Mayor Bloomberg seems to be under the impression that his problem in the polls has something to do with his wealth. Lately he has been joking that if he went by the papers, he would assume his first name was Billionaire. And when the Forbes annual ranking of billionaires showed he moved up to the 63 rd spot from 72 nd last year, the mayor was suddenly seeming downright bashful about his hard-earned fortune. In his weekly radio show, he said, “I wish people wouldn’t focus on the luck that I’ve had.”

Our own impression here is that the mayor sells himself considerably short. Mr. Bloomberg, after all, worked his way up from humble beginnings to the status of a certified press baron. His story is as American as apple pie. It strikes us that, if anything, this is one of the primary things New Yorkers genuinely admire about him.

If there’s a reason that 53% of New Yorkers think, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, that the mayor doesn’t care about “the needs and problems of people like” them, it has less to do with his money that his policies. He doesn’t seem to grasp that even a few hundred dollars a year in an increase in property taxes is a big deal to a lot of homeowners in New York. The kind of tax he wants to pile onto commuters is, for most of them, devastating. When it comes in contradiction of campaign promises, many people find it galling. Our own advice to the mayor would be that this tax revolt isn’t about his money. It’s about other people’s desire to hang on to the little they’ve got.