Goodwin's Canonization of Mayor Mike

The litany of unrelenting sycophancy continues unabated as Micheal Goodwin extols the Bloomberg "flawless" campaign in his Sunday Daily News column. What strikes us is the -yes, but- character of his discussion of the mayor's spending and what it might mean as the mayor launches a second term.

The "only a fool" would dismiss the influence of the mayor's spending is immediately followed by the lionization of the mayor's "historic" achievements. Even the mayor's campaign, one that has spent more money than both of the millionaire gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey combined, is lauded with the kind of praise that manages to totally de-emphasize the sheer unrelenting and overwhelming quality of the mayor's ad barrage.

To make matters even worse Goodwin goes on to commend the mayor for running only positive ads, thereby underplaying the fact that the overwhelming volume of canned messages obviated any need to go negative. The piece by Dave Seifman in today's Post, one that relates the mayor's $118/vote expenditure, underscores the shallowness as well as a degree of smarminess, of the Goodwin perspective.

There is also a certain degree of self-deception as well. Unacknowledged is the fact that the mayor's unparalleled record was insufficient in April to generate any degree of popular approbation. In fact, Mike was running solidly behind his putative Democratic opponent. Apparently the public had yet to get the message that all of our smugly superior media elites had intuited way before the rest of us.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's suppose that Freddy Ferrer was the billionaire and Mikey B was the poor boy from the Bronx. Let's imagine that rich Freddy began a $70 million ad campaign in April with the West Side Stadium/Olympic debacle fresh in the minds of New Yorkers. Add to this onslaught an unrelenting blitz of linking the out-spent mayor to the unpopular Bush administration and its right wing supporters.

Go from here to an attack on the cozy relationship between Deputy Dan Doctoroff and Steve Ross of the Related Companies, one that underscores the fact that the Bloomberg administration is beholden to the special interests. You can imagine what the results might have been. After all it was the effective Cablevision ads that had dragged the mayor's popularity down in the first place.

So please Mike Goodwin, spare us the expert analysis here. You, along with the rest of the toadying front-running Mediaocracy, are going to have to struggle mightily to get out of this cozy sycophancy once the proverbial stuff hits the fan and our mayor, once on the verge of sanctification, finds his popularity plummeting in the face of the crisis that is sure to come in his second term (Will Goodwin and the journalist rat pack experience a bit of buyer's remorse when that happens?).