Trying to Turn a Long Shot Into a Shot, Democrats Look at Cobbling a Coalition
Democrats, ready your slingshots.One way or another, a candidate will emerge next fall to face the Bloomberg behemoth, with little more than a ballot line to protect him or her against a billionaire opponent with deep popularity and even deeper resources at his disposal.
The task is surely daunting, but politicos and pundits say cobbling together a coalition to topple the two-term mayor is not impossible. The key, many say, is to begin now as the kinks of the Council's effort to overturn term limits get worked out, as indeed Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens), Comptroller William Thompson (D) and Council Member Tony Avella (D-Queens) have begun to do.
"That's the place to start and to finish," was Fernando Ferrer's advice to those Democrats who seek to avoid his fate as the party's nominee in 2005.
"You have to ask, 'Are we all okay with making up the rules as we go because you got more money than God and all your friends happen to be hyper-billionaires? Are the rules just for the little people?' That resonates every time somebody has to pay a parking ticket."
Stoking the indignation of voters on term limits will be tough, Democratic operatives say, since it is the kind of process question that sends good government groups into a tizzy but generally registers much less with most voters.
Still, this is a start, and the key to making a successful case that the incumbent plays by his own rules and is more attuned to the needs of his billionaire developer buddies and their newspaper publisher pals than the rest of the city.
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"I would go on a rampage. I would argue that he's a plutocrat, a billionaire," said Doug Muzzio, professor of public affairs at Baruch College and a former campaign adviser to David Dinkins. "I'd run against the media and do a real middle class populist campaign, painting him as an out-of-touch elitist. Who did he talk to when he decided to do this? Did he go to Astoria or Bayside or Red Hook? No, he talked to his buddies at the Federal Reserve and the Stock Exchange."But a Sarah Palin-sneering-against-the-elites strategy alone is not likely to be enough to overcome a mayor who has spent over $156 million of his own fortune in his two City Hall runs thus far.
No, that tactic must be mixed with a little Barack Obama magic, said Mark Green, the 2001 Democratic nominee, who calls himself, "the world's expert on what it's like to run against $74 million in this city."
"You have to find a local fundraising version of Obama where you tap into the tens of thousands of small donors who are pissed that Bloomberg broke his word, and then with the magic of 6-1 matching dollars, that adds up to 20-30 million dollars. Bloomberg can spend multiple of that, but if a lot of swing voters are angry at Bloomberg's primary pirouette, you may have something there."
The key, Green and others say, is to then connect the latest flip-flop on term limits into a broader critique of the mayor's policies. One does not stay mayor for seven years in this town without making a fair amount of mistakes and more than a fair share of enemies. Though polls show Bloomberg with a stratospheric approval rating, it was not all that long ago that pedestrians could not walk down city streets without fearing that a crane would tumble on top of them. There are voters in the outer boroughs still smarting over the mayor's plan to charge them a fee to enter into Manhattan, and parents across the city angry at what they see as increased testing and a top-down approach on schools.
The mayor may also have dug himself into a rhetorical hole last summer when he dropped his Republican affiliation and began decrying the very notion of political parties.
If he sticks to his guns in November '09 and eschews running on any line, Bloomberg will find himself on the sixth ballot line, all the way over to the right.
That might be a tough spot to get voters to find, especially in a town where two-thirds of registered voters are Democrats.
"It's very difficult to get elected mayor if you are not on the Democratic or the Republican line," said Democratic consultant Scott Levenson.
Levenson added that Bloomberg would be hard-pressed to try to go back to the parties after so actively shunning them.
"The mayor says he's committed to non-partisan campaigns," Levenson said, "so you try to convince him to set the example."
Part of the reason Bloomberg has remained so effective in office, however, is that he has reached out to core Democratic constituencies like labor unions and minorities and kept them in the fold. He has a strong record to run on, and a history of putting together masterful campaigns.
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Come next November, he may even have the support of many Democrats on the City Council, who will, if a term limits extension passes, owe the mayor for their immediate political future, and who will have overturned a twice-voted-upon referendum in order to give Bloomberg another shot at the other end of City Hall.Each Council member still holds considerable sway over his district and is able to mobilize grassroots support and get-out-the-vote operations on Election Day if he chooses to.
As the Council prepares to vote, opinion on 2009 remains divided, even among those who back Bloomberg's bid for a term limit extension.
"There is no question that if the mayor is able to run for re-election, I would support him 100 percent," said Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), who received Bloomberg's endorsement for his own failed State Senate primary campaign and who, as chair of the committee overseeing the term limit extension hearings, has decided to remain publicly neutral.
But fellow Brooklyn Democrat Lew Fidler, who has also signaled his openness to changing the law legislatively, said that just because extending term limits could be seen as a vote of approval for Bloomberg, that did not mean he would back Bloomberg next year. Fidler said he was committed to supporting the Democratic nominee-assuming that nominee is either Thompson or Weiner-and predicted that a large majority of his fellow Council members would do the same.
"If Anthony and Billy stay true to their word and run, I think most people will end up supporting whoever is the winner of the primary. If they don't, and if there's a door number three, I think I want to see what's behind that door before I commit to it," he said.
And Council Member Domenic Recchia (D-Brooklyn), who has publicly carried the mayor's water on the term limit extension, appearing on New York 1 and elsewhere to argue the case for four more years, said on the eve of the term limit bill's introduction on the floor of the Council that he had not yet made up his mind.
"This is about the democratic process," he said. "Now is not the time to get into that."
But even if most members come around to support their fellow Democrat, will it be enough? Unlikely, most political observers say, considering the power of money and incumbency on elections and the mayor's popularity. But a lot can happen between now and next November.
He could get blamed if the economy stays sour. If the economy rebounds, his central reason for running again could evaporate.
It is a long shot, even the most loyal Democrats say. But it is still a shot.
dfreedlander@cityhallnews.com
