Friday, December 19, 2008

THE VILLAGE VOICE ON BLOOMBERG-CRAT KENNEDY

I've said I resent the fact that the movement to put Caroline Kennedy into the Senate is more connected to Mike Bloomberg than, apparently, the Democratic Party. Wayne Barrett, who's been reporting on local politics for The Village Voice for a million years, reinforces what I've been thinking -- and says that, yes, this could help keep a Democrat out of City Hall (for the fifth straight election):

... the ground war in New York is being waged out of City Hall. The same bluebloods who brought us Mike Bloomberg's term-limit extension have now joined the campaign for Senator Caroline Kennedy, and not just because they love Sweet Caroline.

If [Governor David] Paterson bows to the Kennedy surge, he may end whatever chance his Harlem neighbor Bill Thompson [the Democratic city comptroller] has of becoming the city's second black mayor.

How is that the case? Well...

Bloomberg's 2009 campaign and Kennedy's 2010 campaign will be run out of the same offices at Knickerbocker SKD, where consultant Josh Isay already helped orchestrate the term limits coup for clients Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn....

Imagine it's a few months from now, with the New York mayoral race approaching. Senator Caroline Kennedy endorses Bloomberg and wraps her arm around him at event after event. The endorsement of New York's newest Democratic senator--and the slightly less explicit support of Chuck Schumer (whose wife was a Bloomberg commissioner)--combine to neutralize an attempt by President Obama to campaign for a serious Democratic challenger to Bloomberg, who didn't endorse Obama in the presidential election.

With Quinn and the rest of the Democrats compromised by Bloomberg, and perhaps neither Thompson nor Congressman Anthony Weiner, who has already publicly assailed a possible Kennedy appointment, even bothers to run....


But would Caroline Kennedy back Bloomberg rather than a Democrat?

She didn't support a Democrat in 2005. Fernando Ferrer, the Democratic candidate and first Latino ever nominated for citywide office, says she didn't support him. And one source recalls seeing her at a Women for Bloomberg event, though Stu Loeser, the mayor's press secretary, says she was not a member of the group.

Great. Go for it, Democrats.

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