Word: mayorally
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From the moment you enter his office at New York's city hall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 63, wants visitors to know that he is not your average politician--or a politician at all. Bloomberg, you see, doesn't really have an office. Instead, he sits alongside much of his staff in the middle of what is known as the bullpen, a large, former public meeting room now packed with corporate cubicles like a Wall Street trading floor. "Walls are barriers, and my job is to remove them," says the billionaire businessman who made his fortune by building his namesake financial...
...variety of measures, from the falling crime rate to the improving economy, Bloomberg has done just that. And he has done it in a post often described as the second toughest job in America--a job he inherited from the most famous mayor in the world, Rudy Giuliani, in the wake of 9/11 and a bearish stock market, no less. Bloomberg has brought an unprecedented level of efficiency and transparency to New York City government. "The best thing is, he doesn't seem to be making decisions based on a four-year calendar," says Jonathan Bowles, research director...
Perhaps most impressively, Bloomberg has managed to do that while being "the first mayor in a long time who has not been a polarizing figure," as Mitchell Moss, professor of urban planning at New York University, puts it. That is not to say his constituents necessarily appreciate the Republican mayor. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1, recent polls show that only about 40% of registered voters approve of his job performance. The majority of New Yorkers have also told pollsters they don't want to build a football stadium for the New York Jets on Manhattan...
...with only token opposition. He controls public housing, public schools and the city council. He is cozy with Big Business, is a master at the ward politics of fixing streetlights, and he speaks with a blunt, blue-collar brio that Chicagoans find endearing. "There's never been a [U.S.] mayor, including his dad, who had this much power," says Paul Green, professor of policy studies at Chicago's Roosevelt University. And he's used it to steer the Windy City into a period of impressive stability, with declining unemployment and splashy growth...
With so much political capital at his fingertips, the mayor has been able to take big risks. The city is in the midst of knocking down its old high-rise housing projects, which concentrated the poor in pockets of crime and privation. Many of the former tenants are being relocated to better, low-rise housing that blends into existing neighborhoods. Since Daley took over the school system in 1995, he has brought graduation rates up from 51% to 54%, but he's not stopping there. Last year he launched a reform plan in which old, failing schools...