Bloomberg Stock Is Way Down in New York

It should have been a golden moment at Coney Island. On a soft summer evening, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had just thrown out the first pitch at the home opener for the Brooklyn Cyclones, a popular minor league team.

But as he strolled off the mound, a man stood up behind the first-base dugout and shouted: “Hey, Bloomberg, off the field! You one-termer!”

Politicians are used to getting booed at sporting events, and the mayor seemed oblivious, waving to the crowd. Yet the taunt did not come out of left field: Less than halfway through his first term, Bloomberg’s poll numbers are in the cellar and he is struggling with the image of a billionaire businessman who is cut off from the needs of working people.

It’s a galling situation for a leader who has received little public credit for his tough decisions to balance the city’s bleeding budget and to push through a sweeping reform of New York City’s troubled public schools that could spur long-overdue changes.

Crime continues to fall, and the tensions between minorities and police that flared under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani have cooled. These achievements should be enough to burnish a mayor’s image -- but that’s not what many New Yorkers see.

Instead, Bloomberg is largely known as the politician who raised taxes and told people they can’t smoke in bars and restaurants. He’s the official who defended a police crackdown on partygoers drinking beer at the beach, while concertgoers freely sip wine in Central Park; he’s a leader who talks about shared economic pain, but is able to jet off to his Bermuda home for the weekend.

“You’re hearing more people say that he doesn’t understand how his policies come across to working people, and I do think that’s a fair criticism,” said veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “In New York, it can be a prescription for disaster.”

Even his worst critics say there’s still time for Bloomberg, 61, to turn his image around. He says he wants to be reelected and is prepared to spend millions out of his own pocket. But there is a growing concern that he is a stubborn official who does not understand the intricacies of city politics and could be voted out of office in two years.

“Every mayor gets blamed for things that go wrong, and when you think of the bad news this guy has delivered, it’s understandable he’d have problems,” said George Arzt, a political consultant and former press secretary to Mayor Edward I. Koch. “But clearly [Bloomberg] has to find a way to show people he cares about them.”

As she fanned herself on a midtown street corner, secretary Laura Shapiro said Bloomberg was a remote figure, yet shouldn’t be judged so quickly.

“Look, he’s been given a rotten situation to cope with; the economy is so bad,” she said. “I think he’s doing the best he can, but he doesn’t do the greatest job of communicating.”

Others are less charitable: “I hear people say, ‘All this man does is raise taxes and tell me I cannot smoke!’ ” said Bhuliyan Sayedul, a street vendor.

As he sinks in the polls, with a 24% favorability rating, Bloomberg has vowed defiantly to stay the course. He predicts the city’s economic fortunes will revive and that he will be reelected.

“My job is not to get the best poll numbers,” the Republican mayor said during an appearance on his weekly WABC-AM radio show. “My job is to make this city the world’s greatest city and to keep it that way. And we are going in the right direction.”

Efforts to interview the mayor for this story were unsuccessful.

From the moment he took office Jan. 1, 2002, Bloomberg was grappling with a city in crisis. New York was reeling from the psychological effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The city faced a staggering $6-billion budget deficit, and political leaders made it clear that there would not be any long-term relief coming from either Albany or Washington. New York was on its own, and the new mayor had his hands full.

A media magnate with a $4.5-billion personal fortune, Bloomberg boasted during the election that he was genuinely independent. He had funded his campaign with more than $70 million of his own money, a record-breaking amount for a mayor’s race, and pledged to bring a businessman’s acumen -- rather than a list of political IOUs -- to City Hall.

Nearly 20 months later, he points to a list of achievements. Unlike his predecessors, he persuaded political and union leaders to disband the old Board of Education and put the New York City school system -- the nation’s largest -- under the control of the mayor. He has appointed highly respected commissioners to run city agencies, giving them both independence and a mandate to do more with less.

When it became clear that New York would either have to slash municipal services or raise taxes to balance its budget, as required by state law, the mayor pushed through an 18% rise in the local property tax rate -- the biggest increase in city history. As a result of the tax hike and some painful cuts -- such as the closing of six neighborhood firehouses -- New York was able to close its huge budget gap.

“He’s been dealt a pretty harsh economic hand,” said Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor to Giuliani and a law partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “Under the circumstances, he’s done a great job for the city of New York.”

The polls tell a different story. A New York Times survey last month found that fewer than one in four had a favorable opinion of Bloomberg’s performance, the lowest rating for a New York City mayor in three decades of such polling. Few believed that he was a fighter for the city, or that he understood the day-to-day concerns of average New Yorkers, the survey found.

“In this town, you’ve got to mix it up with people; you have to be an extrovert,” said Koch, who supports the mayor. “Giuliani and I disagreed on a lot of issues, but we had a governing style very much the same. We were upfront and in your face.

“New Yorkers like that kind of noise. But this mayor [Bloomberg] is the soul of discretion, by contrast. He’s calm, he’s businesslike, and he gets virtually no credit for the great things that he’s done.... He’s got to work on the ‘person thing’ just like the first President George Bush had to work on the ‘vision thing.’ ”

In small, intimate groups, Bloomberg can be charming and gracious. When a class of second-graders from a Manhattan public school visited him at City Hall, he let them conduct a mock news conference and clearly enjoyed the experience.

In front of large groups, however, the mayor often seems wooden and ill at ease. Unlike Koch and Giuliani, who relished the combative give-and-take with voters at monthly town hall meetings throughout the city, Bloomberg has generally avoided such raucous forums. A native of Medford, Mass., he speaks in a flat, nasal voice that delivers economic facts and statistics in a monotone, rarely registering any emotion.

Behind the scenes, though, it’s a different story. Bloomberg, a former trader at Salomon Bros. who made a fortune selling the distinctive stock and business information machines that bear his name, can be a tough, demanding boss.

He shook up City Hall by virtually eliminating his staff members’ private offices, replacing them with the so-called bullpen, a large, one-room constellation of cubicles and desks, where he sits at the center and his aides work next to each other.

Bloomberg can be abrasive, but he is mainly impatient, challenging aides to defend their ideas. He explores complex issues at a high level, and aides say he is more interested in an argument than a memo.

Perhaps most important, the mayor is interested in his own ideas and pursues them relentlessly -- often with little regard for what others think. And it is this trait, coupled with his stiff public persona, that has sparked growing disenchantment with Bloomberg, according to Stanley Klein, a Long Island University political scientist.

“Ed Koch used to ask people, ‘How am I doing?’ but this guy doesn’t really care what other people think,” Klein said. “He comes up with an idea that he thinks is logical and then drives straight ahead, over anybody who gets in his way.”

Take the smoking ban. When Bloomberg proposed it, he was not responding to mounting grass-roots pressure. Citing his own beliefs, he relentlessly lobbied the City Council and got his way. “There has been huge resentment about this in some quarters, and it’s caused him political pain,” Koch said. “But that’s his style.”

On July 4, New York police raided a party on Rockaway Beach in Queens, confiscating coolers filled with beer. They cited a New York City law banning alcoholic consumption in public places without a permit and issued summonses.

Members of the beach party, who had been holding a fund-raiser for the families of Sept. 11 victims, were irate. The controversy escalated when the New York Daily News published photos two days later of people sitting on blankets and sipping wine at a July 4 New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park. They had not sought permits to drink wine in public, and there was no police intervention to stop them.

The mayor hotly denied there was any double standard, saying the Rockaway Beach group had applied for a permit to drink beer on the beach and had been denied; police officials later said the group had a history of boisterous behavior and police were worried that people might get drunk and drown.

Police enforce the law on a case-by-case basis, and “nobody ever drowned in a tuba,” Bloomberg cracked at a City Hall news conference, referring to the well-behaved Central Park crowd. But for all his patient explanations, the image persisted of a leader who can only connect with affluent people.

The mayor has gotten no shortage of advice on how to turn his public relations problem around. “It wouldn’t kill him to eat a hot dog on the streets of Brooklyn, just to humanize himself,” Klein said. Others urge him to visit street fairs and Little League games without a press entourage to show people he cares about them.

This month, the mayor received big play in the tabloids and on local television news broadcasts when he jumped into a Harlem swimming pool with a dozen kids on the first day the city-run pools were open. He also won points with reporters when he made fun of himself as a sad-sack “Mayor of La Mancha” at the annual Inner Circle dinner in Manhattan, where the mayor’s office and local press corps put on dueling musical shows.

“If anything, that performance showed people he had a sense of humor,” Arzt said. “When I saw that happen, I was hopeful for him.”

Still, tensions simmer between Bloomberg and other city leaders. He may face his strongest test yet over a controversial proposal to make all municipal elections nonpartisan. New York, unlike Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities, permits parties to hold primary elections to determine who will run for local offices. The mayor says this puts too much power into the hands of party powerbrokers and discourages independent candidates.

“Some issues have a way of fermenting with the public and gathering some acceptance over a long period of time, but this [nonpartisan elections] issue has never caught on here,” said Maurice Carroll, who heads the Quinnipiac Poll.

“It may prove to be a good or a bad issue for Bloomberg. But the one thing we know is: It’s his issue. It certainly didn’t rise up from the public, like other initiatives do. For better or worse, this is how he’s chosen to run the city.”

The same independent streak applies to baseball. As Bloomberg threw a strike to the catcher and strolled off the mound in Brooklyn, a chorus of boos gave way to good-natured cheering.

Most politicians would have tried to look on the bright side. But if this mayor cared about the shift in public opinion, he didn’t show it.

“He’s all right,” said a fan, settling into her seat. “Give the man a break.”