good things for the city–and some really dumb, tone-deaf ones–but circumventing the free vote of the people will always stain him. As his third term draws to a close, a passage from “The Untouchable,” Ben McGrath’s pitch-perfect 2009 New Yorker profile about Bloomberg at the very moment his arrogance was in the process of transforming him from able technocrat into something far less flattering:

“To people who aspire to become mayor of New York City in the traditional way, by suffering countless fund-raisers in apartments far larger than their own and attending interminable Democratic club meetings with the same cast of hangers-on, year after year, Bloomberg presents a conundrum. Many in the city’s political class believe that he’s been a good, if overrated, executive, and acknowledge that his ability to forgo the shaming hat-in-hand routine has proved far more valuable in warding off corruption than they would have liked to admit. When dealing individually with the more promising among these wannabes, Bloomberg is affable and plainspoken, in the way that a self-made man can be. He dispenses advice, tinged with just enough humor so that the condescension is not immediately apparent. (‘You know what you should do is, go out and make a billion dollars first, and then run for office.’) Or he chides, gently, ‘Why are you wasting your time doing this? You could be doing something really meaningful.’ They are flattered—who wouldn’t be?—by the attention. Only in retrospect does it begin to rankle. It’s not as though they haven’t privately nursed fantasies of ditching the numbing routines and indignities associated with a legislative life and exploiting their connections in the service of making millions (though maybe not billions) of dollars. They are not fools. They understand that the political game is rigged in favor of hackery. They know it because the hack businessmen come calling every day on the steps of City Hall.

But the political class always viewed Bloomberg’s mayoralty as an anomaly rather than as a paradigm shift, and looked forward to 2009 and, thanks to term limits, the end of his reign. For much of the second term, they endured the chatter, from the kinds of people whom they sometimes grudgingly court as their donors, about who could possibly succeed Mayor Mike, now that the bar had been raised: Dick Parsons, the Time Warner C.E.O. (since installed at Citigroup)? Jonathan Tisch, the Loews chairman? Joel Klein, the schools chancellor? One well-regarded politician recalled a breakfast last year at the Regency Hotel at which Tisch and Parsons joked about splitting the job in a tandem arrangement: alternating days, with both off on Sunday. Perhaps it was just a good-natured attempt at deflecting all the wishful speculation, but to the politician, after six-plus years of Mike Bloomberg’s booming New York, it sounded like self-satisfied dilettantism. It drove him mad. More insulting still was the proto-candidacy of John Catsimatidis, whose résumé seemed a too literal re-creation of the Mayor’s—billionaire entrepreneur, amateur pilot, and lifelong Democrat who had recently discovered the conveniences of Republicanism—but who seemed to lack any of Bloomberg’s obvious gifts. Catsimatidis owns Gristedes, a second-rate grocery-store chain, not a revered technology company that revolutionized global finance. But at least he was beatable. Then Bloomberg decided that he didn’t want to surrender his seat.”