By Neil Fabricant

We have a very big problem in New York City. An extraordinarily wealthy man holds virtually every source of private and public influence and power and is employing it to pursue a personal vision of what the city should look like, and who should live and work in it far into the future. He also conceives his vision as a model for other cities and for the country. He has bulldozed over obstacles, including elections that constrain all other elected officials. He is often compared – and compares himself favorably – to Robert Moses, the iconic master builder (and destroyer). Only the global fiscal meltdown, a crisis brought about primarily by Bloomberg’s investment banking colleagues, has slowed the 20-year timetable.

When he failed to gain whatever it was he wanted in Washington D.C., he decided that remaining in office was the best thing he could do with his time. He easily swept aside the two public referenda that called for him to leave after his second term, and is putting to work the same combination of public and private power, wealth and influence to overwhelm the electoral process. Today’s capital-intensive, technologically driven electoral politics being what it is, the advantages of deploying hundreds of millions of dollars with the stroke of a pen, together with all the other resources Bloomberg commands may prove decisive. That at least is the conventional wisdom. This election is, therefore, a very big deal, but as with the New York Times and other major media, the New Yorker, doesn’t seem up to the task of treating this challenge to our democratic system seriously.

That’s why there are so many small blogs like ours that are trying to get through the heavy blanket of praise and platitudes that smothers serious debate over the vision – making New York City a comfortable and fun place for the rich and a correspondingly difficult place for the rest of us – and why we are especially concerned about the media’s downplaying the game-changing nature of overriding term limits, a move that Bloomberg once called “disgusting.” That’s why we began Bloomberg Watch and why shortly thereafter we launched our little paper.

Not all challenges need be met. That’s one of the few life lessons I thought I had learned. I know I’m going to regret taking on this one. I can’t do justice to the skewering Ben McGrath’s piece deserves and the public flogging New Yorker’s editor merits for publishing it. But there it sits a huge homunculus of puffery and fluff emblematic of Michael Bloomberg’s fawning media coverage. There is really no choice.

The first thing was to Google Ben McGrath. I was curious, not about the man’s politics — he seems to have none — but about the preppy tone. Was it authentic? Do people really think and talk like this? Or had someone from the “other side of the park” (McGrath’s phrase) so completely internalized that attitude that caricature had become character. I never got far enough in my search to find out; a blogger’s comments on a hip hop story McGrath had written, suggested that I wasn’t alone, and the piece itself such a long, tedious celebration of Bloomberg the Magnificent that I moved on.

This article was written by Ben McGrath, a longtime New Yorker writer whose contributions—always self-conscious, obnoxiously precious, and not nearly as amusing as I’m sure he intends them to be—can usually be found, mercifully, confined within the limited-length Talk of the Town section. But amidst the cringe-inducing academic descriptions, and ignoring my general distaste for McGrath, an important point about the article must be articulated: McGrath is right.

I don’t know anything about hip-hop so I’ll take Joey’s word that McGrath said something about hip-hop that was right. Virtually everything he wrote in this profile was pointless, wrong, or painfully servile.

Can a good mayor amass too much power?

The assumption, of course, is the very thing in dispute. Surely, thinks McGrath, you don’t doubt that he’s been a good mayor? Oh, but we do, we do. Maybe it’s just that other side of the park thing.

As for the question of too much power, it’s only to be found in the title–McGrath never raises it.

I will be accused of taking things out of context, but I cannot try your patience as mine has been tried, I’ll just point up a few items. If you’re inclined to read the entire piece, here’s the link.

McGrath on how others see Bloomberg

He begins with Bloomberg’s social circle—the near-peers.

[T]hey dine with him at his town house, on East Seventy-ninth Street, or clink glasses at charity functions in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art; they see, in this mayor, a better version of themselves—a tycoon so wise and generous he could be President, couldn’t he?

This take on Bloomberg — a better version of themselves…a wise and generous tycoon — signals what you’re in for: Read on at your own peril. Yes, many wealthy people like and respect Bloomberg; that’s one of the central lines of inquiry as to whether the man has amassed too much power. Political and governmental power reaches just so far. Bloomberg’s writ runs farther and deeper than his mayoral position. It reaches anyone who has a stake or a voice. The hundreds of millions of dollars available to fund a cause, finance a deal, support a candidate or an entire political party, pick up the phone and reach the richest and most powerful men in the country, and much that we don’t know about — put it all together and we get a sense of what William Thompson of BedStuy is dealing with. For the wealthy who see the same world Bloomberg sees, there’s no conflict; they’ve done very well. For those who have qualms about the way he’s remaking the city in his image and the manner in which he holds onto power, McGrath has made it clear that he has no such doubts, and those who do won’t say so, at least not publicly.

Nonetheless, the record is clear about how Bloomberg uses his charitable contributions, which, when he decided to become mayor, he boosted from about $25–30 million a year to $100+ million. Most of the money went to groups in New York City. His political operatives intimidate and threaten those who publicly criticize him. Whatever they think of the term limits override, they are best advised to keep it to themselves. Bloomberg as much as says so himself:

[H]e once responded to an anecdote about a charity’s having expressed disappointment at the size of a check from the older of his two daughters, Emma, by saying, “That’s not very smart. Emma is going to run a very large foundation of her own some day.”

This is typical McGrath. Buying and bullying New York’s civil society is told as a cute story, something like Harry Truman’s famous defense of Margaret’s piano playing.

New York Times reporters Sam Roberts and Jim Rutenberg have a more sinister take on Bloomberg’s charitable checkbook leverage.

All incumbents dispense favors. But Mr. Bloomberg’s personal wealth has made him a modern-day Medici — a role that, some critics say, can also stifle dissent from institutions that have quietly absorbed city budget cuts because they worry that what the mayor gives he can also stop giving…,after a professor in the education school at New York University publicly criticized Bloomberg L.P., company officials informed N.Y.U. that two journalism fellowships were in jeopardy. Catherine R. Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, said that Bloomberg company officials made it clear that the criticism was the reason for the warning.

The following account is even more revealing:

Last year, a number of cultural leaders, including at least one board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said they received calls from Patricia E. Harris, a deputy mayor who has also been the unofficial chief guardian of Mr. Bloomberg’s gift-giving, chiding them for buying $100 tickets to a party for Gifford Miller, the council speaker, who is seeking the Democratic mayoral nomination.

“Like anybody else, the mayor expects to have the support of his friends,” said Mr. Skyler. “But the mayor never holds his personal philanthropy over their heads.”

Enough said, let’s move on.

When a college student collapsed near the Mayor’s feet, at an appearance in the Bronx, in March, Bloomberg knew exactly what to do. He dropped to his knees and checked the kid’s pulse.

“Call 911,” Bloomberg said, and calmly unbuttoned his patient’s shirt.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

By the time the paramedics arrived, the Mayor appeared to have come up with a diagnosis: no breakfast, stuffy room. Hours later, back at City Hall, Bloomberg cited his Eagle Scout training and reminded reporters that one of his deputies had recently tackled a mugger in midtown and rescued a commuter’s BlackBerry; heroism runs in the administration…. of a man on whose watch New Yorkers’ average life expectancy has increased by fifteen months.

Bloomberg as hero-in-chief, Bloomberg the Eagle Scout, Bloomberg administering CPR and saving lives — even increasing life expectancies!

Only someone from the other side of the park would raise a testy question like whose lives? But raise it I must. A book could easily be written about the class war Bloomberg has waged against the poor and working class people of New York ever since he took office. We and others have written about many of the policies that accentuate the extremes of wealth and poverty in a city that is the epicenter of the fatal social arrangement. But here’s one example that seems to have been overlooked lately.

In 2004, Bloomberg vetoed legislation that required landlords to identify apartments that house young children and remove the lead paint. He said it would lead to landlords not renting to families with small children, discourage the rehabilitation of affordable housing, and lead to homelessness. (Increasing the minimum wage will lead to unemployment, raising taxes on the wealthy will cost jobs, etc.). This is bedrock Republican political doctrine: oppose social and economic legislation that benefits poor and working class people on the grounds that it will harm poor and working class people.

Lead paint is particularly damaging to children under the age of 6 whose central nervous systems are still developing. It has been linked to attention deficit disorder, stunted growth, low IQs, and kidney problems. But lead paint in housing doesn’t affect anybody the mayor knows. Now if you want to talk about toys that’s different: everyone’s kids play with toys made in China.

The city council in a rare moment of rebellion overrode the veto. And what does “Mike” do?

Headline: New York City Places Hundreds of Homeless Families in Lead-Tainted Apartments in Effort to Save Taxpayer Dollars

In January, it was revealed that the New York City Department of Homeless Services placed hundreds of homeless families in apartments contaminated with toxic lead dust and deteriorated lead-based paint, triggering protests at City Hall by lead poisoning prevention and homeless advocates.

Moving on –

After seven and a half years in office, Bloomberg, who is now sixty-seven, has amassed so much power and respect (emphasis added) that he seems more a Medici than a mayor. Liberals of both the Upper West Side and the Park Slope generations, not inclined to recognize “businessman” as a compliment, refer to him, with some pride, as “the only Republican I’ve ever voted for.”

I’ve lived in New York all my life and I’ve never met anyone who talks like this. Who are these Upper West Siders and Park Slopers who take such pride in voting for him? Never mind, it’s not really voting anyway; politicians seek votes.

Some of Bloomberg’s friends still can’t bring themselves to call him a politician, no matter how expertly he broadens his electoral base.

Tom Secunda, a co-founder of Bloomberg L.P. echoes that idea. The Bloomberg he knows is entrepreneur, C.E.O., philanthropist. “You know, Secunda says, [politician] just doesn’t feel right…”

The attitude, reinforced at galas on the Upper East Side, seeps downtown with some of Bloomberg’s appointees, who, years after trading their upper-floor offices for cubicles in the famed City Hall bullpen, have been known to bristle when colleagues use the word “politician,” asking, “Is that how you see yourself?”

Yes Ben, from Camelot on the Hudson to the downtown bullpen, nobody thinks of Bloomberg or those who work for him as political. True, there is an election coming up. Not quite ready for an anointing, the people expect it. But when anyone, even supporters, uses the word “politician,” we bristle. $200 million worth of TV spots, focus groups, phone banks, political consultants, and all the rest are in the service of a cause and its leader, not a political campaign.

Does all that adulation go to his head? No, it’s as we thought:

Bloomberg is largely above the snobbery. He genuinely likes to shake hands”… During the early days of the swine-flu outbreak, the Mayor even mocked politicians who carry Purell with them on their daily rounds. “I’ve always found that you’re in the wrong business if that’s what you do,” he said.

Doesn’t carry Purrell? I had to look that one up — it’s a hand sanitizer — Who among us doesn’t carry around a hand sanitizer these days? Add Bloomberg the Brave to the ever expanding list of qualities — what are New Yorker profiles for anyway?

He also told me that he has consistently found the quality of government employees to be higher than businesspeople generally allow. He singled out the Metropolitan Transportation Authority …he could recall being stuck on the train only once in the past few years.

McGrath’s political ideas may be shallow but they are never ironic. Bloomberg doesn’t get stuck on trains. Still, one can go too far. The political operatives must have cringed at the praise of the MTA. The Metrocard was $1.50 when he took office and is now $2.25.

The campaign literature reads Bloomberg to MTA: No more excuses. No more delays. Give New York City the subways and buses we deserve.”

And here’s Bloomberg on the recent ceiling collapse: “It just goes to show the MTA has, for decades, underfunded what they needed to do — to not just expand, but to maintain our stations. This could have killed somebody.”

Adjusted for inflation, the city now contributes about 20 cents for every dollar it gave the MTA during the 1980s. Bloomberg appoints four MTA board members and has great leverage over others. But one of the favorite smoke-blowing tactics of politicians who can do something about problems but don’t want to is to point out the problem and lead the citizen outrage. Bloomberg has a petition on his website where New Yorkers can tell the MTA “no more excuses, no more delays!”

Not long ago, he stood on a rooftop above Fifth Avenue with the City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn, and other officials and labor leaders, to announce a new initiative dedicated to reducing the city’s carbon footprint, and said, “This is a City Council that’s actually trying to make our city better rather than just talk about it.”

This is the city council which put millions of dollars of our money into non-existent non-profits and when nobody was looking paid out the money to friends and relatives; it’s the same city council members who gave themselves a 25% pay raise and overrode term limits to keep their part-time jobs. And there is the leader of the pack, Christine Quinn, basking in the Sun King’s glow.

If we were to add up all the houses, private jets, SUVs, and whatever else this richest man in New York owns, there is little doubt that Bloomberg single-handedly consumes more energy than the entire city of Syracuse. His campaign brochures alone have destroyed acres of carbon-trapping forests.

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.

Let’s pause here for just a moment to summarize the first few pages of this profile.

So far we have the wise, humorous, generous, affable, plain spoken, brave, self-made Bloomberg. He is as the ads and editorials and press releases trumpet the affordable housing mayor, the education mayor, the indispensable financial genius mayor, the ceo, the entrepreneur, the $1 a year mayor, the regular guy mayor, the incorruptible mayor – and now another facet of the mayor’s gleaming identity — the environmental, no-carbon footprint mayor.

I can’t add anything to that. Ben is beginning to inch up to the term limits problem.

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.

So measured against the mayor who has raised the bar so high, these dilettantes made a well-regarded politician angry.

More insulting still was the proto-candidacy of John Catsimatidis…Catsimatidis owns Gristedes, a second-rate grocery-store chain, not a revered technology company that revolutionized global finance.

We haven’t heard the term “revered” used in connection with global finance in quite a while. Be that as it may, McGrath is sympathetic to Bloomberg’s plight: How could he leave the city in charge of a dilettante, a hack, or a second–rate grocer?

Crime is low, test scores are climbing, and racial tension hardly registers…. Environmental activists rave about his global-warming speech in Bali, in 2007…Bloomberg has probably done as much as any politician in the country to hold weapons dealers accountable. Far more than Rudy Giuliani, who parlayed his symbolic role as the stoic face of leadership after September 11th into the honorary title of America’s Mayor, Bloomberg deserves the label…

Is there anything about this mayor that’s not to die for? Oh there is so much more.

McGrath tells of trip that Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania took with Bloomberg.

“I said to him, ‘Mayor, only you can save the newspaper business in this country.’ And of course his staff, they wanted him to buy the New York Times.”

But what’s the sense of owning a newspaper, Bloomberg suggests, if you’re too ethical to try to influence the coverage? Here is McGrath reporting on Bloomberg riffing on Bloomberg:

“My ethics are different than some of these people,” meaning publishers like Murdoch, the owner of the Post, and Mortimer Zuckerman, the owner of the Daily News. “Rupert, and probably Mort, would say, ‘It’s my newspaper,’” he said. “I would never try, and have never tried, to influence a story at Bloomberg. Certainly can’t now—but never. I’m so careful that nobody would ever think that I tried to influence a story… He seemed slightly exasperated by all the hopes associated with his expected transition into full-time philanthropy. “I mean, if you want to know why do it,” he said, referring to his bid for a third term, “I guess this was not the reason, but at least it ended that stuff.”

So what was the reason? Well, of course, we knew what McGrath would say; we just didn’t know how he’d say it. Here it is:

Bloomberg’s preferred white-knight scenario was on a grander scale than merely saving a family newspaper; he hoped to rescue New York City from financial ruin and prevent a return to the bloody chaos of the nineteen-seventies. “I didn’t want anybody to think that you walk away when the going gets tough,” he said.

The three dailies endorsed the Mayor’s wish, and, in the cases of the Times and the Post, justified their slavish devotion by protesting that they had never been in favor of term limits—an anti-élitist reaction against professional politicians—to begin with. That the populist, and hugely popular, campaign to enact term limits, in 1993, had been bankrolled by the billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder only made things easier for Bloomberg. Lauder’s intended targets were not corporate titans who offer their managerial services for a dollar a year but career political hacks.

Let’s examine what McGrath is saying here. The term limits vote wasn’t intended by Lauder, who financed the campaign, to force Bloomberg out; it was career political hacks he had in mind. Therefore, the 10-1 margins by which New Yorkers rejected the the override was what? Misguided? Subject to nullifaction? Lauder bankrolled the campaign and Lauder says what the law means.

The Mayor’s bill proposed extending term limits by four years. At the public hearings at City Hall to debate the issue, last October, the Council chamber was packed with mostly nonwhite citizens carrying professionally made signs (“Democrats for Choices,” “Hear Our Voices, Give Us Choices”) that, on first glance, could have been taken for expressing an opposing viewpoint.

Non-white citizens carrying professionally made signs.

McGrath goes on for a bit about Bloomberg saying turnover and change after eight years is a good thing, and nobody feels good about the way it was done. But what the hell; there was no other way. A few cute remarks about the Inner Circle Dinner and Bloomberg lasting longer than the New York Times and poof, the issue is gone and McGrath is onto Bloomberg’s early years as a bond trader and then mayor.

Bloomberg took office during a recession, and quickly established himself as a bold and decisive fiscal manager, ultimately demonstrating, as his friend Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at N.Y.U., says, New York was “open for business after 9/11.”

O.K. we said there was more, much more. Add bold and decisive fiscal manager to the list. Not George Bush bold and decisive, more Robert Moses-like.

And here is Bloomberg riffing on Bloomberg again:

“I think if you look, we’ve done more in the last seven years than—I don’t know if it’s fair to say more than Moses did, but I hope history will show the things we did made a lot more sense.”

I have to stop soon, but there’s so much more fawning that just a few more lines to top it off — Here’s McGrath giving Bloomberg more space to riff on Bloomberg:

When he’s bored, riding in the back seat of the mayoral S.U.V., Bloomberg counts pieces of trash—or, because his Department of Sanitation has proved more effective than most, he measures the distance between pieces of trash, by counting blocks. (“It is fascinating,” he told me, and gave the example of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which was “like a sewer,” he said, when he was first elected. “Today, you can go for blocks without seeing a piece of paper.”)

In person, Bloomberg is lively and disarming.

How can I count the ways?

About the self-important hedge-fund guy who once approached Bloomberg and Joel Klein with “great news” about a plan that he and his friends had conceived (“They were going to raise a billion dollars to fix public education. When I told him our annual budget’s twenty billion . . .”).

Oh how little these self-important hedge fund guys know about my struggle to right the ship.

On a conversational level he tends to deploy his figures in the service of folksy insights that stick with you. (“We’re down to the point where eighty-five per cent of our murder victims have criminal records, which means you’re really getting down to gun dealers killing gun dealers.”)

The relentless crime fighter—all we’ve got left is gun dealers killing gun dealers.

He is capable of making even the budget process accessible verging on interesting, like a good introductory-level college instructor.

What can’t Bloomberg do?

Bloomberg, unlike some of his predecessors, is a strong proponent of the institutional role of the press, to which he often refers, sometimes in mock solemnity, as “the fourth estate.” He is an evangelist for the open exchange of information—his fortune was made this way—and at times seems to take an almost academic interest in the news-gathering process, interrupting with questions of his own at joint press conferences when he feels that the essential point (usually one that highlights New York’s success) is at risk of being obscured, or when his personal interest is sparked. (To Jeffrey Skiles, the co-pilot of the U.S. Airways plane that landed on the Hudson River last winter: “Had you ever hit a bird before? What’s it like?”) One of his first acts as mayor was to pay a visit to Room 9 in City Hall, where the beat reporters are stationed, and ask if there was anything he could do to improve their working conditions. (He had the room renovated in 2003.) But his estimation of the individual reporters who make up the City Hall press corps has never been high. They represent a different kind of hack—sloppily dressed, and resentful of power.

Coffee, tea? And screw you – you sloppily dressed resentful hacks. Now that’s the Bloomberg we’ve come to know and love on YouTube.

Thanks to his money, Bloomberg has managed, perhaps more than any democratic politician ever before, to govern strictly with what he considers to be the greater good in mind.

Tennis anyone?

The Mayor’s pals include all the usual real-estate big shots and the philanthropically minded financiers, like Pete Peterson and Felix Rohatyn, “wise men,” as Bloomberg calls them, who helped orchestrate the city’s bailout in 1975. (“How much of that’s relevant, I don’t know,” he told me. “But it’s a good sounding board. If you don’t have any clothes on, they can tell you.”)

Yes, but will they even notice?

The crowd also includes members of a subset of Manhattan media, like Diane Sawyer and the gossip columnist Liz Smith. “He’s always just sweet and affectionate—very touchy-feely,” Smith said. “I can’t see not supporting anything that he wants to do.”

You betcha.

Bloomberg struggles righteously to maintain a wall between his governance, on which he is happy to expound on the level, and his campaign, whose staff is ready and willing to engage in the usual spin.

Bloomberg struggles righteously above the spin while the staff stays below the radar doing the wet work. McGrath sees this arrangement as “on the level.”

As for chasing Anthony Weiner out of the race, Weiner, McGrath observes:

…has styled himself as an abrasive spokesman for outer-borough middle-class values, and is in many ways the anti-Bloomberg. Instead of spending his evenings on the charity cocktail circuit, he plays goalie in a men’s ice-hockey league, with the same bunch of nobodies, week after week.

Wow.