Bloomberg '08?

Bloomberg's wealth - the size of the annual national product of the Bahamas - is hard to ignore. The plain fact is that he enjoys being rich. He has a private plane, which he uses to toggle between his $17 million town house on New York's Upper East Side, a $10 million Victorian town house in London, a $10.5 million estate in Bermuda, a $1.5 million condo in Vail and another house north of Manhattan, which he bought, as New York magazine put it, "as a base for his daughter Georgina's equestrian training." He has taken trips to promote the city of New York to Greece, Afghanistan and Turkey (dining with the mayor of Istanbul in a former prison that has been converted into a Four Seasons hotel), paying for the trips himself. "I went to Miami with the mayor for a meeting once," said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. "And when we were ready to fly back, there was some problem with the mayor's plane. So we got on his other plane. That was pretty good."

Americans have historically been suspicious of the very rich getting involved in politics; all those billions too close to the voting booth seem like something edging a little too close to monarchy. Even the most philanthropically inclined billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, are spending their money on social services that circumvent government. Bloomberg is trying something different: not just buying himself into public office but banking on his vast reserves of cash - which mean he never has to take a single campaign donation - to render politics irrelevant. He aims to forge an unlikely brand of politics: billionaire populism. Along the rotten old industrial sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx, bright glass buildings are rapidly being pushed into the empty ghetto spaces between warehouses as if some wealthy, distant hand were playing Monopoly with the boroughs. That distant hand, of course, is Bloomberg's. But in his time in New York, the mayor has already achieved something more profound, and lasting, than mere development: He has shown Americans what they might get if they ever manage to get politics out of government.

It is summer in the South Bronx, in the nation's poorest congressional district, and a tall Puerto Rican politician named Adolfo Carrion Jr. is addressing the Chamber of Commerce. Carrion, the Bronx borough president, is remembering an ugly episode in the city's history. As a child in 1977, he tells the crowd, he watched as the broadcast of the World Series at Yankee Stadium cut away to images just outside the ballpark, where rioters had started a fire in an empty elementary school that had engulfed the surrounding streets. "Ladies and gentlemen," Howard Cosell intoned, "the Bronx is burning." The moment would become a symbol for the next quarter-century of chaos in New York's outer boroughs.

But Carrion is here today to mark a new epoch: The ugliest ghetto in the country, he says, has cut unemployment to six percent, about the same as Sweden, and is sending up airy new high-rises in lots that once burned. Carrion waits for the applause to die down, and then he turns to the small, stiff-standing white guy on his left. The mayor, he says, deserves the credit. Carrion is a liberal Democrat who opposed the billionaire businessman when he first ran for office; now, he tells the crowd, Bloomberg will go down "as one of the greatest mayors - if not the greatest - in our history."

I met with Bloomberg in the vast, open room in City Hall that his aides call the bullpen, a room that is itself one of the mayor's proudest accomplishments. An unabashed management geek, Bloomberg conducts his interviews here, at a square table on a platform running the length of the room, to show off the triumph. The room is designed to democratize the business of governing; no one, not even the mayor, gets his own office. Instead, everyone sits at stations at long banks of desks, like daises at a phone-a-thon. Bloomberg spends most of his time here, bouncing around the room, looking over his subordinates' shoulders and pressing them about data. Bloomberg is a freak for facts, and his administration is premised on the idea that if you run the right regressions on nearly anything, you can figure out how to help the most people the best. "Every time I see him, he says, 'How are the numbers?' " says Shaun Donovan, the mayor's housing commissioner. There's a frenetic and excited energy about the room, because at any moment the big man might challenge you. "It's your agency," he'll tell subordinates. "Don't screw it up." When the mayor has more pressing business to attend to, his aides have to wander down into the bullpen and pull him away.