For the second time in a week,
The Times' Joyce Purnick has written sneeringly that Freddy Ferrer "can't connect with voters." There's some truth to this, and it could have to do with the fact that Ferrer has run an overcautious campaign so far. But it just might have more to do with the fact that the Grey Lady has turned her pages into a giant ad for Mike Bloomberg - not to mention Bloomberg's 17-fold cash advantage.
Purnick pulled the mask off with today's piece, though - she editorialized pretty freely on yesterday's mayoral debate, asserting that "it was impossible to listen to yesterday's debate without coming away feeling that there are truly two New Yorks - the old city and the emerging one." Gee, lemme guess which one is Freddy.
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This is a cherished motif for Bloombergian Republicrats (Red Bull Democrats?)- the old city was unruly, frankly dusky, powered by polluting industries tended by untrustworthy, foul-mouthed, sweaty and violence-prone working people they'd just as soon see confined to quaint old cinematic New York. Its mayors were hapless if well-intentioned machine functionaries of suspicious hue, too wedded to the wrong sort of special interests - labor, minority communities and not Wall Street - to be competent stewards. The new city, thanks to a decade-and-a-half of smooth if sometimes autocratic rule by lily-white corporate-style Republican executives, is crime free and largely homogenously populated by the right sort of people. From
Fort Apache, the Bronx and David Dinkins to Sex and the City and Mayor Mike. This is their narrative. If some people get pushed out, well, too bad. We're building a plutocratic utopia here, and if you can't hack it, you can commute from Hoboken to clean our apartments, peasant.
To read The Times, you'd hardly know that New York still suffers from a staggering public school dropout rate, that the middle class is getting squeezed out of the city under a mayor who never met a rent board rent increase proposal he didn't like. You'd never know that homelessness is exploding, or that the city's other half has grown poorer on Mayor Mike's watch. As Purnick puts it:
In Mr. Ferrer's city, most people recognize that a wealthy candidate has the right to spend his money, but think he should not. In Mr. Bloomberg's New York, voters are pragmatic and figure he backs the president and contributes to Republicans to encourage support for the city .... He reiterated that he was spending hs money heavily to combat the city's 5-to-1 registration advantage, but clearly he knows that people do not care.
Well, not the right sort of people, anyway. Nobody that Ms. Purnick knows. But hey, let your hair down, Joyce. After a weeks-long avalanche of Bloomberg puff pieces gracing A1, B1, C1 and even Arts and Leisure, it's pretty clear where the editorial calculus stands on this one. Why fake it? Hardly a column-inch on the substantive policy differences between the candidates has graced the pages of The Times (the singular notable exception being this piece on how some renters in Queens have somehow missed the Bloomberg bandwagon). Instead, we've been treated to a parade of those terribly clever, fluffy campaign strategy pieces that really belong in The Observer, or else pure starch and high fructose corn syrup, such as the Saturday piece on the candidates' sartorial tastes. News flash -- pols prefer suits! This shit was so hot they couldn't even hold it a day for the Sunday Styles. Election? Oh, sorry, we thought it was Fashion Week.
For the most part, coverage of Ferrer - when not overwhelmingly critical - has found its way to the back of the Metro section (though The Times found a piece questioning Ferrer's claim to a hand in the Bronx revival worthy of B1). And let's not forget the series of bizarre articles postulating that those scheming, calculating Clintons, who are publicly campaigning for Ferrer, are privately, in their heart-of-hearts, splitting the difference. Or something. Sure, they may say they support Freddy, they might even do some events for him, but might they hypothetically really love Bloomberg? This kind of shit is so forced, tenditious and premised on winger-worthy Clinton conspiracy theory that it would be laughable were it not prominently featured in our national newspaper of record:
Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Clinton laughed, and talked some more. "All the best," said the mayor as he eventually left the former president's side, making his way onstage for his part in the luncheon. This was a week after Mr. Clinton endorsed Mr. Ferrer. So a joint appearance on stage with Mr. Bloomberg at an event attended by high-profile figures might have sent mixed signals about Mr. Clinton's allegiances.
Aha! It sure might, if... if Times scribes inferred some cryptic meaning in the exchange, that is. So why can't Freddy connect, again? Oh, never you worry your pretty head, dear voter. Here, have a bon bon, courtesy of Bloomberg for Mayor.
There may, in fact, be some connection between Bloomberg's advertising advantage and his popularity with the press. After all, The Times, along with all the other rabidly pro-Bloomberg media outlets in town (and that's, well, all of `em, except sometimes The Post, which might prefer Golisano), presumably pulls in a nice bit of advertising revenue from Bloomberg, both in political ads and city advertising. But more to the point, the city's publishers are all in the same Big Media/Wall Street Old Boys' Club with Bloomberg, while the city's elite reporters, those white, upper-middle-class Harvard-to-Columbia-to-Metro-Foreign-Washington-Metro-tracked wunderkinds, are precisely the sort of voters that adore Bloomberg's anodyne technocratic style and "socially-liberal (i.e., not gay-baiting or overtly racist)," "economically-conservative (i.e., putting the interests of the uberrich elites and upper-middle income property owners over those of working people and renters)" policies. They are the "Starbucks aficionados, Giuliani Democrats and brownstone Brooklynites" to whom one of Purnick's colleagues recently attributed Bloomberg's bedrock support.
Aw, hell, with even UNITE HERE having meekly caved and sent out canvassers for the labor-averse gazillionaire, maybe it's a lost cause anyway. But the smug certainty and over-the-top, singing-at-the-tops-of-their-voices exuberance that characterizes the Times' Bloomberg love-fest really sticks in my craw.
