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		In the Bullpen With Mike by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 04-14-2002 First of two parts Here comes the mayor, 20 minutes late, walking into the bullpen on the second floor of City Hall. This was once the room where politicians held public hearings and where Rudy Giuliani presented his annual budgets to the nagging jackals of the press. Now it's a grid of cubicles and computer terminals, like the city room of a medium-sized newspaper or the back room of a bank. Glazed portraits of dead politicians gaze down from the high, dim walls. A huge cutout of a helicopter — a souvenir of last week's Inner Circle show — leans against a wall, awaiting installation as a mobile. "This is it, this is the place," says Mike Bloomberg, stepping up to a raised platform at the east end of the room. He stops at the nosh bar, nibbles a piece of pumpernickel bagel. There are no television sets to scramble the brains of the staff. Various aquatic creatures move around in a brightly lit fish tank. Bloomberg gazes over the people working the computers. He says: "Let's sit at my desk." It's appropriately in the center of all the other cubicles, with two separate computer screens, each flashing a Bloomberg logo. In some ways, because nobody gave Bloomberg much of a chance to be elected, he came to City Hall as a relative stranger. The press paid little attention to him before Sept. 11; afterward the mayoralty campaign became part of the larger story, with most of the ink focused on Giuliani. And yet, here he is, Mayor Bloomberg, about 100 days into his term. Does he wake up in the morning and say, hey, I'm the mayor of the greatest city in the world? "No," he says, with amused eyes and a small grin. "No, but it has occurred to me, you know, when driving way out in Queens, or way north in the Bronx, or across Staten Island.... as far as the eye can see, you see buildings, and you start to think, 'Now I wonder who lives there — and am I doing a good job for them?' " 'A Nice Warm Thing' He turns in his chair, his hands in his lap. Communications director Bill Cunningham sits nearby. The clacking of computer keys merges with a murmurous hum of conversation. The mayor talks about a visit he made to the World Trade Center construction site that morning, escorting Attorney General John Ashcroft on a photo-op. "One of the construction workers came to me and said, 'We're glad you're the mayor,'" Bloomberg says. "He just came over. It was a nice, warm thing." Bloomberg, who is said to be worth $4 billion, talks with most passion about the ordinary people he has been meeting since his quixotic entry into New York politics. This should be no surprise. He comes out of working-class Medford, Mass. His autobiography ("Bloomberg by Bloomberg") describes his parents as middle class — "my father was an accountant at a dairy and my mother a woman of liberal views and independent mind" — and on his travels here he seems to be reconnecting to the people of his own childhood. "I guess the firefighters are the best example of what I mean," he says. "But not just firefighters, either. People who work hard for a living. These are people who live in the city, work in the city, send their kids to public schools. They're the ultimate New Yorkers in every sense. They're your readers. And, hey, that's what we're all here for." Bloomberg shakes his head in an oddly fond way. More Integrated Areas 'During the campaign, we'd go to a lot of residential areas, and usually there'd be a block party. The barbecue on the front lawn, the street blocked, the kids playing. It was always a much more integrated neighborhood than you see when you live on the East Side. In every block, there'd be some black families, or Latinos or a kid with mental or physical problems — and everybody was accepted, everybody got along." He swivels in the chair, his eyes falling on the Bloomberg logo, turns again. "I'm sure there's plenty of fights, and you only see the good things," he says. "But it was much more Norman Rockwell than what those of us that live in Manhattan understand. It wasn't as pretty, if you will. And, you know, there's more warts when you get close to real people. But it really was America." Every mayor's daily job is made of dozens of small appointments that are given meaning by the broader goals of policy. Most are what historian Daniel Boorstein in 1961 labeled "pseudo-events" (a pseudo event is "not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted or incited it"). Bloomberg has expressed a certain annoyance at the way they can eat into time. "But, look, I like what I do," he says. "I've always liked people. So each one of these events, I like. If the alternative is to not have a lot to do, or to have too much to do, I vote for too much." He shows me a black looseleaf book, in which the day's events are blocked out, including this interview. Each event has a one-page addendum of background information, explaining who the person is, or the group or the issues to be discussed. That day's list included an important meeting with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., to announce Bloomberg's four appointees to the board. He shows pages of other invitations, which run at about 600 a month. "Now you obviously can't do all of these," he says, "but I can look down the list and see who invited us and what the scheduler's decision was. So if it's, you know, an old friend and the decision is, 'No, I can't,' I can always say, 'Oh, come on, tell him I'll come.' Or if you're going to be in Staten Island or Far Rockaway, you can add two more things, because you might not be in that neighborhood that frequently. "At the beginning, I tried a policy of having dinner each night in a different borough. Then I sort of changed it, and wanted to do as much as I could downtown, to get people, through the press, I suppose, to know that downtown was alive. Now I'm back to trying to do it in the boroughs." Defense of His Weekends The ongoing debate over the way Bloomberg spends his weekends provokes in him a mixture of amusement and irritation. "Horse manure," he calls it at one point. He says that since being sworn in, he has been to Bermuda exactly once. And he did go to Florida to visit one of his daughters. "But my private life, it's just none of their business." Usually, when he has one event — a Saturday parade, for example — he stays in the city. "Last weekend," he explains, "there was a parade — with Sean Connery! And so I also went out to Randalls Island to hit some golf balls." The weekends do give him some private flexibility, but even then he remains the mayor, a public figure, one who feels he must stay in touch with a wide variety of people, including his friends. "So, you know, my girlfriend says, 'Let's just have dinner Sunday night, the two of us.' And yes, of course ... But then I invited a friend who was up from Bermuda, and then I invited another couple, and then we stop by something else on the way...." Did he live this way as a businessman, too? "Yes, but the difference is that I didn't do all these short things. For example, I stop in for a reception for the governor, a little fund-raiser thing, and it's just, you know, you go up to the podium and you say, 'Welcome. Vote for George Pataki. He needs your help' or 'Welcome, this is a great organization. You do great work and should be congratulated' — trying to remember what the organization is, if you can say the same thing, and then you're on to the next event...." The night before, he had appeared at a dinner for the American Academy in Rome, "which would normally never make the list." But the dinner chairman and his wife were old friends. "And they were honoring Jacob Rothschild, who was very nice to me when I went to London the first time and I got to know him. And you know, for a Bloomberg to know a Rothschild was very unusual." Bloomberg smiles in an ironical Medford, Mass., way. "So I stood up and introduced him. I said it was funny, he didn't look Italian or American to me.... Everybody got a great laugh out of it, and I stayed for the rest of the dinner. Now normally, I wouldn't have even done even that. I would have just left and then maybe taken a girlfriend and stopped for a pizza or burger or something." With all the demands on his time, large and small, did he have time for reading? "No." How about thinking? He smiles. "Maybe when I'm lying in bed. Or when I'm walking. But in this job, time for yourself you don't have."