A Freewheeling Mayor

He lopes back downstairs. He's on to the science conference he's sponsoring next month, which will feature one of his favorite authors, Alvin Toffler, of "Future Shock" fame.

"Do you know how many patents we had in Mexico City last year?" he says. "One hundred forty. That's nothing. We need new ideas."

Spreading the Wealth

A few days later, more than a thousand people line up in the wee hours outside the cavernous Mexico City Sports Palace. It's a Marcelo Ebrard kind of crowd.

Inside, Nayeli Salas, a 25-year-old motorcycle shop clerk, takes a seat in a sea of plastic folding chairs. Salas rode a bus two hours through Mexico City traffic to be here to collect a housing credit check as part of a program that grants government-backed private loans to people who would not normally qualify for bank loans. She makes $50 a week. The check she'll get this morning is going to allow her to start building a house. She knows whom to thank.

"He's the one who gave us the ice rink," she says.

Across the hall, the crowd buzzes. Over the heads of the audience, Ebrard's Oaxaca Cheese 'do comes into view. At more than six feet, he's taller than almost everyone in the hall.

Ebrard's staff has staged a small eco-fair with booths about sustainable energy and other innovations. The crowd waiting for subsidy checks has been mostly brushing past it all morning. But Ebrard is going to check it out.

"It's like I'm doing an ad for this product," he says, holding up a solar panel brochure.

The cameras go snap, snap, snap.

A woman rushes up and pleads urgently in Ebrard's ear. He turns to an aide and motions for her to write down the woman's name and contact information. A desperate plea for a job? Trouble with dirty cops?

"Her son plays soccer and got moved down to a lower division," the aide says. "She wants him to see what he can do to move him back up."

Ebrard finally makes it to the stage. The functionaries seated next to him assume a classic macho stance, legs spread wide. Ebrard sits with his knees pinched together on a chair that is entirely too small for him, heels out, toes of his penny loafers touching.

When it's his turn to talk, it's all us-vs.-them.

"You pay [your housing loan obligations] better than the people who have access to bank loans," he says.

Outside, he squeezes his long frame into a Honda Civic hybrid, one of only 20 or so imported to Mexico each month, he says.

"You know the average income in the city is $13,000 a year, but half of the people make less than $3,600?" he says.

"That's teeny," he says in English.

The traffic is stalled, so there's time to dream.

"I'd like to have a carnival," he says, "a Mardi Gras-style carnival."