For those us who have been watching the evolution of Mayor Bloomberg these last two years, the visit he made to Haiti this week was memorable. No doubt the mayor’s motives in making the trip were – in the best sense of the word – political, in that there are between 300,000 and 500,000 Haitians in New York, many of whom vote and who, in aggregate, have the potential, like a number of other communities, to be a swing constituency in a close race. But it was impossible for those, such as our Dina Temple-Raston, who were with him not to perceive how deeply this billionaire businessman often derided as being haughty or unfeeling was affected by the spectacle of poverty and need that he saw in Port-au-Prince, where thousands came out to see him, many standing on vast mounds of rotting garbage as he made his way into the nation’s most famous slum of Cite Soleil.

Security officials had discouraged the mayor from making a visit to a dredging project two miles inside Cite Soleil. Loyalists of the recently deposed strongman, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have been hiding out in the shantytown, using its corrugated tin huts and narrow alleys to stash weapons they refuse to turn over to the United Nations. The result has been a community rife with lawlessness. Marines seeking to jumpstart the dredging of hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage from the Cite’s main canal had been frequently targets of snipers. U.N. troops venture in cautiously. Ambassador James Foley has been in Haiti 10 months, but his first visit to the slum was with Mr. Bloomberg this week. Embassy officials told Ms. Temple-Raston that he had never had the security cover he felt was necessary to make the trip.

Mr. Bloomberg had his normal security detail and more than a hundred armed U.N. peacekeepers guarding his route. He initially appeared to be taken aback by the squalor around him and then started asking about the dredging project in a way that was more reminiscent of a private entrepreneur mulling a complex project than a municipal official on a political tour. All the focus on Mr. Bloomberg’s wish to woo the Haitian community ahead of the 2005 elections may be short-sighted and misplaced. Mr. Bloomberg has privately told friends for years that after running Bloomberg L.P. there were only two jobs that interested him: Mayor of New York and president of the World Bank. His trip to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere may be the stepping stone to the latter, though the trip he has just made will help him in his quest to gain a second term at City Hall.