The 'other' Bloomberg returns.

[Smarmie Doofus]

I had a feeling he'd be back.




As Term Wanes, Bloomberg’s Temper Boils Up
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By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: May 20, 2008
For more than six years, Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have enjoyed a warm relationship. So when the councilor spotted the mayor outside City Hall on a recent sunny morning, he greeted him amiably, shook his hand, and turned to go on his way.

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Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Associates say Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s anger may be linked to setbacks on projects he sees as critical to his legacy.
There was no indication that the mayor was about to explode.

“What’s this I hear about you objecting to that power plant?” Mr. Bloomberg, who usually keeps his business private, barked out.

“He kept raising his voice. ‘What’s the matter with you? You know we need the power,’ ” Mr. Vallone, from Queens, recalled the mayor saying. “Then he finally just screamed something about not moving it.”

Mr. Bloomberg is often a man of quaint politeness in public. But in recent days, as he has endured setbacks on projects crucial to his legacy, another Michael Bloomberg has spilled into view: short-tempered, scolding, even petulant.

The mayor has watched the collapse of his congestion pricing proposal and the blocking of his plan to link teacher tenure to student test scores. He is hoping a revived deal to develop the far West Side of Manhattan, another crucial part of his vision for transforming the city, can become a reality.

And, with his presidential hopes shelved, the often fawning attention from the media has faded, too.

Suddenly, as he enters the twilight of his term, he is openly dressing down commissioners, taking obvious shots at officials who disagree with him and invoking the royal “we” while refusing to answer questions whose topics or phrasing he finds distasteful.

He threw a sharp elbow last week toward Senator Charles E. Schumer over his suggestion that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey take over as the lead agency for the stalled Moynihan Station project.

“We set the city’s priorities,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “They don’t come out of Washington.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, played down the recent bouts of temper, saying, “It’s very easy to analyze things into other explanations for ordinary human behavior by someone who, over all, is a very optimistic person.” He added: “Mike Bloomberg is only human, and since he first started running for office in 2001, New Yorkers have seen him happy and sad, irritated and elated.”

But several current and former officials say the public is just now getting a sustained look at the impatience and occasional anger that Mr. Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire unused to answering to any authority higher than his own, feels toward those who would stand in his way or challenge his motives. “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Mr. Vallone said of Mr. Bloomberg’s mood.

Mr. Bloomberg has long been a man of contradictions: jocular and flirtatious one minute, earnest and moralizing the next. Described as down-to-earth and sharply funny, he might greet a political consultant by joking, “Any of your clients get arrested today?” He can be solicitous of his colleagues, once inviting City Councilman Lewis A. Fidler’s son Max to City Hall for a sit-down interview for his school project, rather than simply providing written answers through an aide.

“He was extremely nice to my kid,” said Mr. Fidler, from Brooklyn. “So there’s clearly a soft side to him.”

But he is also demanding and prone to outbursts of angry hyperbole, according to current and former associates, most of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of offending the mayor. They described a suddenly red-faced man who, in full view of others in the bullpen, the open workspace at City Hall, might scream, “You’re destroying my administration!” at an aide over a slip-up, or unleash a profanity-laced question about why he had botched a step in a project.

In some respects, associates say, Mr. Bloomberg’s anger stems from incredulity that systems do not function as they should, and from never fully adjusting to the last-minute, secret deal-making culture of politics, which he believes is a bad way to conduct business.

These officials and associates say that Mr. Bloomberg’s temper burns hot and fast — he can erupt, and then turn around and invite the target of his anger to join him for dinner. The attacks are not so much personal as an expression of his extreme impatience, said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright of Harlem, who clashed with the mayor at times over the congestion pricing proposal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/nyregion/20bloomberg.html

[monmouth]

1. It's that damn New York water. Hillary suffers the same symptoms...n/t