THE CENTER FOR NEW YORK CITY AFFAIRS

THE MEDIA & THE MAYOR:
DOES SPIN MAKE THE MAN?

Presented by The Center for New York City Affairs
Milano The New School of Management and Urban Policy

Thursday, February 13, 2003 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

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Panelists' biographies:

Norman Adler is president of Bolton-St. Johns, Inc., and one of the most widely known and respected public affairs experts in New York. He spent eleven years as the director of Political Action and Legislation for District Council 37, AFSCME, and also served as assistant to the Speaker of the New York State Assembly. He is the author of two books, The Learning of Political Behavior and The Political Clubs of New York, and recently served as part-time full professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Affairs. He has also served on the faculties of Hunter College, Columbia University Teachers College, Barnard College and Baruch College.

Wayne Barrett has been an investigative reporter specializing in state and city politics at The Village Voice for 23 years and has been a senior editor for the last decade. His investigative reporting has focused on a wide variety of major New York public officials including Al D'Amato, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Geraldine Ferraro, Andrew Cuomo, and George Pataki. His latest book, RUDY: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, completes a trilogy-including the critically acclaimed City for Sale (a chronicle of the Koch administration's scandals with Rudy Giuliani as the hero) and Trump: The Deals and the Downfall-that covers New York City politics in the final quarter of the 20th century. RUDY: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani has been made into a television movie by the USA Network.

Joyce Purnick has been the "Metro Matters" columnist for The New York Times since the fall of 1994, except for a two-year stint as Metro editor from 1997 to 1999, when she was the first (and so far, only) woman to head the Times' Metro Section, the paper's largest news department. Her twice-weekly "Metro Matters" column covers the government, politics, and people of New York, and has won several awards, including the 1996-97 Mike Berger Award from the Columbia University School of Journalism. Her columns about the fatal neglect of abused children by the city's welfare system were among The Times's writings that won a George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting in 1996. Ms. Purnick has had a distinguished career as a Times correspondent and columnist since joining the paper in 1979.

Michael Wolff, winner of the 2002 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, writes the weekly "This Media Life" column for New York magazine. His column has taken on virtually every sacred cow in the media business, leading The New York Times to call him the "enfant terrible of the media culture." He is the author of the bestselling book Burn Rate, a tale of the birth of the Internet industry and the rise and fall of Wolff New Media, the Web business he founded. Mr. Wolff began his career as a journalist with The New York Times and now appears regularly as a guest commentator on numerous national television news shows. He is the author of the books White Kids and Where We Stand, which became a multi-part PBS series hosted by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

ANDREW WHITE, Director, Center for NYC Affairs: The topic at hand today is Mayor Bloomberg. What kind of political animal is he? How do we categorize this man and his style of governing? I've been getting a real big kick in the last month or two, asking people what they think of Mayor Bloomberg. And the answers have not been predictable. People who I thought would admire the Mayor's comments about trying to preserve city services and trying to keep the city stable have disliked him, with a passion. And more conservative business people, who I expected to be very critical of his tax hikes, said they liked him a lot.

After a while, I really began to see the pattern. I think people who are close to government, people who are Metro reporters or do policy research or work with government agencies or are executives in government agencies tend to like the guy. And one of the reasons, I think, is they feel they are getting straight answers from the Mayor, which didn't always prove to be the case in the past.

I have also heard several people say that they don't feel like their agencies are saddled with the kind of political appointees that were so prominent in past administrations. And a number of people also liked the smell of technocracy down at City Hall, rather than the sort of hard-ball politics that dominated over the last 8 years.

But outside of that circle of connected insiders, there are a lot of people who haven't heard any message coming from the Mayor. I think most New Yorkers haven't got a clue about what he stands for or what he believes, with some passion. And they aren't aware of what he is saying about the fiscal crisis and they've never heard his frequent statements about the critical importance of preserving government service and the quality of government service and investments in programs. And to me, the man sounds like a European Social Democrat, which is to quote, actually John Mollenkopf said that to me a month or two ago. And I agree.

Yet, many of the Lefties I talk with think he's just a rich guy who's cutting services and a businessman without a heart, who bought his way into City Hall. And at the same time, right wingers are highly critical of him because they think he's a profligate liberal.

In the media, one of the fascinating things that's happened is it's only the loudest Guiliani partisans who are screaming against what Bloomberg is doing. For the most part, the media is treating him very well. They are treating him kindly. Like he's somebody who deserves some respect. And I'm not sure what that's about. And whether that will last.

Michael Wolff, who is the third man down here, wrote a column last month that said Bloomberg better not take the media for granted. And if the press isn't handled with clarity and intent, they may decide to after him. And if they do it, it could really hurt him.

Wayne Barrett, of The Village Voice, at the end of the table, has done a great job documenting the Mayor's liberal inclinations, I found. When I was at a conference in December that was held by the Citizens Budget Commission, I was astonished to hear some of the Mayor's comments. He was very critical of the path taken out of the 1970s fiscal crisis. And he said strongly, we are not going to do that again. The disinvestments, that austerity that resulted out of the 1970s really damaged the City badly, which was a pretty strong statement in the face particularly of the people in that room that day. Many of whom had been involved in pulling the City out of the fiscal crisis.

Joyce Purnick, of the Times, who is here also, writes that Bloomberg is still a reluctant student of hard-ball politics. And Mayors Guiliani and Koch never had any problem conveying their messages to the public. They shouted it very clearly and very loudly and relentlessly. Everybody knew what they stood for. But Bloomberg has yet to even really try.

And political consultant, Norman Adler, judging from his frequent quotes in the New York Observer and elsewhere, has a great deal of insight into what kind of strategic thinking is going on at City Hall, I suspect, although many of us don't necessarily feel like there is a great deal of strategic thinking going on. I'm hoping to hear from Norman what he thinks their long-term vision may be in political terms.

So that's by way of setting the context. Who is this mayor and what is his media strategy? I want to kick things off by posing a few questions just to start. I want to pose a question to the panel to give them a chance to lay out where they stand on all of this. And we will move through questions from myself, some discussion on the panel and then we will open it up to the audience after about an hour.

So to start off, Mayor Dinkins was mayor at a similar time in NYC. The fiscal crisis was nowhere near as bad. But he also badly failed to convey any kind of grand vision of what he was doing, what his successes were. He never told the public what his successes were. I'm wondering can Mayor Bloomberg govern New York over the long term, without projecting a stronger vision and without letting the public understand or hear a stronger message from him about his goals? Why don't we start at this end and go down the table. Norman?

NORMAN ADLER: Well, it all depends on whether or not he wants to run for a second term. He says he does but of course everybody understands that any politician who says that they are not going to run again, is an automatic lame duck and once you are a lame duck you kind of limp through the policy contests. So everybody who is in public office always says they are running for re-election, right up to the day that they announce they are not running for re-election.

If the Mayor intends to run for re-election, then he has got to leave the voters with some image of who and what he is. And Mayor Bloomberg rented the Republican Party, at some great cost, in order to be a candidate. And then he spent a great deal of money trying to get to be mayor, which I always think in this day and age is like spending a great deal of money to get on the next airplane to Iraq. And then when he got in, he had political obligations and no political allies and no political advisors except those that he rented. He just put together a group of people that everyone says it's nice to have there, because they are all good government types, but virtually none of them have any sense of how you do a political connect between City Hall and the rest of Manhattan and the other four boroughs.

I have talked to Republican leaders who can't get in at City Hall to talk to the Mayor and his advisors. I've talked to community group leaders who want to know when the Mayor is going to show up in their neighborhood and listen to them. So at this point, if he is doing things that are right, the thing that he isn't doing right is being a good elected politician. Of course, if he spends ¾ of a billion dollars running for re-election, and isn't in campaign finance and his opponent spends the maximum you are allowed to spend, I guess even if people don't know what he is about, he might get re-elected again. Maybe as a Democrat.

JOYCE PURNICK: Well, I look at this administration as an experiment. It's an experiment in whether NYC can be governed by a city manager. For those of you who don't know, the city manager system has a sort of nuts and bolts guy, it's usually a guy but occasionally a woman, who runs the government and takes care of business. And then there's a ceremonial mayor who has very little power but is the voice and face of the government. Los Angeles has a similar system, although I think in comparison, anything you say about Los Angeles falls apart. There is no city there. But that's another subject. It's a bunch of suburbs knitted together.

I've never seen a mayor like this. I don't think anyone has ever seen a mayor like this. If anyone had said to me one mayor ago or maybe two years ago, that the mayor of the City of New York would appear with the Governor of the State of New York on a Friday or Thursday and announce a higher alert, because of these alleged terrorist threats that Washington keeps telling us about and they keep changing the color of the day or whatever they do. And then, would take his private plane and leave New York and spend that weekend playing golf in Florida. If anyone had told me that, I would have said, "You're smoking something. No mayor of New York would ever do that." But that is precisely what Bloomberg did last week. He announced this higher level of alert and he left. And he was asked about it today and he said, "Well, that's my business."

I'm kind of circling around your question, can he govern successfully without having the classic political skills that we are accustomed to mayors having or at least trying to have? He neither is trying to have them nor does he have them. The answer is, if he wants to spend $75 million to run for re-election next time out, yeah, he can.

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think I have this odd relationship with the Mayor because virtually nobody was writing about him and certainly weren't writing about him positively. They weren't writing about him disparagingly, I was. And I was writing about him disparagingly because actually I knew a great deal about him, because he was in my area of specialty, which is not politics but it is in fact media moguls. So I knew him very well. I actually knew what he did, I knew people throughout his organization and I knew that he was, even among media moguls, a legendary egomaniac. He was over the top in virtually everything he did, in the entitlements he assumed, in the presumptions he took on for himself. He was really a piece of work. And I thought, "Well, my God, if this guy gets to be mayor, who knows what was going to happen to the political process."

Well, it turned out I was entirely wrong. As a matter of fact, the first time I ran into the Mayor, after he was mayor, I kind of was in an awkward position. I found myself spontaneously apologizing. And it was not that I was actually wrong about Michael Bloomberg as a media mogul. It's just that it turns out that, or it may that this may be an example that demonstrates that corporate egoism is of a different sort or a different order than political egoism. That actually, political egoism and political narcissism is just so much vastly greater.

But I think there's actually something else that is going on here. And one of the things that happens, if you are a career politician, what you have learned is, as a matter of fact, your chief skill is a full range of media skills. That's what you've learned to be. You've learned to be someone who can get media time, can get in front of a camera, who can project. If you haven't learned those skills, then you don't have a career. So we have this anomalous, really, anomalous situation and kind of ironic situation of a guy who made all his money in media but, in fact, has no media skills. Or at least what we think of no media training. But because he had this money, he got to be the mayor anyway. And it turns out to be, if not a humble man, at least a mayor or a politician without the usual pretenses and pretensions and grandiosity and desperate need to be in front of the camera all the time. And that's really what we have here. That's what is kind of missing. I don't think that anyone can say, at this point, that he is a bad mayor. We may not even be able to say that he's a good mayor. He's a little more than a year into his term. But what we know is that he is essentially an unseen mayor. He is just not there. And I don't think, and this is not in the Dinkin's model because he hasn't been able to do it. He doesn't want to do it. It's totally like, "I don't care." The camera comes and he steps down and he steps behind somebody. It just isn't part of his makeup. And it may be because he has this money and he knows, "If I want to do this again, the price of $75 million probably goes up. The price is $110 million. But who cares."

And the interesting thing is that this may be, this COULD in the most interesting and positive terms, create a different kind of political model. It creates a thing that you don't have to do this anymore. Here's a way to be in politics and it may cost you that much money but it also may establish this other kind of thing. That all these media skills, the Guiliani, ultimately the Guiliani model, is something that perhaps in contrast, we'll get tired of. It could also work the other way and we're going to say, "We want our media guy."

WAYNE BARRETT: Just by way of introduction, I have been on the beat for about 25 years. And I'm a hit man. And I'm getting worried about myself. And I've done hits on people on this panel. And I have never, I think everyone on the panel has said this in one form or another, I have never seen a public figure on my beat that faintly resembles Michael Bloomberg.

Think of all the rules of this game that don't apply to him. He had Pen and Schoen as his pollsters in the campaign. Best pollsters in the business, spent millions on them. I know that the tracking polls that Bloomberg had picked his number. So he believes in these polls and he has good reason to believe in these polls. Buying a poll for him is like putting a quarter in a meter for you and I. And he won't buy one.

Billy Cunningham, a number one political guy, who used to be the head of the State Democratic Party and is at his side 5 days a week, is a terribly frustrated political professional, because Michael Bloomberg will not do a poll. And so he sees his public poll numbers dropping through the bottom. You would think if you do a Pen & Schoen poll, you not only get a number, you get something to work with. You get some analysis. Real numbers about why things are falling apart in the public polls. You can make adjustments. He doesn't want to make any adjustments.

I actually talked to him today, very briefly. And said to him, "I'm going to be on this panel tonight about spin and why there doesn't seem to be any Bloomberg successful spin." And he says, "I don't need it. I don't want it." Look at the other things he doesn't have. He frustrates a guy like me. He has no campaign committee. When have you ever known a politician that didn't have a campaign committee? It's one thing to get elected on your own money. He has also made the decision that if he runs again, he is going to get elected on his own money again and he is not going to raise a nickel. Follow the money is the #1 bromide of my business and there's no money to follow!

Lobbyists like Norman, there's no lobbyists around him to track. There's nobody that you can figure that has the special access that you should be looking to see who his clients are. No grease! And as Norman said, no certainty that he will run for re-election. Billy Cunningham, his #1 political aide, still lives in Albany. When he moves down here, I'll believe that Michael Bloomberg is going to run for a second term. The other thing about him is we know he has no further political ambitions. If he doesn't run for re-election, he's not running for anything else.

QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: How do we know that?

WAYNE BARRETT: I guess I intuit it.

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that's wrong.

WAYNE BARRETT: You think he has political ambitions?

MICHAEL WOLFF: There's no question that he would like to be President of the United States.

WAYNE BARRETT: In this party that he's in now?

JOYCE PURNICK: There's a difference between what he wants and what he can get.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That has been immaterial to him before and it's probably, as he looks forward, immaterial now.

WAYNE BARRETT: If this is a path to the presidency, running in New York as a Republican, with his point of view, it's a very unusual path to the Presidency. I don't see it.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Tell me that on 79th Street, when he gets into bed at night, that he doesn't make a calculation if it costs him $75 million to be mayor, what would it cost to be President? Would it cost a billion? He could afford a billion.

WAYNE BARRETT: I don't think it's a question of money. I think it's a question of the choices that he's already made that are political choices, making it possible for him to run as a Republican, for president.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That's what we said before. He got to be mayor and turned out to be actually a question of money.

WAYNE BARRETT: Alright. I want to make a couple of more points. I just disagree with you about that one.

The thing that bothered me most about him for his first year, and I wrote critically about it many times, is that he had no special interests of his own but he adopted George Pataki's special interests for a year. The deal with the United Federation of Teachers was clearly designed to benefit the Pataki re-election campaign. It's the prime example. It's hardly the only example. We all know he really didn't start talking about property tax increases until the Governor was safely re-elected. Everything on his schedule seems to be determined. The major items on his schedule seem to be determined by the Governor's interest. And now this thing, which I think was an albatross around his neck, is gone. He's liberated now from the Governor, because the Mayor, if you read his book. believes in quid pro quo. He writes about, "I do for you, you do for me." Now he did for George Pataki and I think we all know that he got the answer very recently. So I think he's liberated from the one thing that I thought was the largest negative of his first 14 months, which is the relationship with George Pataki. And I think now we all see, I think, a stark difference. And everybody wants him to get in the Governor's face. He's not going to get in the Governor's face but I'll tell you, if you read his budget book, if you look at the stories that have come out since the Governor announced his budget, you can see very clearly the bylines are City Hall bylines.

In Joyce's paper and others, suddenly reporters are writing how the State is screwing the City. That's not just coming out of Albany. That's coming out of City Hall and I think what we all have to look forward to, in a grime sort of way, is that when the Mayor announces his executive budget, and he's only announced his financial plan now. When he announces his executive budget in another month and a half or so, we will see the enormous impact of the Governor's budget on the City's budget. Because he announced the financial plan and he made sure he did it before the Governor announced his financial plan. And so that we are going to see the tremendous difference that the state budget has made, when the Mayor announces his own executive budget. We are going to see enormously painful things that the City is going to have to do, that can only be a consequence of what the Governor has proposed. So I think that is much more important than whether or not he gets in the Governor's face.

So I just find him to be this extraordinarily unusual character. And one of the reasons I brought his book here, is that Bloomberg on Bloomberg, he has a whole chapter about philanthropy. Philanthropy, has played a very, very large role in his life, this book was written in 1997, he is a very dedicated philanthropist, who not only gives away a great deal of money but spends a lot of time getting other people to give away a great deal of money. And the vision that I get, this is a hard-nosed cynic talking, is that he believes that this public service career that he has begun late in his life is an extension of his philanthropic life. Every time he refers to philanthropy practically, he refers to philanthropy and public service, as if they are two sides of the same coin to him. These things are inextricably linked, I think, in his mind. So he had this life where all he did was go off and make money for years. And now he has a very different life, where the focus of it is philanthropy and public service. And we have never seen anything like this on my beat. And it's an unusual phenomenon where I disagree with judgments that have been made by City Hall but for the first time in my career as a journalist, I think decisions are being made on the merits as the principle sees them. Rather than compromised by this interest or that interest, or this contributor or that contributor or this lobbyist or that lobbyist. He makes mistakes but he makes decisions based on this extraordinary sense of what he thinks is right at that moment. And it's some kind of miracle that the City could have a chief executive at this grim moment in the life of the City, who does that. It's some kind of miracle that it happened.

Michael presented, accurately, his bona fides as a critic of Bloomberg in the campaign. He's right. He wrote much more often critical pieces than I did. But I did some too. And I was on that case too. And I am really surprised by the tenor of his mayoralty so far.

NORMAN ADLER: There's plenty of work for you in Albany. Wear warmer clothes.

ANDREW WHITE: Let's talk about the money and get it out of the way. It's not as if money was the only reason he won that election. He had a little help from the Democrats' self immolation. And you can't necessarily count on that in two and a half years.

JOYCE PURNICK: He was elected because of Mark Green, 9/11, Guiliani and his money, probably in the opposite order. He needed every single one of those factors. It was an extraordinary constellation, the way that that constellation came together. He had to have had Guiliani's support. He had to have had all of the tension and emotion connected to 9/11 and Guiliani saying, "This is the man who can continue." Guiliani, who had been, at the time of 9/11 on 9/10, his popularity had sunk to quite a low level. And his support of Bloomberg would not have meant a great deal.

Then came 9/11 and his support of Bloomberg became instrumental. Mark Green's self-immolating campaign helped Bloomberg a great deal, and the money.

MICHAEL WOLFF: But even the support, that Guiliani support, in order to get that support was really a reflection of the money they put around that support. I think in the day, it was relatively lukewarm and they took the media on that and they blew it way out of proportion.

JOYCE PURNICK: I don't think people cared how lukewarm it was, it was there. And anyway, you take all of those factors, no, he will not have those factors. He will have four years of incumbency. And what we have heard so far, willingness to spend a great deal of money and also, as Wayne was implying, there is the record. He's managed, for a variety of reasons, to do extraordinary things in this year plus. Things that previous mayors tried to do and could not, in part because of the special interests and in part, in Guiliani's case, because of his personality. And alienating everyone in Albany. That's why Guiliani did not get control of the school system. Because it was all ready to go and Shelly Silver is the head of the Assembly and key player in all this, said to me, and I'm sure he said it to everybody on this panel, "I'm not going to give it to Guiliani." It was right there on the launching pad. "I won't give it to him." He said it. And Bloomberg came in and he gave it to him. The stars were in alignment and just ready for someone to hit the switch to mix metaphors.

WAYNE BARRETT: One of the things we have to remember is that the City is still a creature of the State. And the mayor can be a great administrator and he can be a great star, but ultimately a lot of what he needs has to come down from Albany.

JOYCE PURNICK: That's why he didn't alienate Pataki.

NORMAN ADLER: But he is sure as hell pissing off Joe Bruno. And Joe took a swipe at him the other day at breakfast, when he started to patronize him as an amateur in the business. And I honestly believe that as this thing moves along, that what you are going to find is that there is going to be a major disconnect between the Republicans in Albany and the Mayor. And he needs those Republicans in order to get things done because they control one house and the executive office. And if he doesn't get their cooperation, if he really ticks them off, he is going to be less successful at doing things for the City. Which means that City services are going to decline even faster.

They won't give him the power to do the revenue generation that he wants. He cannot go back in and do another real estate piece. I don't believe that this City Council, running for re-election this year, will buy another kick up in real estate. And he could very well be at the point of making exactly those slashes in services that we saw in '75, '76, '77, '78 and '79. In which case, he could come to election and need every nickel that he has in order to persuade the voters around the City that things really are better, when they might very well not be better at all.

JOYCE PURNICK: Who is going to challenge him?

NORMAN ADLER: You know what, I always used to say you can't beat somebody with nobody, until Murray Weinstein came along. And for those of you in the audience who don't know Murray Weinstein, Murray Weinstein was a lawyer who ran against the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Stanley Steingutt. And I remember standing on a street corner handing out Stanley Steingutt literature at 7:00 in the morning and people saying, "I'm voting for the other guy." So my view of the thing is normally you need somebody to beat somebody. But sometimes you don't. Sometimes the voters are so damn irritated with what they see and what they are experiencing, a la David Dinkins in his second campaign, that they just basically say, "To hell with you." And they vote in the other guy, even though they don't know who the other guy is.

I frankly think that Bloomberg is a pretty good mayor but I also think that if there is that disconnect with the Albany Republicans, I think Wayne is right. I think that he is, in fact, making that disconnect and that's what we are seeing now. Some of the reporting is the first step of that. He could be in a really severe problem in terms of the ability to raise the revenue, to close the gaps and you're going to see the closing of all kinds of things.

I remember when the zoos were open 4 days a week and so were the museums. I remember when they weren't repairing potholes on the FDR Drive. I remember when there weren't cops on the street. I remember when they were cutting the number of firefighters doing overtime and refusing cops overtime to go to the courts, after they arrested somebody, to make the case. That's what happened in the 70s and we could very well relive that.

JOYCE PURNICK: But this City, for those in the audience old enough to remember, rejected Abe Beame, not because the City was suffering with budget cuts but because he was perceived, I believe accurately, as incompetent. And I don't think anyone is ever going to say that Michael Bloomberg is incompetent. They may not like what he does. They may be angry at tax increases and service cuts. But I think the people of the City are fairly practical and they know what is going on is probably what has to go on. It's probably necessary.

MICHAEL WOLFF: But as damaging as incompetence are some of the other things that he is now on the verge of being accused of, which is remoteness. A lack of connection, a lack of sympathy and empathy. As a matter of fact, in many ways, these are more damaging than incompetence. We have a high tolerance of incompetence in politicians. We have a very low tolerance of politicians who are unsympathetic figures.

WAYNE BARRETT: I want to say a word about the dynamic in Albany that Norman has described. It's hard for me to turn the Mayor, who is clearly a victim of a thug governor, and I think this is a thug governor. I think this is a criminal governor. It's hard for me to imagine that Bloomberg, who has done everything he possibly could to aid this guy and is now getting screwed by him. To turn that into, this means that the mayor has fallen down on the job of managing his relationship with Albany. Joe Bruno, who was a businessman of sorts, managed to go to the Acme breakfast, a week or two ago. And tried to talk about how, "Well, the mayor wasn't a bad businessman." This is a man, who I think had an insurance business where he managed to shake down every government in upstate, .no, it was a telephone company. It was a telephone company, years ago. But his business was a success through total political connections.

This guy is making these demeaning comments about the Mayor, when he is the one who has said "no" to every conceivable, reasonable request that the Mayor of the City of New York has made. The Governor wallows in the blood of Ground Zero. He cannot talk without citing it. But I think he forgets where it happened. They are even stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of the FEMA money. They are even keeping the FEMA money in Albany. And they give us $650 million and they take $300 and some odd million.

Now I think the Mayor has demonstrated enormous patience with these two guys up in Albany. I think he has demonstrated amazing patience and trying to continue some sort of relationship with them. I don't think any of our predecessor mayors would have shown the same patience. Go back to Ed Koch, the 800-lb. gorilla. He used to call the Governor of the same party. And go to war with him rhetorically.

JOYCE PURNICK: And the sapling.

WAYNE BARRETT: I think the Mayor has shown enormous patience, you read the description of how he gets along with his ex-wife. The Mayor is just not the sort of guy who gets, he never had a fight with his wife, while they were married. When they got divorced. This is his description. Could be wrong. But this is the nature of the man.

JOYCE PURNICK: She says the same thing.

WAYNE BARRETT: He does not get in anybody's face and I think he has shown remarkable patience and restraint in dealing with these two guys. This was the city that was attacked and what the State of New York has done to the City when it was attacked. Do you realize that within a couple of months, I guess it was actually October, so it was within a month of 9/11, they finally passed the State budget for 2001. And you know what they did? In the State budget that they passed in Albany, a month after 9/11, they took away the money that had come to the City of New York for the capital gains tax for 20 years. About $140-150 million that we were getting in lieu of a tax we gave up. And we got payments from the State for all those years and in a month AFTER 9/11 they killed those benefits to the City of New York.

Now, these guys, I just don't know how much more Bloomberg can do to accommodate them. Let's put the onus where it belongs. It doesn't belong on Michael Bloomberg. It belongs on the heads of Joe Bruno and George Pataki, who are doing everything they can to hurt this city. Look what they did with the Medicaid proposal that the Governor proposed. They figured out a way in which they could cut Medicaid in a way in which they would hurt the City the most. By saying, "We'll take over some of the pharmaceutical costs that can be cut, which the City does not disproportionately pay. And you pick up the medical care costs that the City does disproportionately pay." So every way they look, they find another way to screw us.

ANDREW WHITE: I would like to see the look on the face of Dennis Rivera and Randy Weingarten over the last month or so after supporting him. But whether he is a victim or not, the fact is, Norman is right. If he doesn't have anything coming from Albany, if he can't get a commuter tax, and if he can't find another billion dollars or two billion somehow with State approval, then how can he govern without slashing the police department, most prominently, but every social service imaginable? Universal pre-k is going to be out the window. So many recent expansions in government will be history and a lot of the stuff that isn't so recent will be gone as well. And that is going to hurt him. He has to find not only a base to get elected but some kind of base to govern with and if those kinds of slashes and dismantling of programs becomes the norm, the City is easily going to turn against him in a far more powerful way than they are now. So, okay, if his base for re-election was the Guiliani outer borough universe, the business community, the disaffected Latinos who split straight down the middle to support Bloomberg over Greene, he can't count on that same universe, unless perhaps Guiliani comes out and does ads for him again in 2-1/2 years. And if he doesn't have money from Albany, he can't very easily build a base in the black and Latino communities. What does he do?

NORMAN ADLER: There's more than that. If Michael is right, that one of the Mayor's biggest problems is that he appears not to be empathetic to the average man and woman who goes to the polls and votes in elections, if they view him as being this rich guy who announces that the City is in Code Orange and then takes off for a weekend of golf. And then, this is the same man, who because he doesn't have the resources, closes senior centers, closes firehouses, cuts programs in the municipal hospital system, shuts down emergency rooms and fires school teachers. The combination of those two things will make it much more difficult for him to position himself with that electorate, when he runs for re-election. Because on one hand he will have the liability of doing all the things you have to do when you don't have money, there is a limit to what you can do. And at the same time, unless he is able to overcome this liability, and I think you are right there is a liability there that he has of being not one of us, that's a very, very bad potion for people to swallow and that creates a major political problem.

And if, at the same time, while all of that is happening, the electorate is hearing from people who previously either were in his camp or were not in the camp of his opponents, union leaders and moderate Democrats and others. It is going to cost him more money than it cost him before.

You know, there's one thing Wayne, that I think the Mayor doesn't understand, which is that a lot of stuff that Bruno and the Republicans are doing and saying has more to do with negotiating with Shelly Silver than it has to do with negotiating with Bloomberg. Because what happens is, since the Democrats in the Assembly are overwhelmingly urban, New York City, Buffalo, Albany, they therefore are carrying the burden of urban and minority citizens. The Republicans are basically suburban and small town and rural and mostly white and older. What the Senate always does is they start out their negotiating gambit by screwing minorities, poor people, urban people and the like and then they expect Shelly Silver, to come back and say, "I need these things." And then they say, "Well, what are you going to trade for it?" And what drags this out longer and longer, of course, is then what Shelly Silver does is he basically shuts down and since you need both houses, that causes these long budget problems. So I think a lot of it really is not that they are goring Bloomberg's ox so much as they are goring the ox of the Democratic majority in the Assembly. Which unfortunately is carrying the real burden of representing Bloomberg and the City of New York in these budget negotiations.

But you know, Carl Sandberg once wrote "Whether the rock hits the jug or the jug hits the rock, it's bad for the jug." So ultimately, it's bad for the City and I think that translates into a potential for it being bad for Bloomberg as well.

ANDREW WHITE: What would you tell him to do in terms of dealing with Albany? What is the alternative?

NORMAN ADLER: I think he's got to fight like a son-of-a-bitch. I think he's got to do what guys like Koch did. And what Shelly Silver said he should do. He's got to be very, very forceful. He's got to, in effect, turn on some of his old allies. He's got to call a spade a spade. He's got to make the kind of arguments about the fact that the City is getting screwed. He shouldn't leave it up to the reporters from The New York Times and The Village Voice to make the arguments for him. He's got to be out there being a cheerleader and the first lieutenant over the hillock, fighting the enemy. And until he gets to the point, he can't simply be the nice guy who didn't beat his ex-wife. He's got to be somebody who is willing to go in there and beat up the opposition and create a situation where he is heard. Democrats have to worry about whether the things that he's saying are going to come back and haunt them politically when they run for re-election. You've got 6 Republican State Senators in the City. You've got some middle of the road Democrats and some Conservative Democrats who played footsie with Pataki, like Tony and some of the others. And these people have to feel that they are in endangered. And unless the Mayor is there doing some of the endangering, it's like threatening to campaign and spend his money against a handful of council members who didn't vote for the tax increase, he should be saying, "I'm going to spend my money out of my pocket and go out and campaign against anybody who comes from the City of New York or from the suburbs, who isn't there fighting for the City of New York. I will make my contributions there.

MICHAEL WOLFF: This sounds like an incredibly bleak picture, because what you have is on top of everything else, you have a guy who is resolutely astoundingly conflict adverse. He is a guy who just doesn't go to battle with anyone. He's out the back door and letting some one else do it. Actually, he's not even letting someone else do it. His thing is he's a sales guy and the thing is just to be the nice guy, be the better product and you get your deal. These other skills, which are the skills of not just politicians but of a wide variety of businessmen, but they are not his skills. And on top of that, he doesn't have the other side, which is he doesn't seem to have the ability to reach out to the electorate, to mobilize them to create a sense that he has not only enormous support but that he has the ability to begin to take support away from his political enemies.

JOYCE PURNICK: The topic tonight, I don't know exactly how you would phrase it, but it had to do with spin and whether you can be a no-spin mayor. Spin has a negative connotation and basically it has been interpreted as manipulating us, right? The members of the media, and getting us to write what the political figure wants.

Let's take the word spin out of it, then. There is an important function that politicians play in order to bring the public along with them. It's that sort of amorphous sense of leadership and charisma and those words that we hate. But they are very, very important, particularly in difficult times. We've spent most of this first hour talking about whether he can get re-elected and how the budget in Albany is hurting him. Most people in the State of New York do not follow politics. In the City of New York, I'm sorry, do not follow politics the way we do. They never heard of Bruno. They probably never heard of Silver. All they know about Pataki is that he is still governor. People don't follow, people in this room do but the general electorate in New York City does not. They don't know. All they know is what touches them. Whether crime is going up and they feel less safe on the streets. Whether the schools are getting better or continuing to deteriorate. It takes, I believe again, it's an experiment. Maybe we are all wrong, just as you now say you were wrong about whether Bloomberg could be a mayor.

I have always believed that in order to be a successful mayor, you need to be able to connect with the public. To bring the public along when difficult things happen, which they always do in a city of this size. ALWAYS!!! Something will happen. Probably something bad will happen when he is in Miami or Bermuda. It's just sort of inevitable. Something unfortunately is going to happen. And this is what I mean by the experiment, assuming most NYC residents do not know all the details of politics, can you govern in a difficult economic time when services are declining, without playing that critical role of being the cheerleader like Koch standing at the Brooklyn Bridge or the disciplinarian like Guiliani? Can you do it? My inclination before Bloomberg became mayor was that ultimately, in the long run, it would be impossible. Part of politics is showmanship or showwomanship. It's a big part of it. It's getting people to think that you are in control when you probably are not. And whether you're Bush, during whatever is going to happen or not happen in Iraq or any of our other presidents in difficult times. Or you're Koch during the Transit strike or Guiliani during 9/11, you are going to be tested and the question is can you govern without those skills? Or can he find them within himself?

NORMAN ADLER: Or can you make a media case for not having media skills?

JOYCE PURNICK: Well, that's my question. And I started this out, just to finish, by saying that this is an experiment. And that before Bloomberg becomes mayor I think any one of us on this panel would have said, "no way." I'm here to say right now that I'm not so sure "no way" because he has surprised me so far and maybe we are seeing something new. I tend to think that he is going to have to show some of these skills because he is living in a political world and we are accustomed to certain kinds of actions from our politicians in the world of politics. But maybe he is going to surprise us and this is just an experiment and he will succeed. His experiment will succeed. Plus, you know what, he can't be what he's not.

MICHAEL WOLFF: It's interesting to remember that part of why he is now the mayor is because Mark Greene had too many media skills. God!! It was just that and this also goes to the Guiliani point, before September 11th, he also said that, "My God, we are so tired of this man. And what a relief to have a mayor, to have any political figure who will stay out of our faces. And I think that is an asset that is a highly valuable attribute. The problem with it is how do you remind people of the value of absence of nothingness of not being there? And I don't know the answer to that.

JOYCE PURNICK: I think his polls are down primarily because of the tax increases. But I think it may be 60/40. 40% is how he's dealt with it. In other words, I think any mayor who had to raise taxes in difficult economic times, would have seen his polls number go down. The question is would they have gone down? I don't know the answer. My inclination is they would not have gone down as precipitously if he were a better salesman and that does go to his chances for re-election. I don't think it should be that way. Life shouldn't be like that but I think it is.

ANDREW WHITE: Well, Michael, is there anything in his business career to show that he can play hard ball in an effective way?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, yeah, he's a son of a bitch. And I mean he's an incredible son of a bitch. And he's a total control freak. And that's kind of one of the interesting things, that those attributes have not really show themselves.

JOYCE PURNICK: Not at all.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Will they? I don't know. If you were a business guy, one of the things you would do, at least one business approach to this is say, "I have a new career and I'm doing something which I have no idea how to do. I have no experience so I'd better learn the job before I start to become a control freak." And this may well be what he's doing. The guy is pretty methodical.

JOYCE PURNICK: I have a question for you, how can you be, I have never understood this, a control freak and completely non-confrontational? How do you do that? They seem inconsistent. You've seen him in action. I haven't. How do you do that?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Actually, I think it's different. I think confrontational guys are not necessarily control freaks because #1, you are always risking something. When you confront something, it can go against you. One of the reasons that you stay away from situations that are fraught with conflict and fraught with obvious conflict, is because you don't want to be caught out. So what you are doing in the classic Bloomberg thing would be to first thing, it's interesting because his business never expanded. He never went public. It was always kept under his control. And he never let it out. He never put himself into those positions where he would invite conflict that he might ultimately benefit from. Rather he kept this thing firmly and he kept it so he could see everybody. And he knew everybody and everyone knew what he was doing. He knew what everyone was doing. He is a real serious micromanager. I don't know. I don't know how you take those skills and translate them.

WAYNE BARRETT: It's very interesting, I mentioned that in the book, he writes about the fact of how well he gets along with his ex-wife but he was fired once, in 1981, after 15 years at Salomon Brothers. He loves the guys that fired him. And I'm telling you, he loves the guys that fired him!!! I think Michael is completely correct that there is this extraordinary non-confrontational nature to him.

But I wanted to say something about what Norman said a while ago. And I think it kind of brings up the difficulty that the Mayor faces, because I thought when Norman first talked about Bruno and the Senate and so forth, I thought he was saying the Mayor is risking losing these allies of his. And then it turned out Norman wants him to take them on. And so I think that's exactly the kind of complex challenge that the Mayor figures out. Because I thought Norman was on both sides of the question himself. And I think it's perfectly understandable that the Mayor would be on both sides of that question. But I think ultimately, his personality is not going to permit him to do the kind of taking on that and I don't know whether it would work anyway. It's understandable that Shelly Silver has put that forward as a proposal.

Shelly Silver, by the way, never takes on the guys that he plays ball with in Albany. Where was he in the gubernatorial election? He was missing in action in the campaign of just a few months ago. Totally missing in action. The Times Union, the Albany Times Union wrote a story and the reporter told me that when he was reporting the story, discovered that DACC, which is the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee and Shelly Silver has his own campaign committee, had not given any money to Carl McCall. Shelly Silver controls more money, Democratic money in Albany, than anybody else and they hadn't given him a dime.

So the reporter called Shelly Silver and said, "How come you haven't given a nickel to Carl McCall?" And so that day, they gave him $25,000, because The Times Union placed the phone call and asked the question. Shelly Silver was missing in action, because he plays ball with George Pataki. No one knows it better than Norman .. The one Democrat in Albany that is part of the three, loves the numbers. He's not looking for another Democrat to be part of the three, up there in Albany, that matter. So I think that's exactly the kind of difficult questions the Mayor faces.

Now, getting to the question that Joyce was talking about, which is I think she is absolutely right that as much as I've been singing his praises, there is something missing about the public performance of the Mayor, in terms of for example, he does this education plan. It's a total transformation of the education system. Now the educational system has been a community-based system since the decentralization law passed in 1969. The Mayor doesn't go out and meet with communities about what he should do to change this system. I don't have some built in opposition to the changes and recommendations he's made. They sound semi-reasonable to me. But the process, by which this entire transformation of the New York Public School System was made, is an indefensible process. And I've asked Cunningham about how they could do it this way. And they are about to do bilingual education, I think, in exactly the same way. Wipe out bilingual education and never talk to Latino parents who have been in it.

Now, it doesn't work if the Deputy Chancellor met with communities. It doesn't even work, if the Chancellor, the brand-new Chancellor met with communities. We are talking about the Mayor, who knows nothing about public education and we are talking about a Chancellor who knows nothing about public education. Before you transform an entire system like this, which has been community based for 30 years, you ought to talk to the people at the receiving end of the service. I think the failure to do so is not just a policy failure, it's an enormous political failure and it's the indication of what the weaknesses of this mayor, whenever he approaches re-election is he does believe that a handful of people around him can make these kinds of policy decisions for the good of the people without ever really interacting with them.

As bad as Rudy Guiliani was, he did Town Hall meetings in every neighborhood in this City, many, many times. And as bad as Rudy Guiliani was, you couldn't have a water main break without Rudy being there. And so those are the kinds of things that convey to people just how on top of the job this guy was. Just how involved in the neighborhoods this guy was. And we don't see either of those from Michael Bloomberg.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That's an interesting point, because there's a philosophical point here. I think that Michael Bloomberg doesn't believe in that. I think he believes in the opposite. That Rudy Guiliani showing up for every water main break was about Rudy Guiliani and not about repairing water mains, which I almost, at least in some part, it certainly was true.

NORMAN ADLER: No, it wasn't wrong. He's absolutely wrong. When the Mayor shows up in a community that has had a broken water main break, the first thing the people in the community say is, "He cares enough about the fact that we don't have water, to come here." Now if they don't repair the water main, they may still say, "He cared enough when we had a water main break, to come here." Because very often we hold government officials to somewhat lower standards.

MICHAEL WOLFF: But that's not the point.

NORMAN ADLER: That is the point if he is running for re-election.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That's not the point. Bloomberg's point would be, that's just about perception. And perception is not what he's doing. He's doing the other thing, which is substance, which is reality, which is performance, which is profits. Ultimately, perception in at least some businesses doesn't make any difference. If you don't, at the end of the day, have your 19% profit margin.

JOYCE PURNICK: What he doesn't realize about politics and what I think is true about politics, maybe I'm wrong. I'm learning. But is that it's probably overwhelming probably 90% perception and 10% product what did you call it? Profit?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that he does….

JOYCE PURNICK: Overwhelmingly perception.

MICHAEL WOLFF: The interesting thing and the potentially profound thing is that he does realize this and is rejecting it.

JOYCE PURNICK: I heard this woman say, "That's ridiculous." I don't think it's ridiculous and I'll tell you why. Let me explain why. And we can talk about it.

This is an enormous city where most people, except for if they have a fire in their home or are touched by the police or kids in the public schools, are not actually touched by services. Unless there's a huge decline and the crime goes up. So the public's perception of how a politician is doing is largely formed by what we before called spin. Because they don't' really know. It doesn't really touch them, unless it's something as concrete as a light on the corner or crime literally on their street. So therefore, you never really know in a city this size what is happening to services unless it's touching you directly. That's why I say that the perception is an enormous part of reality in this city.

ANDREW WHITE: We are going to open it up and take some questions. Identify yourself and be concise.

Question: I wanted to ask Michael a question. I read Bloomberg on Bloomberg as well. And when he was fired in 1981, it seems like that was the only kind of crisis in his life. In a lot of ways he's lead a kind of charmed life. Do you agree with that?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Totally. Completely.

Questioner: What is happening now might be the biggest crisis he's had. Maybe he could react differently to them. In 1981 he just said, "Okay, I'll just start my own business." And he did that and got even bigger than what he left.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Absolutely. I think that a crisis, in order to be a crisis, you have to accept it as a crisis. In other words, this is not a crisis for Michael Bloomberg if he doesn't see it as a crisis and I actually think that he does not. I think that he thinks if the poll numbers are down, that's probably not such a great thing but there are still years to go on this term and he will see what happens then. I do not think he looks at this and says, "I got to get these polls numbers up."

Questioner: I mean the financial crisis that's happening in the City.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Even that. It's interesting. I think

Questioner: Is this part of his philanthropic mission?

MICHAEL WOLFF: It may well be but I don't think that he regards it as that. I think he regards this as the kind of challenge, let's call it that comes up in business all the time. You got a business problem. It's a turnaround situation. This is what business guys do. I'm sure that he figures, "If I can't handle this…."

Questioner: He's never had a turnaround situation, has he really?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, every business has turnaround situations. Of course. Every New Year starts and you think, "What am I going to do here? The economy is tanking. We got to respond to it in some ways."

Questioner: Bloomberg's business has always grown and grown and grown.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, it's grown and grown because he's faced every one of these situations that have come up and he's dealt with it. And I have no doubt that is exactly the way he regards this.

WAYNE BARRETT: Can I respond to that too? I think you are absolutely right, this is a traumatic. I don't think it was until the Governor announced his budget. I think up to the time the Governor announced his budget, the Mayor thought he had a plan. He thought he had already taken the big fall with the property tax increase. He thought he had taken the big hit. By that, he had reduced the $6.4 billion gap to about $3 billion, which we've had $3 billion gaps before. We've closed $3 billion gaps before. It seemed like a handleable problem. And now, what the Governor has done has so decimated that, that I hear stories from people that he is a little crazed since that happened. I think the building blocks that he had put together are coming apart. And I don't think he thought he was going to take a hit like this from the Governor. And so I agree with you that he is in crisis mode at this moment. I don't think it has anything to do with polls or re-election or anything like that. It has to do with whether he can do the thing that sits in front of him and daunts and challenges him, which is to get the City out of this mess. And I sense a great deal of uncertainty in the last few days about what they are going to do.

But it's not the only great crisis of his life, since 1981, which you point out, is that in his book, he almost died twice. Once in a helicopter and once in a plane. He's a pilot. He almost brought his nephew down with him. And the guy was so cool. Now this is by his own description. He was so cool under that kind of pressure, it was just extraordinary to read about it.

Question: My invitation says this The Media and the Mayor. And all we've heard is the Mayor is this and that. What is the media doing? Are they just sitting there? Because they gave Guiliani a free ride. I heard the Post say they gave Reagan, maybe we didn't ask them enough. Now, if he did not satisfy with the lack of spin, why don't you say that and something positive. I think that Guiliani was given a free ride. I heard Steinhauer on Channel One say things that she never said in print, when he was the mayor. So let's find out. If this is the media and the mayor, where is the media? Nobody is talking about it.

NORMAN ADLER: Well, as the only one who is not in the media on the panel, I think the closest thing to a love fest in New York City politics, is the relationship between the people who cover City Hall and the Mayor. Part of it is because the Mayor treats the media, it seems to me, pretty well. And the average reporters, the guys in Room 9, have basically treated the Mayor better than most mayors get treated. I think that the introduction was the interesting thing. I think given the way that the working press, in its daily reporting, not the columnists and the editorial writers but the daily press, has treated the Mayor and given the fact that most people learn about what the Mayor does through media, how come the media likes the Mayor? And the voters don't particularly care for him? So if that's the case, the problem is not in the media. The media isn't doing a job on him.

Even Wayne Barrett, who generally has his machete out for anybody who's a government official, is looking for the weak underbelly of them, has not exactly ripped the Mayor apart. And I think the problem is with the Mayor and the way the Mayor has handled things. He has come across in a way that doesn't particularly persuade the electorate of the City of New York that he is a good guy. They don't think he is a bad guy. They don't think he is a corrupt guy. They don't just particularly care for him. And if they don't care for him after the working press has treated him pretty nicely, then you have to wonder why that is. And one of the reasons may be 18-1/2% on the real estate taxes, which I don't know if anybody has paid that yet? Have they? So that may be part of it. But I think part of it just is that the Mayor and his people, reflecting him, are not using the media to portray a public official in a tradition that most New Yorkers have come to accept as the way mayors are supposed to behave.

If I had been Bloomberg's advisor, and he would have listened to me, with that 18-1/2%, I would have had him out in communities. Having community meetings. Explaining to people what the 18-1/2% was like. When they did Safe Streets, Safe Cities, every politician who was responsible for it was out there explaining that the surcharge, the police surcharge for Safe Streets, Safe Cities was going to be translated into more safety on streets and in schools and on subways and the like. And I think that he had an obligation to sell it and maybe he was a good salesman for Black Boxes but he really is not a very good salesman for Michael Bloomberg and his good works.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Let me add another structural point here about the media's relationship with the Mayor. The media doesn't know the Mayor. This is an unusual situation. Almost always, the media, especially the working political media, knows a politician. The politician has come up. The politician has been around for some time. In addition, there's likely to have been a long campaign that the media has followed. Okay. Michael Bloomberg is unknown to every political reporter in the City as of a little more than a year ago. The campaign itself was lightly followed until the very end.

JOYCE PURNICK: It was all on television anyway.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Right, exactly. There was no campaign to particularly follow other than $75 million worth of media time. So therefore, we are in a situation in which we really don't know this guy. Literally, we don't know. I mean, does reading the guy's book here to get some insight into him. He's got a whole career, his entire career and nobody knows anything. I know a little bit about it but that's because I am principally a media reporter. A reporter about the media, instead of about politics. And so one of the things that happens is I think everyone is kind of holding not only their fire but holding their passion or their connection to the man, because it's not really there.

WAYNE BARRETT: First of all, the New York Post is on his case every day. If you ever read the New York Post. That may have something to do with my own mindset. I kind of go whatever way they're going I go the other way.

NORMAN ADLER: I wish I had thought of that.

WAYNE BARRETT: Yes, yes.

ANDREW WHITE: You notice that they are sitting at opposite ends of the table.

WAYNE BARRETT: They are merciless on the guy. They are merciless on the guy. It's obviously an organ of his own party and yet they didn't endorse him. Does anybody remember that the New York Post did not endorse him?

Audience member: Actually not. It's not an organ of his own party. It's a competing media mogul's.

WAYNE BARRETT: Maybe that's part of the explanation. I've tried to nose around that. Maybe there is some kind of, but actually, look at the book here. The first blurb quote on the book is from Rupert Murdock. What can you say? Who can decipher what goes on between tycoons?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I can.

ANDREW WHITE: That's what Michael does for a living.

WAYNE BARRETT: But the thing is that the whole gestalt of politics these days, nobody embodies it better in our own state than the Governor, is no taxes. So when this guy did an 18-1/2% property tax increase, up til then there were reasons I liked him. There were reasons I disliked him. But that was an extraordinary act. And it showed, when Andrew started the panel he said, "Where's the vision?" I think to have a mayor with this kind of business background who says, "You know what, increasing taxes is bad. But killing services is worse." It's a Nixon to China thing.

To me, it was an extraordinary moment where the man ran up against the gestalt and that was certainly since the day he did that, the New York Post has been on his case every day because they are a single issue newspaper. Taxes are all that matters. It's a single issue party. So I just find that I don't think I am failing to do my job. Direct answer to the question, I certainly have still written critical copy about the Mayor. I just said some critical things here. But I certainly think that his Pataki baggage, the way in which he has approached the school system changes, his process at least. I'm not putting blinders on and he certainly hasn't charmed me or wooed me in any way.

I think there is a way of getting to know a politician, contrary to what Michael says, by what he does. I think I am beginning to get to know this guy by what he does. That's one method of learning and we are learning an awful lot about him by watching him under enormous pressure and how he conducts himself and the decisions he makes in these circumstances. I think Michael really put his figure on it too, which is the thing that astounds me, is when you are around him and watch him at press conferences, he appears to be ego-less. And now, Michael said he was one of the consummated egoists of the corporate world and I don't know anything contrary to that. But he said, and I get that sense of him, is that the guy, maybe when you've made that much money, when you've done the things he's done, you don't need it anymore. But I just don't get a sense of like Mario Cuomo, these are the people I've covered. Ed Koch. Rudy Guiliani. These are the people I've covered and to look at this guy in comparison to those egos, it's an enormous difference.

ANDREW WHITE: I would agree that his vision is that statement, killing services is worse than taxes. And he says that with passion, when you see him in person at a speech. But the media hasn't picked that up. Certainly not the television media. I don't see that message coming out in a public way anywhere, which is, maybe the media is treating him with kid gloves but they are not conveying that message, which is fundamental to his vision, certainly.

Questioner:: The media has been spoiled. What the media needs to do is recognize that this man is an administrator. His entire success has been based on his ability to give responsibility to people and make sure that they carry it out. Just recently, Citizens Union brought the story with illustrations, of 23 city agencies that had been floating in the atmosphere without any guidance or any demand for performance of their responsibilities for several years in the previous administration. And they had been brought together with the rules that each of them had to carry out that agency's responsibilities in 2003. And they are meeting those demands. Not only that, but they are finding that at least they are able to work much more efficiently with a city government that is responsible for making city government work!!! Not to glamorize one person or two. But to put the emphasis on the agencies that run the city. Why can't the media understand that?

Question: With every mayor I've seen, good things started in his administration and Mayor Bloomberg, to his credit, has gone out of his way not to say anything bad about Mayor Guiliani. It's clear that he is not like Mayors LaGuardia and Koch but the interesting thing about the media is should they try to make him into a character, or to accept him for what he is? He is criticized for being flat and dra? What do you want from him?

JOYCE PURNICK: That's why I started out my first remarks that we are seeing a very interesting experiment in whether NYC can be governed successfully by a manager. That's precisely what I said and I think that's precisely, Henry, what is happening. Of course, you can't give him a personality he doesn't have. And I do not believe, as I believe I don't think anyone can fundamentally change his or her personality. I think that he is, in fact, a very smart, competent manager. And on one level that should be enough. Maybe it will turn out to be enough. I have my doubts as to whether it can be, given our history of liking these flashy characters. And I think we are in the midst of watching a fascinating experiment. That's how I see what is happening. We are just past one quarter through this experiment. And we'll see. I've never seen anything like this. Well, the closest probably was Abe Beame, except he was an incompetent manager. But right? He had very little in terms of it being a public, really flashy, compelling public figure. He was not. But he also was not competent. From what we have seen so far, Bloomberg is competent. So whether that will be enough for people, as they see, because they are going to have to, services decline and taxes probably go even further up. I don't know. But that's what we are all involved in now. It's a compelling experiment.

Question: The fact that 9/11 in New York, which really put Bloomberg into office, with the election delay and all kinds of other factors and it's been another year now ? Do you think these external events have created a different approach by the Mayor himself as well as the media, in analyzing this situation?

NORMAN ADLER: The thing is war and a very bad national economy, make a lot of things that happened at local and state levels beside the point in the minds of the voters. This is both a challenge and an opportunity to state and local politicians. The challenge is to find something that will help you connect with the electorate, when they are focused in war and the economy. So that's the challenge. The gift that it gives you is that it allows you do to a lot of things without really being noticed because they are busy noticing what George Bush is doing in Iraq and what he is not doing with the economy.

So what does that mean for Bloomberg? On one hand it means that in some ways he has a somewhat freer hand to operate without ticking people off. On the other hand, it is harder for him to get any recognition, since he is the kind of person that Joyce says, where he is really not looking for that recognition. That makes it even more difficult. And let's face it, when you run for re-election, they've got to recognize not only your works but the fact that you're connected to them. Unless at some point you take credit for what you're doing and you say, "Me, me, me, me, me." People can like what you did and then vote for the other guy at the same time.

And just one other thing, Henry, you broke into politics in the Wagner administration. Talk about dull as dishwater man, who everybody liked and served three terms in office, even though he didn't…in the minds of the voters he wasn't LaGuardia or Guiliani or Koch. So I don't know if it's necessary to be flashy and it may not even be necessary to build enormous edifices, if the voters are fond of you. And they were really fond of Bob Wagner and that enabled him, even though he wasn't colorful, to get re-elected.

MICHAEL WOLFF: That was virtually a pre-television age. And one of the things we've been talking about here, here's the central media principle, without which you cannot have media success, if an ability to break through the clutter. If you can't get yourself, it's not just a matter of just being written about in the media and talking to the media and doing that. If you can't rise above everybody else. And that's rise above 9/11 stuff, rise above war stuff, rise above Pataki, then in some sense, at least on the media, the traditional media standard, you fail. And that may be the central dilemma here. That this is a guy not only doesn't he have the interest, he doesn't have the talents. He doesn't have the skill sets to rise above this media clutter.

WAYNE BARRETT: I just want to say that I think the greater failing, the greater weakness is this thing I was talking about in terms of the community school boards and the Town Hall meetings. He doesn't understand that the city is a collection of 50-100 small towns. And that to be an effective citywide official and get re-elected, you have to engage those 50 or 100 small towns in very real ways. And they don't seem to have any strategy for doing that. I think he is much more likely to be successful in the long term, on the media level that you are talking about, Michael. But what he doesn't seem to understand is the neighborhood level.

MICHAEL WOLFF: So he can't do the micro and he can't do the macro.

ED BLAKELY, Dean of Milano: One of the things I kept hearing here and one of the things you are talking about is the Mayor making contact with the people. The Mayor has to build political capital. That's one of the reasons you go out and talk to people. You are building political capital with those guys sitting on the City Council and with a whole bunch of other people. Because if you don't, pretty soon they start going in their own direction. And this, it seems to me to be a greater danger. The Mayor doesn't have a kind of presence. So I'm concerned, not about what the Mayor wants to be in the media. The media is a way of building that political capital. Because you can give some of that capital to another guy. I'm sitting next to you, you can get elected. But if you don't have that political capital, I don't need you if I'm a City Council member or borough head or whatever. And if things get tough, you need a lot of political capital or you can't get anything done. And you don't have to wait for another election. That's going to happen in a few weeks.

MICHAEL WOLFF: But the interesting thing is he clearly, this is not a failure on his part. Rather he believes that it isn't necessary. That he can do this in a different way.

ED BLAKELY: But he's wrong.

JOYCE PURNICK: But where are they going to go? He does hold….

ED BLAKELY: We are going to have politicians running to Washington on their own. We are going to have all kinds of people doing crazy things that will hurt us.

Question: Whether you are pro or anti Guiliani, I think it is generally agreed that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 he was effective. Not only in leadership but also basically in charisma in personality. In making people feel, "Don't be frightened." I wonder if Mr. Bloomberg, who I admire enormously for his administrative ability, could have given the City what Guiliani gave it in the aftermath of 9/11 and what condition we would have been in as the public a month after without a charismatic leader.

JOYCE PURNICK: I don't think we know yet. Most of us at this table have seen both. We have seen emergencies where mayors could not rise to the occasion. And I'm thinking of the terrible blackout when Beame was mayor and the City was in very bad shape, with riots and looting going on. I think the guy….very nice man but he was clueless. He could not convey a sense of control. I remember being there. I don't know if you were there, Wayne, in the old version of the command bunker, the command center at 1 Police Plaza. And he was lost. He kept turning to his public relations advisor, Howard Rubenstein to ask him how to handle it. The guy was outside it. It was just a depressing view of governing.

And then Guiliani rising to the occasion. The exact opposite. And I think a very, very important factor. And Koch, I believe, for all of his flaws, rising to the occasion during the transit strike. Important, at least symbolically. And Dinkins not rising to the occasion during Crown Heights. Yes. So every mayor is ultimately tested and I don't think he has been tested yet so I don't think we can answer that.

NORMAN ADLER: But you also have this balance here. Guiliani rose to that occasion not least of all because it was a crisis. Hysterics function well in crisis. The problem with Guiliani was that he created so many crises that weren't crises before.

JOYCE PURNICK: Listen, no one has criticized Guiliani as much as I have. I think that is one instance when, for whatever constellation of his neurotic….whatever the nature of his neurotic makeup, he was ready for that crisis. That's all I'm saying. I haven't gotten to the other 7-1/2 years.

WAYNE BARRETT: Somebody has criticized him more than you have. And Joyce was the first one. She wrote the piece that gave us Rudy, the Hero of 9/11. She wrote the first piece. How many days after 9/11 was it?

JOYCE PURNICK: One. That was not easy to do.

WAYNE BARRETT: And the rest of the media took it from there.

END OF TAPE