Five Types of Mayors :::

It's hardly a revelation that all mayors aren't the same. Like others, they have different interests and styles. So it's hard to imagine New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the former corporate CEO, carrying on a conversation with Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit's "hip-hop mayor," for more than, oh, five minutes or so. But Bloomberg might get along famously with Kilpatrick's predecessor, Dennis Archer, the starchy former judge.

Clearly, though, some mayors are alike, and if you were to have a dinner party of mayors (we wouldn't advise it, but if you were . . .), you might want to seat them among those with common interests. What would those interests be?

We think there are five broad "mayor types" today. None is the right way to be a mayor; mayors can be successful in any of these types. But we do believe that two types tend to wear better over a couple of terms in office, the managerial mayor and the urbanist/neighborhood mayor. And if you want to be mayor more than eight years, probably the urbanist/neighborhood mayor is the right type to be. Some of the longest-serving mayors today, Richard Daley of Chicago, Thomas Menino of Boston and Joseph Riley of Charleston, are urbanist/neighborhood mayors.

Note: Mayors can change types in office — or at least adopt enough characteristics of another type to smooth their edges. New York's Rudolph Giuliani, for example, entered office as a reform/protest mayor and made at least a partial transition to a managerial mayor. But, by and large, we've observed that mayors stick to their types.

Here are the types, mayors who personify them and some descriptive notes.

Type	Example	Notes
Deal-maker mayor	Richard Riordan (former mayor, Los Angeles)	This is the wheeler-dealer as mayor, the person who loves to make headline-grabbing deals, usually in development projects. Imagine Donald Trump as mayor and you have the general idea.
Ethnic-champion mayor	Kwame Kilpatrick (Detroit)	This is the kind of mayor you often find in cities that have just made an ethnic transition. (Kilpatrick is a throwback.) This kind of mayor comes to office determined to level the playing field. Alas, sometimes it blinds ethnic champions to everything else a mayor must do.
Managerial mayor	Michael Bloomberg (New York)	The name describes the type. This is the mayor whose passion is making government work better, cheaper, faster.
Reform/protest mayor	Laura Miller (Dallas)	Again, the name describes the type. These are mayors elected to protest some condition or issue. But as the issue fades, these mayors exhaust all but their most ardent supporters. Unless they move toward another type, reform/protest mayors usually don't last long in office.
Urbanist/neighborhood mayor	Thomas Menino (Boston)	These are mayors who are focused on making downtowns and neighborhoods healthy. They delight in the details and can talk endlessly about neighborhood groceries and tree plantings. Result: Some think of them as small-thinking fussbudgets. Perhaps some are, but there's a reason these mayors last so long in office.