Rudy's Unlikely Heir

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Warm talk, but it raises expectations that may be unreachable. Bloomberg is about to discover how hard it is to satisfy the city's right and left, its business elite and minority leaders, its diverse interest groups with wildly competing claims that can never be fully reconciled, especially at a time of deep crisis. Says former Mayor Ed Koch, who campaigned for Bloomberg: "It's the greatest challenge that any mayor has ever had." Giuliani never tried to please everyone, but Bloomberg wants to be liked, and in New York that can be trouble.

Bloomberg has already started meeting with the city unions most likely to suffer direct hits from the fiscal crisis. He has even reached out to black activist Al Sharpton, something Giuliani never did. The meetings are evidence that part of the story Bloomberg sold voters is true: Being a CEO is not unlike being a politician. Bloomberg has long nurtured relationships. He tried to have lunch with everyone in his 7,600-person company. He's used to listening to people with a polite smile on his face.

Great CEOs, like great politicians, like the sound of their own names. "Do I enjoy walking into a restaurant and having people point me out? It takes a pretty strange duck not to like adulation," he told Canada's National Post in 1999. In times of crisis, the best leaders show the kind of unshakable confidence that suffused Bloomberg last week. As he sailed into a press conference on Friday, he grinned at the sight of more than 60 journalists packed into his campaign headquarters. "The crowd gets bigger every time," he said.

There are flashes of Giuliani in Bloomberg. He can be tart and is surely a character, a divorce who has boasted, "I like theater, dining and chasing women." He tends to say whatever crosses his mind, which is refreshing when it's not embarrassing. Last month he told a group of community leaders that New York is so safe, people don't lock their doors--making New Yorkers wonder if he occupies the same planet. He is known to make the kind of raunchy jokes that men trade in fraternities and golf carts; jokes that are not meant to be clever or political, but to get attention.

But Bloomberg does not have Giuliani's common touch--he'll pay himself a dollar a year but live at his East Side town house instead of Gracie Mansion--or his experience as a prosecutor. Some complain that he has not thought deeply about what Sept. 11 means to New York. Bloomberg opposes the creation of a separate agency to guide the city's rebuilding, something Giuliani and Governor George Pataki support. Last week he estimated the city's fiscal 2003 deficit at $2.5 billion, when many analysts put it at $4 billion. He has no experience dealing with unions--Bloomberg LP is a nonunion shop--but will have to make punishing cuts in the city's work force. Already, though, Bloomberg has marked a change in New York, just by being Bloomberg. "Right now the city has a massive hole in its heart," says strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who worked for the Green campaign. "The New York swagger has lost a bit of its punch. We're looking for a business solution."