Revisiting a Long-Forgotten Chat With Candidate Bloomberg

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Michael R. Bloomberg, in October 2001,  when he was running for New York City mayor.

Michael R. Bloomberg asked to be interviewed.

That is a sentence very few newspaper types could have written during the dozen years of his mayoralty. When Mayor Bloomberg wants to get a point across to a broad audience, his tendency is to ring up a Barbara Walters or Joe Scarborough.

But this interview request was made 12 and a half years ago. He was Candidate Bloomberg then, trying to make himself known to an electorate only vaguely familiar with him.

He had yet even to win the Republican Party’s mayoral nomination, which seemed a dubious honor anyway. At least that was accepted wisdom among the chattering classes in early summer 2001. Surely, the sages said, any Democrat would beat him in November. Mr. Bloomberg was wasting his money on a quixotic quest. (Mind you, his net worth back then was $4 billion â€" a mere bag of shells, as Ralph Kramden might say, compared with Forbes magazine’s latest estimate of $31 billion.)

Rummaging through old files to clear away the underbrush, I happened upon a long-forgotten partial transcript of the interview that Candidate Bloomberg had sought. We met on July 2, 2001, at his campaign headquarters in Midtown.

Why a partial transcript? Because retyping every one of his words would have led to finger cramps. Just about every question produced not so much a response as a speech. One Bloomberg answer, consisting of many deviations from the initial topic, went on for fully 10 minutes and 55 seconds, not including time out for him to finish a bowl of cornflakes that seemed to pass for his lunch.

What is striking on rereading the transcript is the degree to which the public style of Candidate Bloomberg was almost identical to that of Nearing-the-Exit Mayor Bloomberg. Unlike many politicians, the candidate did not don a mask, only to shed it once he had won (a victory that was in good measure the result of 9/11 and an endorsement from then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani that was not the curse it had usually been).

Not that Mr. Bloomberg has never shifted positions that were supposedly immutable. “I’m a big believer in term limits,” he said in the interview. We all know how easily that belief got tossed overboard when the city’s term limits law proved inconvenient for him.

But on most other matters, he was then what he would be.

Even while courting the press in 2001, he could not hide a certain disdain for it. That has not changed. Throughout his mayoralty he has maintained a studied distance. At news conferences, he almost never calls on reporters by name, even those he talks to practically every day. It is “Miss” or “Sir.”

In the interview, he said he was surprised to discover while campaigning that Staten Island had a diverse population. “It has the image of being conservative and white only,” he said. “There’s an enormous Pakistani population, a decent-sized black population, decent-sized Asians.”

Might his misconceptions have been the result of his ignoring that borough all his life? No, it was the newspapers’ fault. “The press doesn’t think of Staten Island as a diverse place,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg’s faith in himself as a manager was absolute, as it would be later. When I suggested he might find City Hall quite different from the world of business, where he probably was unfamiliar with the word “no,” he bristled.

“The business world isn’t as you described it,” he replied. “It would be wonderful if you said, ‘Jump,’ and everybody went up. That’s not the way the world works.”

“I don’t understand why the fact that I’ve been successful in business would argue that I am less able to do it,” he said of the mayor’s job. “Quite the contrary. The only people that can argue they’ve been there, done that, are Dinkins, Koch and Giuliani, and so far as I know none of them are running. So everybody else has the problem of saying, ‘Well, how do I know I’m going to be able to do it?’”

The important thing is accountability, Mr. Bloomberg continued, foreshadowing his eventual control of public schools by singling out the education bureaucracy as one that should answer directly to the mayor. “I think that the things that I’ve done are directly applicable,” he said. “I’ve led. I’ve listened. I’ve managed. I’ve been accountable.”

Then, as now, he had an unapologetic Popeye way about him: I yam what I yam.

Take his visit to a Harlem church the day before. “They said, ‘Bloomberg just stood there, and Mark Green was chanting and clapping and waving,’” he said of press accounts. “That’s who I am. I don’t normally go. They ask, ‘Why were you there?’ Because I was invited.”

He contrasted himself with Al Gore, defeated for the presidency months earlier amid (still lingering) controversy over the election results. “You know, Al Gore didn’t get elected because nobody knew who Al Gore was by the end,” he said. “He wasn’t himself.”

“If the public wants me,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “I will work 24 hours a day, and I think I’ll be the best mayor this city has ever had. And if they don’t want me, the first day will be very tough, but nobody’s ever going to know it. I will smile and shake hands and say thank you to everybody that supported me.

“And I will do two things: No. 1, be very careful not to criticize or make the next mayor’s job more difficult. And then I’ve got to find something else in public service to do.”