The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg by Eleanor Randolph

Author:Eleanor Randolph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

20

FROM LOW POINT TO LANDSLIDE—2005

“You always want to press, and you want to tackle issues that are unpopular, that nobody else will go after.”

—Bloomberg, on low polls as mayor1

It was clear to anybody who watched the mayor buzz from event to event, making policy pronouncements, cutting ribbons, even snarling at the press, that Michael Bloomberg loved being mayor of New York City. It was not so clear that New Yorkers felt the same way about him.

To begin with, Bloomberg was competent but not lovable. The property tax increase was so jarring that at one point he earned a 24 percent approval rating, the lowest for any mayor since the New York Times had been polling such questions. To a city full of Democrats, he brought in the Republicans—the Republicans, mind you—to renominate George Bush for president at the Republican convention in 2004. Hundreds of protesters were arrested that week, and some were so roughed up by Ray Kelly’s police that the city eventually paid nearly $18 million in settlements.2

With the city souring on their billionaire mayor, Bloomberg had a ready supply of quotes to explain his sudden unpopularity. Besides the staple about the short attention span for the media—i.e., “Eventually even Monica got off the cover”—he could be more serious. His version was always: If everybody loves you, you’re doing something wrong—or doing nothing at all. Or, if you don’t fall, you’re skiing on the baby slopes. Great, his political advisers grumbled, but if nobody loves you by election season 2005, you go back to private life. Instead, the savvy political team scrambled to find ways to make their candidate palatable.

One afternoon in early 2004, two of Michael Bloomberg’s most seasoned aides slipped out of a city event and reconvened at an Irish bar in uptown Manhattan. Marc Shaw, now the first deputy mayor for operations, and Bill Cunningham, the mayor’s communications director, were dressed in their business attire that day—suits, ties, good shoes, the works—and the regulars suddenly grew silent and eyed them warily. “They thought we were the Feds,” Cunningham recalled with a chuckle. Instead, the two were trying to figure out a way to help the mayor politically without hurting the city’s finances, and after a few rounds of Dewar’s for the budget man and Jamesons for the media expert, they hatched a solution. They would not cut the property tax, now a stable source of funds for the city. But since there was extra money coming in, they would give some of it back to the voters as a kind of annual bonus.

Their plan was a classic political solution—a rebate, a check with the mayor’s name on it to offer taxpayers a little relief. It was a modern version of the roasted turkey or fifth of bourbon handed out by the politicians of old. When they brought the idea to Bloomberg, he saw the deal as a cheap political ruse. Cunningham remembered the mayor’s first reaction. He said, “Cunningham, you’re crazy.” So Cunningham, Shaw, the budget

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