Bloomberg '08?

Even after nearly five years as mayor, Bloomberg can still sound shockingly out of touch, as if the lives of the poor are a matter of anthropology. I asked him what it was like to walk through working-class neighborhoods in the outer boroughs during his first campaign. "I was, I don't want to say surprised, but struck," he said. "They work in jobs that many of us might not rush to say that's where we work or that's what we did, but they are proud of those jobs." The mayor still seems most comfortable with people when they are abstracted, as statistics. Three years into his term, The New York Times considered it news that the mayor "can now kiss babies and flick a thumbs-up without explicit instructions from his press secretary."

When Bloomberg has failed, it has been from an insular bullheadedness, a political naivete that failed to comprehend that ideas that looked great on the bullpen's spreadsheets might not seem so great to ordinary people outside City Hall. Bloomberg lobbied hard for a long-shot project to bring the Olympics to New York, eventually losing out to London, when most city politicians would have given up. He also spent years pushing a vast, city-funded football stadium for a rusting, city-owned rail yard on Manhattan's West Side, one that his economists told him would spur an economic renaissance in that neighborhood. But he overestimated his political clout, and the owners of nearby Madison Square Garden - who didn't want the competition - joined with local residents and real-estate developers to kill the stadium plan. In a typical Bloomberg flourish, his opponents hadn't just blocked his pet project - they had "let down America."

But Bloomberg has been equally stubborn in his successes. His signature initiative was his decision to ban smoking in public places, an idea that, the bullpen's spreadsheets assured him, would keep thousands of New Yorkers from dying of heart disease. The restaurant and hotel industry - powerful players in New York - hated the idea, because they thought it would cost them business. When Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter, a celebrity from Bloomberg's own social circle, protested the "imperial" law by smoking in his office, the city sent cops to the magazine's headquarters to write a ticket. The bill passed, and deaths from heart disease in the city dropped by 1,200 in the first year - "which is almost exactly what the statistics predicted," the mayor says, looking pleased with himself.

Bloomberg's most successful initiatives are often like this - moves everybody thought would be good ideas but that had been considered politically impossible. He first ran for office saying that he wanted to reform the city's schools, seeking to break up the city's Board of Education and hold individual schools responsible for results - a move opposed by the powerful teachers' union. As the first mayor in years not to need the union's support, Bloomberg won this fight, too, and test scores across the city have increased by as much as nineteen points.

By the 1990s, New York had become a den of murders and chaos, a gory gang screenplay come to life, and Rudy Giuliani became a national hero by using innovative policing techniques to seal off ghettos, helping to cut the city's murder rate from 2,200 per year to its present level of less than 600, which is lower than it was in 1965. Bloomberg's great ambition has been to better Giuliani by not just beating the ghetto back but by Manhattanizing it, bringing businesses and middle-class neighborhoods to places long ago abandoned as hopeless, and trying to rebuild the city from the bottom up. The mayor has completely revamped the city's property tax code, enacting the largest tax hike in New York's history and turning the city's $6 billion deficit into a record $3.6 billion surplus. He has presided over what has become the largest affordable-housing initiative in the nation's history, cutting deals with developers to convert rotting industrial parks into high-end apartments, with a portion of the units reserved for middle-class families. And he has spent more on parks in the outer boroughs than anyone since the New Deal.

The rapid development has led to accusations of cronyism, and a state judge ruled in June that Bloomberg's administration gave a contract to a favored developer without competitive bidding. The mayor's emphasis on business growth, critics say, has done little to help the one in five New Yorkers who lives in poverty. "Mike Bloomberg thinks everything's going just great in this town," said Fernando Ferrer, the mayor's Democratic opponent in the last election. "For some it is, but for millions of others it isn't. There are two New Yorks.''

But it has been difficult to argue with the effect: a booming economy all over the city and flashy commercial strips popping up in unlikely corners of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Bloomberg's approval ratings, once mired in the George Bush territory of the low thirties, are now consistently above seventy percent, and when he trounced Ferrer last year, it was the largest margin for a Republican mayor in the city's history. Douglas Muzzio, a professor of political science at the City University of New York and a longtime observer of the city's politics, is only half-joking when he credits Bloomberg with creating a whole new category of American politician: "plutocrat as philosopher king."