Michael Bloomberg, whose personal style is natty, old-guy prep, is likely making a statement about aesthetics as much as health in his proposal to ban slurpy-size sugar drinks from various public venues.

He undoubtedly sees these vast beverage sizes as not only fostering obesity, but vulgarity. Bloomberg is one of the few American politicians who doesn't have to pretend to be a man of the people. His political career exists precisely because he is not average.

Indeed, disdain, of a particular persnickety kind, has been one of his powerful hallmarks. He seems often agnostic as to ideology but very fixed in his ideas about individual comportment – not so much from a values point of view, but from a style perspective. The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg, a booklet published by his company before his political career began, and disappeared immediately thereafter, was largely a set of quips and aphorisms at the expense of the hoi polloi.

He has often ruled, both in his company and in his political life, by personal aversion. Indeed, his office life famously reflected his micromanaged petty dislikes.

This approach to governing, curiously, has not gone all that badly for him. Aside from the beverage industry and assorted libertarian scolds, nobody seems all that riled-up about his extra-legal and strangely impolitic call for a ban on oversize drinks. And this is hardly his first foray into personal behavior. He demonized trans fats without seriously blowback. And more than any other politician in the US, he has personalized the smoking issue. Outside of a few rabid redoubts in California, it is probably harder to smoke in New York than anywhere else in the world – and now, thanks in part to the mayor's dripping scorn, clear public reproach attaches to anyone left with a cigarette.

The mayor's message, in addition to the health point, is that if you guzzle like that, or consume such grease, or still, after everything, go on smoking, you've got not no class or common sense.

This is, surely, authoritarian. It's nanny-state stuff. And yet, he isn't thought of like that sort of scourge or bureaucrat. His bugaboos are qualitatively different than the usual issues that compel over regulation. Bloomberg is making a much more visceral call – he's channeling the great guilt out there. Authoritarians are usually fighting the Zeitgeist; Bloomberg seems to be on top of it.

Clearly, he has a feel for articulating a certain sort of underlying, yet unstated class issue: an attitude he frequently directs toward city hall reporters and teachers' union representatives. It's not so much their lack of breeding he finds contemptible, but their lack of any obvious desire to better themselves.

His is a strangely appealing revulsion, pointedly identifying the small-time and badly-dressed. One is certainly glad not to be a shlumpy reporter or teachers' union official irritating the crabby billionaire.

The big beverage ban is like that. There is no one who has watched a person slurp down a 48oz (or, egad, 72oz) sugar-laden drink who has not had a moment's sense of personal virtue, even relief, not to be the one slurping it. Nobody looks at a big-boy size and says, "I want one". They might ask, "How did I find myself with one?" – but they don't feel proud of it.

Everybody is victimized by a slurpy. The mayor has astutely put the blame on the size of the cup.

Now, of course, this is not the real issue – nor his real message. One can only imagine what the trim and carefully-dressed mayor (even though almost nobody would want to dress the way the mayor does) feels when he finds himself among the overweight – a place you frequently find yourself when you are a politician. He feels, no doubt, the one thing he's not allowed to feel as a politician: grossed out by the electorate.

Curiously, one suspects that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney probably feel the same, but, of course, hesitate to offend the nation. Bloomberg's instincts, on the other hand, after spending a career in the private sector, and making more money than God doing it, remain fairly impolitic, which has been the nature of his sui generis charm.

Indeed, fat may be the truly big issue – and Bloomberg the only politician free enough and bold enough to ride it. From a public policy standpoint, no matter what we achieve, it may be all for naught if everybody is obese. Surely, for Bloomberg, it goes to the core of who he is, and he is who he is because of what he has achieved. Fat represents an anti-achievement ethic. With a little critical interpretation, fat, in the Bloomberg lexicon, is the new "welfare queen".

And it's a New York issue – or anyway, an Upper East Side issue. Sure, the thin on the Upper East Side are rich, but you're never going to get rich if you're fat. And in the Bloomberg view, it's obviously a class issue, with an ever-growing part of the country at risk of becoming not just obese, but downwardly mobile.

It may be worth asking what else can he do before his term ends to impose a new sense of personal decorum on the hoi polloi. Certainly, public food and beverage consumption offer many more areas of potential reform. Our massive walking appetites can't be outlawed, but they can be whittled back. Smell limits, perhaps? Food emitting certain odor levels ought not to leave the originating premise, surely?

And gum, with its permanent sidewalk blotches? And, while we're at it, clipping nails on the subway? And men in cargo shorts? And tattoos?

We all know what the problems are. Let's deal with them, Mike.