Is Bloomberg (R-NYC Mayor) mortally wounded in political near death experience??!!

[HamdenRice]

The stunning news from New York City today isn't that Mayor Mike Bloomberg was re-elected. It was that the race was much, much closer than anyone expected.

Challenger Bill Thompson lost by just 5% of the vote.

Bloomberg is estimated to have spent around $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Relative unknown Thompson spent six million or so of public finance funds.

Thompson ran an appallingly bad campaign. Besides the fact that no one knew who he was, he focused on the fact that Bloomberg overturned term limits in order to run for a third term. For most of us, as appalling and self-serving as that was, it's inside baseball; it's local pols complaining that their "turn" is getting pushed back.

Bloomberg has a complicated profile here in NY, especially out here in the boonies of the outer boroughs, like Queens and Brooklyn. What Bloomie has going for him more than anything is that he isn't Giuliani. Everyone knows he's a genuinely nice person. He's also a life long Democrat who was using the Republican party line as his bitch, which has a long tradition in NYC, which is solidly Democratic. He's the first white mayor who hasn't dog whistled or been outright racist to get swing votes in southern Staten Island, Bensonhurst, Howard Beach and a few isolated religious communities since Mayor Lindsay.

But he has pillaged the public lands for his real estate buddies. Anyone who thinks this savy businessman spends hundreds of millions of dollars to be mayor at $1 per year isn't calculating losses and gains -- well I've got the Brooklyn Bridge in my sales portfolio. The whole point of the Bloomie administration was to give away tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate to the real estate interests here.

There is no more obvious and public example of this than the Brooklyn Train Yards. In the heart of revived black and white neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Park Slope, Clinton Hill, the open air train yards were given over to the Ratner organization, and the homesteaders' lofts and condos were confiscated using eminent domain.

Moreover, Bloomie used the property taxes of the modest working class houses of the outer boroughs as his municipal ATM machine to avoid taxing the mega rich, who are his real constituency. Bloomberg's property tax hikes are as much responsible for the foreclosure crisis as the sub prime mortgage industry and the resetting of interest rates. He plunged thousands of homeowners into foreclosure.

His running of the educational system was laughable -- teaching to tests in order to prove phony "improvements."

So why did the public vote almost 50/50 for an unknown who ran a lackluster campaign that seemed to have one eye on how to cash out on its friendship with Bloomie after throwing the fight?

[roguevalley]

1. makes you wonder what might have happened if obama and others

had helped there.

[yourguide]

2. Bloomberg lost in Brooklyn BTW n/t