City Hall, New York: a damp autumnal afternoon, three blocks from the awesome ground zero hole that was once the twin towers. On the steps of the elegant 18th-century mayoral offices I await my first encounter with 'Hizzoner' the 108th mayor of New York City, multi-billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg. A guard at the security channel at the gates has made me strip outer coat and jacket for the X-ray machine. Last summer a troubled individual, with no clear motive, shot dead a city councillor from the City Hall public gallery. But the policeman has given me extra reasons for heightened security. 'You're about to meet,' he states portentously, 'the most important human being on the planet.'
Bloomberg, arm in arm with a fleshy woman in fire-engine red, comes through the double doors of the chandeliered lobby to meet me and a handful of reporters who have waited for more than an hour and a half. Shuffling on splayed feet (his fallen arches famously saved him from a Vietnam War call-up), he wears a modest two-button navy suit and a wilting white shirt too tight at the collar.
No more than 1.5 metres tall in his well-heeled, tasselled black loafers, he carries not a gram of surplus adipose, despite the sobriquet 'two-dinners Bloomberg'. Like a bilocating prodigy he is known to partake of dinners in several venues during any one evening. But Elaine, the famed proprietor of the restaurant of that name, confides: 'He likes his food, but in very small pieces.' The personality, the presence, the explanation for his boundless hubris - why, after all, does a self-made media tycoon seek the grief-laden mayoralty of New York City? - are in his grizzled scalp, bland face, primly protruding mouth and indignant, hooded eyes. Greeting 61-year-old Bloomberg is like encountering a prehistoric amphibian. He licks his thin upper lip with a flash of the tongue. When he turns his head, striving for leeway from his constricting collar, his creased neckline elongates to gecko-like proportions. His press office, led by lanky, 30-year-old Ed Skyler, who throws handy objects and obscenities at journalists who provoke him, has revealed it turns down 500 requests to meet Hizzoner every day. But this morning Bloomberg is keen to endorse the woman on his arm as the Republican candidate for a seat on the city council, and he has ordered an unscheduled press conference.
It has become a routine tactic in Bloomberg's strategy for the next mayoral election, set for next year. Formerly a Democrat who switched to the Republicans to run for mayor, he now poses as nonpartisan. He owes Democrat councillors for supporting his latest swingeing city tax hikes, but today he's promoting a Republican. Defiance of 'politics as usual' has become a popular platform in bids for high office in America. It swept multi- millionaire actor Arnold Schwarzenegger to power in California in October, and Bloomberg is banking on it for a second term in the hot seat.
Bloomberg, however, became mayor in 2001 not on merit, nor because of party or nonpartisan credentials, but because he bought the position with mass-media backing. As with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, there is no better way of manipulating the media for political purposes than by owning it, or buying it. Bloomberg, worth US$4.9 billion by the latest reckoning, owns one of the most influential news and financial-information businesses in the world, encompassing radio, television, magazines and online newsletters. In addition, he punted a staggering $75 million of his own money into public-relations promotion for his candidacy.
To prepare his company for his absence while running New York, Bloomberg temporarily rotated his top nine executives around the principal departments to give them a sense of the whole operation. Last year he stood down as chairman and gave the role to Peter Grauer, best friend, world-class merchant banker and managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston. He also installed Lex Fenwick, the European managing director of the Bloomberg empire, as his chief operating officer.