To the Honorable Mayor Bloomberg:

Congratulations on your plan to ban Big Gulps.  You’ve piggybacked on an issue of minor importance created by the First Lady and already flowing through the public bloodstream.  Obesity.

Banning Big Gulps is a good step toward addressing the issue.  Please notice I didn’t say solving it, because it won’t.  That’s a good thing.  You’ve offered a solution through good intentions that won’t help, which means you can do more of it down the line.  The camel’s nose has taken the first step down a slippery slope.  Perfect.

But this brings me to the point of this letter.  The news is reporting that the Board of Health says the plan doesn’t go far enough and wants to expand it to milk shakes and popcorn.  This is the right idea, but terrible timing.  They’re supposed to see the camel’s nose, not the nose, neck, and half a hump.  That’s likely to ruin the entire deal!

The idea is incrementalism.  These things need to be done incrementally.  If you just ban Big Gulps, a majority of the people won’t care.  They’ll either not know about it, not care because they don’t buy drinks that size, or knowingly say that something really does need to be done about obesity because they’ve gotten it from the media for several months and never question such things.  That leaves the minority of people who do buy them and libertarians, who can be reliably marginalized as “extremists.”  If you do too much at one time, you might impact enough people and risk a political backlash.

The idea is to wait until enough time has gone by that people forget there ever was such a thing as a Big Gulp, which doesn’t take that long and is dependent upon the intelligence of the citizenry.  You’re in office, so that’s already been established.  It won’t be more than a couple months before New Yorkers will forget Big Gulps were ever available locally and will think they’re a novelty item native to Hoboken.  Patience is the key.

Once sufficient time has passed and New Yorkers are as fat as ever, if not fatter, you can tout the success of your anti-obesity efforts, but say that more needs to be done.  Then you can ban other things.  Good luck with your efforts.