General Interest Review 000014

$100 million

$100,000,000 is a lot of money. There is not much outside of government programs with that kind of price tag. A private voyage to space from Russia is one of them. A large country estate recently put on the market in Charlottesville, Va., called Albemarle is another. Recently, Michael Bloomberg added the New York City mayoralty to the list.

Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of ubiquitous business media behemoth Bloomberg, Inc., was elected to New York's highest office for the third time this week on the back of this enormous sum. New Yorkers were treated to an astoundingly ubiquitous campaign. There were negative ads. And there was the kind of personalized targeting that makes you, and only you, feel completely anonymous. ('So I am a middle-income single mother who takes the subway to work and cares deeply about the environment after all,' a New Yorker might think when reading a Bloomberg mailing. 'How nice to be reduced to a sentence.')

The mayor - as people get to be known when they hang around that office long enough - ran straight through a couple hurdles to get to his third term. First, there was New York City law. The law said mayors are supposed to serve two terms. Bloomberg wanted to serve a third. So he got support from the city council, and changed the law. The public didn't get to vote.

Next, there was Bill Thompson, the largely unknown city comptroller. That's where the money came in. A negative ad blitz, it turns out, can cost about as much as you want if you have the money. Bloomberg attacked Thompson, suggesting he felt threatened. This included starting a web site dedicated to Thompson's alleged fiscal policy, Thompsontaxhike.com. Usually the point of political advertising is to reinforce your own name so voters will remember it when they go to the polls. That's apparently not necessary when you're the two-time mayor and the richest man in New York all at the same time. The idea apparently is to get them thinking about Bloomberg even when they're thinking about Thompson.

Thanks mostly to his sizable investment, Bloomberg was expected to trounce Thompson in this week's election. He didn't. He won with 50.6 percent. Thompson received 46 percent. Only half the people were convinced. Many interviewed mentioned the term limit change. Others sounded like usual schmos about local politics -- they didn't wanna vote for either SOB, but they voted for the guy who would at least get this guy outta there.

But what Bloomberg's third term represents had to be in the subconscious of at least some who rejected him. As the richest man in New York and a shaper of opinion at the head of his media company, Bloomberg is one of the makers of the universe. These people are typically not out in public. They pull strings through money they disperse to foundations and political campaigns. They whisper in politicians' ears at charity cocktail receptions. They get their way quietly, but no one realizes it until they're dead. Legends are concocted, public squares named after them. And all are left to marvel at what they achieved, even though they didn't realize it at the time.

Typically politicians are not in this realm. They make the decisions, but only based on who can twist their arm the most effectively. By nature of their debt to the public for votes, politicians are forced to pull hair and poke eyes in the sandbox of governing day-to-day. And they make public enemies in doing so. With his relatively popular mayoral stint thus far, Bloomberg brought the masters' subtle ways into the public sphere. If eight years had been enough, perhaps he would've been looked on as an effective broker, and ultimately a genuinely benevolent billionaire, as opposed to the haughty ones who give money but can't be bothered to do any real work. He would've been seen as a man of legendary mettle who could bridge the gap between the two worlds -even when he had the kind of money that allowed him the luxury of not having to worry about it. Now, he's remade the world to his liking by yanking the strings of influence in the public light. The voters, recognizing what has transpired, were reminded all too directly that those strings are out of their grasp. Maybe Bloomberg thought he was sealing his fate. But even after $100 million, only half the voters agreed with him at the ballot box, and that feels a little more ambivalent than a grand narrative ought to.