On Saturday, Oct. 17, Michael Bloomberg went to synagogue. He was not there to pray, though—or at least not using anything out of the usual liturgy. Taking the lectern at Park Avenue Synagogue on East 87th Street, he launched into a 15-minute version of his stump speech, peppering it with some jokes tailored for the religious crowd (when his rabbi tells him he should attend services more regularly and be part of the army of god, Bloomberg responds by saying he is in the secret service): New York has been faring better than other cities in tough times, hotel occupancy is still relatively high, crime has stayed low, life expectancy is higher than in the country as a whole. The crowd nodded, laughed at the right points and applauded as he finished. He never mentioned the election, nor explicitly asked anyone for a vote, but he did seem to win over and confirm a few more fans.

A politician on the pulpit is a normal sight this time of year. But a man named Michael Reubens Bloomberg, a centrist billionaire who lives in a 79th Street townhouse, still shoring up Upper East Side Jews two weeks before Election Day?

The campaign is leaving nothing to chance. “Our view is that if we do everything conceivable to get our message out and turn our voters out, we’ll win—and the better a job we do, the more votes we get,” explained Bloomberg campaign manager Bradley Tusk. “I’m paraphrasing it, but LBJ said something along the lines of ‘If you do everything you possibly, humanly can and then a little more, you should win.’ That’s how I see it too.”

The result is a comprehensiveness com beyond even what was part of Bloomberg’s 2001 and 2005 campaigns—from the hand-painted signs in the phone-banking area of the Bryant Park headquarters which run the gamut from “Sutton Place 4 Mike Bloomberg” to “5 Points Votes Mike,” to the endorsement of the president pre of the Korean Nail Salon Association so that there are Bloomberg signs in front of a few more women getting pedicures. And rolling out Rudy Giuliani, who stoked some fears in the right audience, to the right crowd. And by publicizing every kind word a celebrity says about him, from Neil Simon to Bono, from Al Gore to Oscar de la Renta. And through his nearly ubiquitous campaign ads and mailers going negative earlier and more thoroughly than ever before.

And by the massive campaign spending to support it, demolising existing records—which he himself had set.

Through all of it, Bloomberg Blo claims he is just playing it safe. “I think it was Jack Kennedy’s father who said he didn’t want to buy a landslide, he didn’t want to spend one more dollar than he had to,” he said at a recent Crain’s breakfast forum (in front of a recent sell-out crowd in the midtown Sheraton ballroom, as compared to the empty seats left in the much smaller room at the Hyatt when Thompson addressed Crain’s a week earlier). “I’m not trying to spend money that I don’t think is necessary.”

And for now, despite all the spending and all the comprehensiveness, Bloomberg has stayed well ahead but largely static in the polls, with the Thompson campaign gleefully pointing out elections in this city have historically been tighter than polls predicted, so there may be hope yet. With all of this, and with the anti-Bloomberg sentiment stronger in many quarters than in his past two elections, ele a big win would help kill any Wednesday morning quarterbacking next week that if not for all that spending, the blessing of the city’s big publishers to seek a third term and a political establishment that has largely sidestepped any engagement with him over the course of the campaign, he might have lost.

And even if he does win, Bloomberg will face a much tougher opponent, perhaps, than any he has ever faced on the campaign trail: the third term curse which has thrashed so many once-strong politicians on the rocks

of their own ambitions. He is rolling the dice, going triple or nothing as he looks to cement his legacy, but risks squandering much of the good will he has built up in people’s minds in his quest to make this happen.

Ed Koch, the last mayor to try a third term, saw his end in a sputter of scandal and fatigue. Twenty years later, Koch still resents the suggestion that this is anything but misconstrued history—“our third term was marred by corruption on the part of some people that I was not a part of, but it took place on my watch,” was all he would say about all the troubles he faced. But ask most people, and what they remember about Koch in the end is less the city’s first anti-smoking laws and housing expansion he wants people to think of, and much more Donald Manes and his drubbing when he tried for a fourth term.

But for all the people who worry about what will happen, Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio believes that the mayor and his senior advisors may be able to go into next year with enough shake-ups and new directions to make the next four years a success.

“There’s nothing inherent that makes third terms failures,” he said. “And I think that they understand that.”

One week before Election Day, Bloomberg arrived in a small room on the ninth floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center to deliver what his campaign called the “Vision Speech.” Hyped as his point-by-point projection of where New York City would be on Dec. 31, 2013, this was to a condensed version of what voters could expect in a third term.

The speech lasted less than 19 minutes.

New Yorkers were told to expect that crime would stay low, he would diversify the economy, and that there would be improvements in, among other things, education, mass transit, immigrant outreach, CUNY investment and public health.

The details were thin—more of the

“Did you know there used to be an F line express? … there will be again” variety than concrete plans for how to get plans like this approved or paid for, or to explain why he had not already pushed his MTA appointees to do more on transit enhancements in his two terms so far. But in just about every area, Bloomberg said in standard incumbent-speak, the city was at a tipping point and needed his guidance to see things through.

Statements like these are about as extensive as people involved with crafting Bloomberg’s third term will go publicly, and even privately, his campaign advisors and administration officials are insisting to their colleagues in government and in response to most questions that their only focus is on the distance between here and Nov. 3.

But there are clues. Look at what happened in term two. After never paying much attention to gun control previously in his political career, Bloomberg spent the crux of his second inaugural address declaring that he was going to become the point man on illegal gun trafficking, taking the case to Albany and Washington and wherever else he needed to go. After never talking that much about environmentalism, he stood under the giant blue whale at the Natural History Museum on Earth Day 2007, unveiling his 127-point environmental plan, which included what would have been the transformative congestion pricing proposal.

Neither of what have become the two signature initiatives of his second term were part of the 2005 campaign, nor things any mayor before him had ever thought of trying to do.

That kind of national leadership has become a major talking point over the course of the campaign, with the mayor repeatedly appealing to the idea of re-establishing New York as the pioneer, and thereby the pinnacle, of what America is supposed to be.

“We don’t realize how important we are to set the agenda across the rest of the country,” he said at Crain’s. “We are the poster child—not for everything—but for most things in the rest of the country.”

In guessing what might be the equivalents of what has grown into the Coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and PlaNYC for term three, former Bloomberg communications director Bill Cunningham pointed out that these efforts may have been new in their size and scope, but Bloomberg had always believed in gun control and been talking for years about environmentalism.

Cunningham said he expected that the signature initiatives of term three will similarly grow out of existing passions.

“He’s always been interested in health, so you might see something more in that,” Cunningham said.

But though Bloomberg has been pushing the health message hard on the campaign trail—“if the primary purpose of government isn’t to let people live longer and healthier, I don’t know what it is,” he told the congregation at Park Avenue Synagogue—the main new theme which has emerged on the campaign trail is immigration. This is the subject of one of his campaign’s longest and most detailed policy papers, and was the topic of a rare specific policy speech delivered to an audience of ethnic media reporters in an auditorium at the CUNY Graduate Center in early October. Bloomberg now uses almost every opportunity he gets to marvel aloud at how amazing it is that Americans are the only people in the world who identify themselves by using hyphenations—Chinese-American, Ukrainian-American, every kind of -American there could be.

He talks about this as a moral imperative, but in typical Bloomberg fashion, frames it also as an economic one, a means to pump more money and innovation into New York and America. That same frustration rising in his throat as when he talks about the people across the country who refuse to do anything about the gun trade, he rails against shortsightedness of those who work against immigrants.

“If we can give them a little bit of help, that will expand our economy, it will create jobs, it will increase our tax base, it will make this city even stronger,” he said as he began his immigration speech. “The ways out of a recession is more immigration, not less.”

The immigration proposals, while probably the ones in which Bloomberg is most trying to expand his influence past the traditional limits of a mayor, are among a series of proposals that have come out of Bloomberg’s campaign, with others focused on reforming government operations and voting, getting more students into community colleges, instituting new crime fighting technology, reducing gun violence further, expanding charter schools, strengthening city housing and improving transportation.

Throughout these, Bloomberg’s team has sketched out policy that would be markedly different from what he has done in his two terms so far—to some, an indication that he has flip-flopped on the very decisions he and his appointees were making for the first two terms, but to others, an indication that he does plan to reinvent himself somewhat in term three.

There is another imperative at work, too, Bloomberg said.

“Each of these ideas would make the city a better place to live and to work, but they all have something else in common: that is they don’t cost very much,” Bloomberg said at the Crain’s breakfast, after rattling off a few of the topics the campaign’s proposals have addressed. “If we’re going to make some progress, that is going to be a constraining thing—everything’s got to pass that test.”

This overriding need for fiscal prudence, more than any of the proposals themselves, may well be the defining factor for most of what comes in term three, at least in the outset.

“Given the budgets, it’s very possible he will be in the position of protecting the gains he’s made and the city has made in a tight fiscal environment,” Cunningham said, comparing the $5 billion budget deficit and uncertain economic future to the situation Bloomberg faced in trying to preserve city services when he originally came into the office in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“It could be a lot like his first year in office in the short term,” Cunningham said.

Bloomberg, like Thompson, has remained vague on what he would do about the budget. Neither can do much to predict what the budget process will actually look like, and whoever is mayor will probably ultimately be making decisions about how to allocate the last few hundred millions of dollars in a $59 billion budget.

Facing this, Bloomberg will have the difficulty of living up to the own very high standards he has set. There is not much glory in crime or the welfare rolls staying low, but, conversely, he will be hung in the headlines if these or other bad statistics start climbing again.

Mayors coming up against history tend to go after legacy projects—the kind of grand brick-andmortar capstone that, once upon a time, the West Side Stadium was supposed to be for Bloomberg.

If the schedules keep, the No. 7 extension will almost be finished, as will the third water tunnel. But if he looks for something more, Bloomberg will be facing a difficult real estate market which may force him to spend more time badgering Related to actually get started at Hudson Yards than cutting any ribbons.

Many people have called for Bloomberg to seek and get control of development at Ground Zero, but to date, he has given no indication that he wants that particular albatross. Still, his frustrations at past failures simmering just below the surface, he does not seem content to have his biggest contributions to the skyline be whatever has grown out of his administration’s comprehensive rezonings over the last two terms and the new Bloomberg LP headquarters on the Upper East Side.

“We have to do the big projects,” he said at a recent press conference, his face scrunched in a grimace as he addressed the current condition of Atlantic Yards.

Throughout his second term, Bloomberg beat back the lame duck idea through some clever politicking: the day after the 2005 election, Kevin Sheekey was on NY1 suggesting a presidential run that aides kept winking at all the way through the end of February last year, when they instead switched to promoting the idea of him running for governor that lasted right up until the real will-he-won’t he term limits extension talk began.

There are no more of these gambits left. All Bloomberg will be playing for is the history books. His supporters say he will be emboldened to make the tough choices.

“Once you make a decision that you’re not facing any future elections, does it give you a greater sense of independence? It does,” said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who this year endorsed the mayor for the second time. “It does, there’s no question about it. I don’t think to the level of irresponsibility, or being a hardhead or telling people to take a walk—I don’t think that’s where he’s at.”

Bloomberg’s critics, though, believe that the search for some legacy project is precisely the thing to fear most about him having a third term, and which may in the end result in a deaf, imperial mayor.

“He’s so enamored of the big mega-projects, and they always want to be the skyline of New York, and it hasn’t happened. The danger would be that in the third term he will try to create that legacy and push through big projects that don’t make sense and will be destroying neighborhoods and communities,” said Thompson campaign manager Eddy Castell. “The fear is that he may actually succeed.”

There are other worries circulating—that he will not actually infuse his administration with as much new blood as he has promised, that his staff will eventually run out of new things to try, that they may get bored before finishing the term, that Bloomberg’s legendary crankiness may begin to shine through and complicate relationships.

And there is the concern that by bypassing most of the traditional forces that support candidates in this city—many of the people who have backed Bloomberg say they did not even consider Thompson as a possibility—the mayor would come into a third term without owing enough to people to have to listen to them. This, they complain, will result in an administration that goes more for headlines than comprehensive help for New Yorkers.

“I liked The Gates,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the Retail Wholesale Department Store Union president who has become a consistent Bloomberg critic, referring to the public art project that lined Central Park in February 2005. “I would have preferred a sound economic policy.”

The mayor’s critics have always accused him of imperiousness, and without another election to think about, that tendency of his may grow. His fellow political players, already emboldened, may find that the anti-Bloomberg message gains more traction than it has before.

He will be facing very different political circumstances than over the last eight years, with everyone expecting John Liu and Bill de Blasio to be stronger critics than either Thompson or Betsy Gotbaum ever were. The City Council chamber, meanwhile, will be more diverse in background and political allegiances than ever before. Many of the prime players throughout the ranks of city politics will be jockeying early and hard for their own spots in the 2013 elections— hardly a recipe for cooperation, especially if Bloomberg does indeed call the charter review commission he has promised. With things like the future of the public advocate’s office and the role of borough presidents potentially on the table as he seeks to remake government in his own image, Bloomberg could end up in conflict with many of these forces directly.

And Bloomberg, who overturned a promise not to overturn term limits, who has sunk a combined quarter of a billion dollars of his own money and shelled out countless more millions to keep the city’s various factions happy, may finally find that he is unable to put the imprint that he desperately wants to on his city.

“Like anything else, when you buy a certain detergent and then another package comes out that’s blue and not red, you wonder maybe that one’s better than the one you’ve been using,” Markowitz said. “We all, in public service, have a shelf life.”