Bloomberg also rolled back recycling, saving $40 million21 and stunning the city’s environmentalists. It would be a harsh opening shot for a man who would later become one of the world’s most intense advocates for a greener world. He raised taxes on cigarettes from eight cents to $1.50 a pack, then the highest tax in the nation. A pack of cigarettes that cost about $7.50 in Bloomberg’s first year in office ran to about $13 when he left. The tax not only added revenue so badly needed by the city, it helped bring down smoking rates considerably, an administrative twofer. Sales dropped immediately from 29.2 million packs in July 2001 to 15.6 million packs in July 2002.22, 23
Finally, he resorted to breaking one of his key campaign promises—he borrowed $1.5 billion to pay operating expenses. That tactic is often explained as a government’s version of taking out a mortgage to pay for groceries, and it was one of the key reasons that New York City went into financial decline in the mid-1970s. Bloomberg assured the rating agencies that the city was not going to mortgage its future, and, as promised, his future budgets would essentially pay the money back and patch this hole in his operating accounts.
Most surprising to the public, especially to Republicans who had backed Bloomberg, was his 18.5 percent increase in property taxes starting in 2003—the highest one-time increase in the city’s history.24 Desperate to balance his budget, Bloomberg had already convinced Albany to allow the city to add temporary surcharges on the sales tax and the personal income tax. The clothing tax exemption, beloved by most city residents, was also canceled by the state, thus infuriating almost everybody who bought shoes and items of clothing worth under $100. But the property tax was the only one that the city could essentially levy on its own, and that tax for homeowners clearly had Bloomberg’s name on it.
New Yorkers, of course, thrive on complaints and especially seem to enjoy the sport of mocking their mayor. Mike Bloomberg was an easy target. A rich stiff who wanted to take away their cigarettes and raise their taxes? Bloomberg often recalled parades, especially in Staten Island, when there were “a lot of one-finger waves.”
A New York Times poll in 2003 registered those complaints—with 74 percent of those polled unhappy about the property tax increase. Another poll in 2003 found that 61 percent of New Yorkers would reject an invitation from the mayor to have Thanksgiving dinner.25 Overall, midway through his first term, Bloomberg had an approval rating of 24 percent. It was the lowest rating in the twenty-five years that the Times had been assessing the popularity of New York City mayors.26
12
The “Nanny” Mayor
“Just before you die, remember you got three extra years.”
—Bloomberg, on a healthier New York City1
Michael Bloomberg loved doing business over dinner. It was not idle time, those hours taken off to savor food and drink. And the talk was not usually about the food (even at his posh dinners, he served meat loaf or roast beef, barely one step up from the cafeteria specialties of his youth). Meals were a time to devour whatever was happening outside his cloistered world, to seek out experts in his big three interests—business, politics, and philanthropy.
He met and interviewed countless future employees at a favorite Italian eatery in Manhattan. And after he left city hall, Bloomberg’s homes, especially the elegant limestone town house in Manhattan, would become a kind of modern-day salon, post-university seminars where a rotating cast of ten people or so would sit around a large table and debate his chosen subject of the evening.
Still, he would be a guest for one of the most important dinners in his long career—one of many events in the late 1980s for rich trustees at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. By chance that night, Bloomberg and his then wife, Susan, met Dr. Al Sommer, dean of the university’s School of Hygiene and Public Health, or simply “hygiene,” the students’ dismissive label for the place where doctors promoted such necessities as working toilets. “It was the poor cousin of the university,” Dr. Sommer recalled. “By definition, people who go into public health have no money. They weren’t particularly valued alumni. There were none—zero—on the board of trustees.”2
So when Bloomberg, the richest alumnus of all, suggested, in a light and sociable way, that if Dr. Sommer and his wife ever got to New York, they should all have dinner, Dr. Sommer managed to hold out for two weeks.
Over a meal at a small Manhattan restaurant Sommer made his pitch. “Public health is about preventing disease, and if you prevent a disease, nothing happens,” he remembered saying. “Nobody’s grateful they’re not getting smallpox. They’re grateful if the doctor saves them from a heart attack, and they walk out of the hospital cheating death, at least for the moment.”3
Bloomberg listened intently. He quickly got that public health isn’t about that stent in a heart that gives someone extra time (including, later, even him). It’s about millions of people not getting heart trouble in the first place. The salesman was sold, and he came up with a slogan to market public health, a way to make it sexier than something called hygiene. Imagine saving lives—millions at a time, Bloomberg began telling associates and friends. “When I heard it, I quickly copyrighted it, and it became our official motto,” Dr. Sommer said.4
The Hopkins school soon began to advertise that its mission was “Protecting health, saving lives—millions at a time.” And after Bloomberg gave $350 million (a mere down payment on his later contributions), the name of the school changed in 2001 to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.5
Bloomberg had indeed helped Dr. Sommer. But even more important, Dr. Sommer had given Mike Bloomberg a cause that would guide him through the next decades. As a politician and philanthropist, Bloomberg would soon launch his own public health campaigns against smoking, obesity, guns, drug addiction, coal-fired power plants, dirty water, accidental drowning, traffic deaths and, above all, climate change.
Others in his class of billionaires were helping the world’s poor, trying to cure people of basic diseases or eradicate illiteracy. Bill Gates was spending billions to fight AIDS and to win the “mosquito wars” against malaria and to help out poor schools both in America and in developing countries. Warren Buffett was giving more than $3 billion a year to the Gates Foundation to draw down his considerable net worth before he died. Other billionaires were choosing their causes, some of them attached to favorite politicians. But Bloomberg soon recognized that as mayor of New York City he could save even more lives—millions at a time—by changing the way an entire city of eight million–plus people lived. No health issue would be too small or too politically risky—from a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants to a warning about a circumcision rite. He would later say, “My obligation is to protect the citizens . . . The job is not to have high ratings.”6
* * *
Shortly after Bloomberg was first elected, his top advisers began hearing about Dr. Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease specialist who was then traveling around India to fight tuberculosis for the World Health Organization. A graduate of Oberlin College (in philosophy and pre-med),7 Frieden received a medical degree and a masters in public health from Columbia University. After a fellowship in infectious diseases at Yale, he became assistant commissioner of health in New York City, where he helped curb a sudden increase in drug-resistant tuberculosis.8 By the time he had joined WHO, Frieden was an international expert on lung diseases, tuberculosis, of course, but also how smokers invited cancer and emphysema. He had already decided that his next big job would be to curb tobacco use in India, in America, maybe even in New York City.
Dr. Sommer, who was by then helping Bloomberg find a commissioner, emailed the forty-one-year-old doctor in India and suggested he should come to New York City to meet the new mayor. As Dr. Frieden sat down for his first encounter with Bloomberg, the mayor-elect suddenly launched into a lecture on the dangers of tobacco.
“I walk in and sit down and for the first ten minutes Mike talks about tobacco,” Frieden recalled.9 “He talks about how it’s like three airline
rs crashing every day. A terrible problem. Don’t know what we can do about it . . . In a sense I felt he was making a commitment to me to do tobacco, but he didn’t need convincing.” Bloomberg, ever the pitchman, was sealing the deal to have Dr.Tom Frieden as his first health commissioner.
Once in office, Frieden moved quickly to curb tobacco use. “For the last five years, my enemy has been mycobacterium tuberculosis,” he said early on. “Now, it’s tobacco executives.” One of his first meetings with the mayor was about making New York a smoke-free city. When Bloomberg’s political team heard the proposal, they were stunned. Ed Skyler, the top press officer, was horrified. Budget guru Marc Shaw saw trouble, as did Dan Doctoroff, deputy mayor for development.
Peter Madonia, Bloomberg’s chief of staff and a plainspoken man, said that as the mayor cut the city budget, laid off workers, and raised property taxes, he worried that “now you’re going to tell people you can’t smoke in a bar. Like, who the fuck needs this now?”10
But the political team eventually had the data the mayor and Frieden needed. Despite polling that showed nearly 40 percent of New Yorkers thought you should be able to have a cigarette with your drink, Bloomberg’s private polls revealed that 85 percent of those surveyed felt it was unfair to impose that deadly smoke on the bartender with asthma or the waitress just working to feed her family.11 An internal report from Frieden’s office on the prospects for a ban had an elegant couple featured on the cover. The young man was saying, “Mind if I smoke?” with the young woman answering, “Care if I die?”12
Frieden recalled taking his proposal to the mayor in the open office plan—with the Bloomberg team all sitting around their boss and listening warily.
“I did my spiel and he said, ‘Are you certain that this is going to save lives?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Then do it,’ ” Dr. Frieden recalled, and then he hesitated. He wanted to make certain the mayor was ready for battle.
“It’s gonna be really rough. They’re gonna go after you, and it’s gonna be ugly,” he told Bloomberg.
“And he interrupts me. ‘Do you know the first rule of sales?’ ” Frieden shook his head, no. “ ‘Once you make the sale, leave. It happens all the time. A new salesman comes into the company, and he makes a sale. He’s so excited about it he starts talking to the customer and pretty soon the customer’s having second thoughts and they lose the sale.’ ”
Frieden hurriedly backed out of the bullpen and returned to work, his first big pitch to the city’s top salesman a success. In fact, when he talked almost twelve years later about the city’s fight against tobacco, Frieden seemed to bounce in his chair. An energetic man on any occasion, simply recalling this particular battle fired up the old weaponry as he raced through his memories of a favorite campaign. It was easy to see why Bloomberg admired him. He could sell health the way Bloomberg sold terminals.
“It wouldn’t have happened without him,” Frieden said of the mayor, who backed him steadily through the political turmoil the proposed ban created in 2002. Like Dr. Frieden, Bloomberg seemed to enjoy defending his smoking ban even when it was unpopular. A smoker until his early thirties, the mayor often explained how he quit—he simply imagined his worst enemy outliving him.13 Who? He wouldn’t say.
The main opposition came from bar and restaurant owners and their friends in city government. “Giff Miller [then City Council Speaker Gifford Miller] was a pain in the butt [pun apparently intended],” Frieden remembered. “He wouldn’t let it pass, wouldn’t bring [the bill] to the floor.”
Miller demanded separate smoking rooms for restaurants or bars, so with the mayor’s okay, Frieden and others engineered the bill to allow separate smoking rooms, so separate they would be similar to the isolation rooms used for people with infectious diseases like Ebola. The rooms would have to be state-of-the-art, negative air pressure, exhaust fifteen feet away from any window or door, and they would probably cost around half a million dollars each. Oh, and that whole system? It would be approved for only three years.14 The law passed the city council in late 2002 and went into effect on March 30, 2003. (The state would follow four months later.15) Smokers were furious. Some called it Stalinesque. What about the city’s smoke-filled history? The Camel billboard that puffed white smoke in Times Square?16
A few worried politicians came to Bloomberg asking for exemptions from the law. They proposed “smoke-easies”—places where like-minded people could smoke themselves into the hospital. Frieden scoffed, “We don’t allow asbestos-easies. We don’t allow benzene easies.”17 To the chagrin of some of his political aides, Bloomberg sided with Frieden.
At parades, especially on conservative Staten Island, Bloomberg recalled that people booed and threw cigarette butts at him as he passed. Mostly, he said he loved the attention, but at one contentious city council hearing, Bloomberg had eventually snapped at a crowd of rough-looking tavern keepers clearly gathered by the tobacco lobby.18
“Does your desire to smoke anywhere, at any time, trump the right of others to breathe clean air in the workplace?” he seethed. “The need to breathe clean air is more important than the license to pollute it.”19
At the Old Town Bar in Manhattan, a favorite hangout of Bloomberg’s political team, one of the owners, Gerard Meagher, groused to his customers from city hall about the smoking ban—yet another intrusion into his business, and by a Republican, no less.
The bar is often used as a movie set since little has changed since it opened in 1892. The original “tin” ceiling of embossed steel was painted a light blue in the 1950s, but by 2002 it had become a thick, dull brown, a vivid reminder of what undoubtedly happened to the lungs of regular patrons and workers. More important for the business, the bar was often as full after the smoking ban as before, and Meagher said that it helped profits and turnover at the tables because diners didn’t linger too long after they ate.20
Ten years after the ban, Mayor Bloomberg came back to the Old Town in 2013 to celebrate how exiling smokers to the sidewalks had been good for business in his city. He boasted that six thousand bars and restaurants opened after the anti-smoking law went into effect. And many, like the Old Town, had prospered.21
* * *
A smoking ban was only one of Frieden’s controversial plans to improve the health of New Yorkers. Soon, the commissioner outlawed trans fat, those industrially engineered fats used in margarine and other 1950s-style foodstuffs that turned out to be more dangerous than lard to human arteries.22 Bloomberg supported the ban, which affected most restaurants, and he agreed with Frieden that it was time for restaurants to post calorie counts. He even sanctioned Frieden’s promotion of condom use, the “Get Some” campaign that was announced on Valentine’s Day 2007, Bloomberg’s sixty-fifth23 birthday. (The city eventually gave out three million a month24 to reduce pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.)25 When he announced the new condoms, the commissioner apparently couldn’t restrain himself. “We are now unveiling, unfurling, unrolling, if you will,” the city’s new prophylactics, he said. In his office, Frieden kept a bowl of the official NYC Condoms (fashionably black, of course).
Bloomberg’s conservative supporters feared promoting condoms meant promoting, well, you know, free sex. He heard from some in the same group again when his administration required more sex education in schools, allowed school nurses to provide birth control, and gave teenagers access to the morning-after pill (labeled “Plan B” by insiders at city hall). Bloomberg saw the numbers and left his health commissioner alone.
After trans fats, salt became another of Dr. Frieden’s prime targets. He wanted salt content in restaurants and processed foods to be lowered by a full 25 percent by 2013.26 If Bloomberg enjoyed controversy, this one hit home. The mayor loved salt. He put salt on pizza. Extra salt on popcorn. He sprinkled it on chips, and Dr. Frieden swore he once saw him shake a little extra salt on a piece of bacon. This would be an uncomfortable test for the public health mayor. (At the time, reducing salt was beginning to enco
unter resistance from a few scientists, and one writer in Scientific American would soon conclude that “The zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science.”27)
When Frieden called together CEOs of some of the biggest food companies for a “salt summit” to talk about lowering the amount of sodium in their foods in 2008, Bloomberg opened the meeting by immediately straying off script. He was supposed to confess that he liked a little extra salt, but too much was not healthy. Instead, Bloomberg began by explaining how much he loved those salty little squares called Cheez-its. He would be happy if he could mash up Cheez-its and sprinkle them on a pizza, he said.28 The Cheez-it producers (representatives from the Kellogg Company) applauded, even though only a handful of Cheez-its provides more than 10 percent of a day’s recommended sodium.
The company executives were polite about Dr. Frieden’s request, but in the end, they mostly pretended to help.29
After much effort, a group of sixteen big food producers—Starbucks, Mars, Au Bon Pain, Heinz, and others announced they would participate in the effort to cut salt in restaurant and packaged goods by 25 percent by 2015. Bloomberg declared the goal achieved by the time he left office. But by a year later, one report estimated salt content reduction by major companies was “modest” at about 7 percent.30
* * *
At each point in the mayor’s health campaigns, his political protectors tried unsuccessfully to steer him away from the most ambitious and controversial plans of his health commissioners, and they worked in vain to shield him from those who would soon mock him as the Nanny Mayor. Maybe the Frieden health agenda would save lives, yes. But they worried about saving Bloomberg’s political future.
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 15