There's Got to Be a Morning After

We just love all of the second guessing surrounding the failure of so many to get aboard the Thompson campaign train-as well as the ridicule of the mayor's rope a dope strategy that we still have trouble believing. After all, they failed to get out their own vote, as 200,000 Bloomberg voters stayed home for a number of possible reasons.

And how about the Marist Poll people sitting on their own pre-election poll that showed Thompson gaining? It starts to look almost conspiratorial to us-especially in light of the NY Times' premature announcement of a Bloomberg win soon after the polls closed.

One of the absolutely most shameless of bogarters at the Thompson election night bash was the Reverand Al Sharpton-the man who, during the campaign, pretended to be supportive of the comptroller, but whose obvious in the Bloomberg tank status was as funny as someone with lockjaw at a fellatio convention. The fact of the matter is that the Rev Al should have been screaming bloody murder when the mayor unleashed millions of dollars of ads to tarnish Bill Thompson's good name. Imagine if a Giuliani had done that.

But then again, Rudy never had the money to buy Al off-not that he would have ever thought of even doing so. So Sharpton joined the list of preachers for hire: Flake, Butts, Bernard, et al; but Al didn't have the decency to admit he had been purchased by giving Bloomberg an outright endorsement. The real shame here is that no one in the media has the cajones to really unmask this huckster-a man of absolutely no morals whatsoever.

But back to the Bloomberg carnival-a campaign that was seen as ridiculously disingenuous by the NY Post's Dave Seifman: "It doesn't make any sense. Mayor Bloomberg's campaign crew's excuses for his shockingly close 4.6 percentage-point win over Bill Thompson go something like this:

* No matter that we consistently told everyone publicly he was leading by double digits, we knew that it was going to be very close. We did this to hurt Thompson's fund-raising and to convince as many Democrats as we could to not go anywhere near him.

* Incumbents got clobbered all over the place last Tuesday, so the mayor's win was an outstanding achievement by our team."

The reality is harsher. There is a significant malaise that the Bloomberg power grab has generated across the city-one that will undoubtedly continue to linger as two eager rivals, John Liu and Bill DeBlasio, begin to nip at his heels: "Bloomberg will also face, for the first time in eight years, a sustained challenge from the other two citywide officeholders, De Blasio and John Liu, the comptroller-elect."

And then there's the city's finances: "The mayor’s surprisingly close five-point win over Thompson only compounds his daunting third-term problems. There’s the $5 billion city-budget deficit (even Bloomberg might balk at paying for that with his own money); coupled with Bloomberg’s election-season vow not to raise taxes, the gap is likely to force cuts in city services next year, unless the economy bounces back sooner than expected. Homelessness and unemployment rates are at painfully high levels. The mayor remains invested with far greater institutional power than the City Council, but council members are angry at having been used by both Bloomberg and Speaker Christine Quinn, and last week’s results will embolden them to put up more of a fight against the mayor’s agenda. The press is on alert for a Bloomberg decline. And there’s widespread public discontent with the mayor’s reign."

So it should be a very interesting four years; and in our view the conditions for a serious deconstruction of the Myth of Mike are readily apparent. He shoulda quite while he was ahead.