Mayor Michael Bloomberg was honored at a benefit for The Drum Major Institute (DMI) on Thursday evening.

DMI, a progressive organization that backed Fernando Ferrer for mayor in 2005, recently issued a detailed analysis of congestion pricing in support of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC program. Bloomberg is currently pushing the state to allow an early test of congestion pricing in Manhattan with the goals of easing traffic, reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, and improving mass transit.

At the benefit, Mayor Bloomberg was introduced by Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr., former minister of the Riverside Church, and was followed by Dr. Cornel West, the noted activist, public intellectual, and professor of religion at Princeton. Dr. Forbes and Dr. West are renowned and fiery public speakers, and it was a remarkable configuration on stage, like a snapshot of three defining roles in American politics: West as outspoken activist, Forbes as idealist, and Bloomberg as pragmatist.

Despite Dr. Forbes being a tough act to follow, and with Cornel West on deck, Bloomberg remained low key and dryly witty, introducing himself with the line "tonight I found a party I'd like to be part of."

Bloomberg chose to end his comments on a serious note. The mayor mentioned he had just come from speaking with the schoolteacher mother of a firefighter who died earlier in the day (at a fire in Brooklyn), and that the conversation he had with her, about her son, about the school system, and about the future of the city, was still very much with him. What was most human about the exchange, he thought, was that in her shock and grief she still thought and cared about the future. This closing note also perhaps inadvertently demonstrated the difference in experience between being a mayor and being an employer.

Given Bloomberg's reputation for pragmatism, perhaps the most pragmatic comment of the evening came later from Dr. West, who provided the introduction for the second honoree, Tavis Smiley (the NPR and PBS host and commentator). Dr. West gave a rousing speech in honor of Mr. Smiley, who was unable to attend. Dr. West described Mr. Smiley's career as communicator as a continuation of the ideals and work of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Acknowledging Mayor Bloomberg towards the end of his encomium, and perhaps feeling the oddity of sharing a stage with a billionaire businessman (and one only recently a Republican), Dr. West said, "now brother Bloomberg, he's a different sort of brother." After a pause just long enough to register the distance between a socialist professor of religion and the owner of the Bloomberg business news empire, Dr. West went on to say the tent of Martin Luther King, Jr. was a big tent, big enough to include both the night's honorees.