Me: Frank Lynch

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Blaming the left, thoughtlessly. Bloomberg will apparently be seeking a third term as NYC Mayor; some think his stewardship will be especially valuable during financially tumultuous times. Doing so would require a change in the law, as there's a two term limit for the Mayor's office here.

The idea is inviting unfair comparisons with the behavior of Rudy Giuliani in the days following 9/11, as Giuliani was ending his second term. (You may even remember that 9/11 was the day of the mayoral primary.) Over at NRO's The Corner, Andy McCarthy goes so far as to predict that the concept of a third term for Bloomberg won't raise the same ruckus, presumably because of local political bias, media bias, and similar claptrap:

Bloomberg Will Seek To Blow Out Term Limits Law and Run for Third Term as NYC Mayor [Andy McCarthy]

NYTimes has the story here. There has been speculation about this for months, but apparently Mayor Bloomberg will exploit the timing of the credit crisis demands, arguing that his steady hand is indispensible.

After 9/11, the mere suggestion that the emergency conditions made it appropriate for Rudy Giuliani to seek a term-limit repeal and run for a third term spurred great howling. But Bloomberg is a liberal much loved by the Times. I'm betting the tsk-tsk'ing will be muted.

But McCarthy has forgotten a crucial difference: Bloomberg is supposedly going to work to change the term limit law first, and then run for a third term. All on the up and up. Giuliani, however, was considering getting his second term extended, rather than change the law first:

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, reconsidering his position that the mayoral election should go on without him, believes that New Yorkers should be able to decide who leads the city out of these troubled times, even if it includes an extension of his term, people close to the mayor said last night.

While Mr. Giuliani is barred from serving another consecutive term under the city's term limits law, he has rebuffed questions about his view of the matter in recent days. He is expected to address the issue directly as early as today, less than 24 hours before voters are to go to the polls in the rescheduled mayoral primary.

...

Last night, two officials who work closely with the mayor said they were told that Mr. Giuliani would publicly state his support for allowing voters to seek a way to choose him in the general election. The officials would not be more specific.

Any announcement by the mayor that even suggests he will personally insert himself into a battle to interfere in the term limit law would not come as good news to the other men running for mayor. All of them have had to carefully pivot between echoing the resounding feeling in the city that the mayor has handled this crisis in a masterly way and building the case that they are able to pick up his mantle, all while barely campaigning.

Even if Giuliani abandoned the hope for something so, uh, extra legal as a "term extension" and sought instead to repeal term limits, there was only a blink between the rescheduled mayoral primary and the November vote. At best, Giuliani's efforts would not have allowed reasonable time to consider the issues involved in setting aside a term limit law; and the concept of him extending his term was a laugh at the time.

[W]ith six weeks until the general election, the Republican mayor would have to find a way to get his name on the ballot. If he did not, he would have to rely on the extremely difficult route of trying to win election as mayor as a write-in candidate. That would be hard in almost any city in this country, but casting a write-in vote is so cumbersome in New York that the city's Board of Elections has posted a video on its Web site demonstrating how it is done.

Mr. Giuliani's advisers declined to say how they might overcome these obstacles. But there was no shortage of suggestions yesterday for ways that Mr. Giuliani might attempt to circumvent existing election law. And there were offers from political figures -- among them, Michael Long, the chairman of the city's Conservative Party, and Herman Badillo, a Republican candidate for mayor -- to help the mayor at least get his name on the ballot.

Giuliani's efforts would have been in no way orderly. It's completely different from the timeline Bloomberg would face, with the mayoral elections a year away.

So yes, Mr. McCarthy, I wouldn't expect a ruckus over Bloomberg either, but not for the reasons you cite.

UPDATE: Those examples from 2001 don't really do the issue justice; Giuliani really did try to extend his term, and strong-armed candidate Mark Green:

Even as the fires burned at ground zero, Democrats and Republicans campaigned in a mayoral election. In late September Mr. Giuliani summoned Mr. Green, who was running in the Democratic primary, to his command post.

Mr. Giuliani, as Mr. Green recalled, was blunt: I want to remain in office three more months. I have a great team, I can lobby Washington. I’m being reasonable, he cautioned; my supporters want me to run for a new term.

Oh yes, he added, I need your answer tonight.

Mr. Green was taken aback. Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, was hours away. His closest advisers, many of whom were Jewish, would not pick up the phone.

"He made it clear he would invest his Churchillian popularity in hitting whomever did not go along with him," Mr. Green said in an interview.

That many wanted the mayor to stay on is undeniable. But American electoral democracy rarely pauses. Abraham Lincoln held elections in 1864. Franklin D. Roosevelt stood for re-election as World War II raged.

"It was a very dangerous idea," said Mr. Schwarz, the former corporation counsel. "The knight on the white horse is always indispensable in his own mind."

I sure hope there's more to this story. Word has it that in an interview with Katie Couric, Governor Palin couldn't name another major Supreme Court case besides Roe v Wade.

Is it wrong of me to be skeptical about this? Like, she couldn't even come up with Dred Scott? Brown vs the Board of Education? I do pray that there had to be some qualifier in the question... Please?
Link | | | 10:42 PM | Home
 

Call out to New Yorkers... and those visiting next weekend. Next weekend is "Open House New York" - - the weekend when plenty of places open their doors and obscure backrooms; many are open through the year, but many offer access to special areas.

I'm tellin' ya, if you're in town, this is the real thing. Open House New York.
Link | | | 8:29 PM | Home

Foreign policy is John McCain's home court? My morning-after opinion of last night's debate is that for an area where the Republicans have been claiming such superiority for Their Man McCain, Obama did well enough that independents and the inquisitive are going to dig deeper into the details of the points of disagreement, and that McCain's advantage will, before the weekend is over, have eroded.

For instance, there was enough to and fro over what Kissinger actually said about preconditions for negotiations, that no one could draw an educated conclusion by referring to something more independent than the campaign web sites, or their "tried and true" blogs which salve their consciences. Eventually, they'll hit the analysis of a site like factcheck.org or content which is similar or derivative:

Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran "without preconditions," but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for "high level" talks with Iran starting at the secretary of state level and said, "I do not believe that we can make conditions." After the debate the McCain campaign issued a statement quoting Kissinger as saying he didn’t favor presidential talks with Iran.

(There's more detail at that link above, I only clipped a summary analysis.)

I think it's impossible to say who "won" the debate, because a lot of it depends on whether or not people will dig into what the candidates said. When Obama reported that McCain said he wouldn't meet with the leader of Spain, what was the audience thinking? If they believed Obama that McCain actually said it (he did), did they register this as another slip of the tongue on McCain's part, or did they see it as an expression of genuine policy? Moments like this called John McCain's superiority on foreign policy into question, and I think that alone is significant. So in the end I'm not sure if it's 'won' the debate versus best achieved objectives.

I also think Obama didn't go far enough with one of the seeds he was trying to plant: when he was talking about the McCain focus on Iraq, I don't think he did enough to point out how disadvantageous that's been not just with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan (he did that, sure), but with respect to Iran and North Korea. McCain said a couple times that leaving Iraq would make Iran more prominent in the region; but they have become more prominent thanks to the failed Bush policy. (The Bush policy dug us into this hole, and it's time to rethink whether or not we should continue digging this way. Sadr isn't taking his cues from Miss Manners, and he's not going to go away, and he's not going to switch to Miss Manners no matter what we do.) We all know that North Korea kicked out the UN inspectors this week, and while liberals crowed that Bush had adopted Clinton's policies in dealing with North Korea, and while I don't know what might have worked better, we all know now that Iraq wasn't the menace.

I have to leave soon, but I think Obama certainly put the ball into play, and that was great. In the meantime, if you here people crowing about how McCain "won," in 2004 Kerry "won" the firt debate, and there was this 2004 post from NRO's Corner on that point:

INTERESTING [KJL]
More of what Bush camp is noting: How important is "winning" the first debate? Since 1984, when Gallup began asking the question, "Regardless of which candidate you happen to support, who do you think did the better job in the debate?", only one candidate to win this measure in the first debate went on to be elected. In 1996, Bill Clinton "won" the first debate and went on to be elected President. Candidates Gore, Perot, Dukakis, and Mondale all "won" their first debates, but failed to win election.

Sept. 30, 2004: Kerry 53/ Bush 37 (-16)
Oct. 3, 2000: Gore 48/Bush 41 (-7)
Oct. 6, 1996 Clinton 51/Dole 32 (-19)
Oct. 11, 1992 Perot: 47/Clinton 30/ Bush 16 (-17, -31)
Sept. 28, 1998 Dukakis 38/ Bush 29 (-9)
Sept. 28-30, 1984 Mondale 54/Reagan 35 (-19)

That 84 example is a tad relief.

Of course, 2004 is one more example of the first debate "winner" losing the election. We'll have to see how much they talk about this in 2008.
Link | | | 9:37 AM | Home
 

Some Bill Monroe for ya... Uncle Pen.

I heard he wasn't a nice guy, though.
Link | | | 8:58 PM | Home
 

John McCain's "postpone the debate" is grandstanding, of course. McCain has suggested that the first debate, slated for Friday night, needs to be delayed because of the financial bailout sitting on Congress's desk. Obama has rejected the idea, and appropriately so. McCain has forgotten that financial issues are not his strong point and never have been; his opinion is not so important here, and it's not "leadership" when you overreact and grandstand like this. It all smacks of Al Haig's "I'm in control here, now" when Reagan was shot; Haig was in no Constitutional position, as Chief of Staff Secretary of State, to assume control.

McCain seems to have lost his humility: he's not important here. It's more important for him to play his assigned role as a candidate for the President and debate on Friday night.

Now, on that note... what can we expect from McCain on Friday night? I think we're bound to hear lip service mention of the Anbar Awakening, and in the right chronology vs. the surge this time (similar to Bush's "of course I remember who attacked us on 9/11" in that debate with John Kerry). But I also figure that immediately after the lip service reference, McCain will go to a statement like "but the fact is" and introduce some fact as being a result of the surge, when in fact the result can't be factually tied to the surge. Look out for that phrase "the fact is." It's generally anything but, just used to buttress a questionable position.

UPDATE: Corrected text above thanks to Joel (in the comments).
Link | | | 6:40 PM | Home

But, Senator McCain... McCain has positioned his campaign as lobbyist-free, and last week pounced on Obama for supposed ties to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (I forget which, but a honcho there was an Obama donor). But et tu, John: the New York Time is reporting that the lobbying firm of Rick Davis, McCain's advisor, was getting $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac. Even in recent months, when Davis has been on leave in order to make McCain's campaign 'cleaner,' Davis has continued to benefit, because he's an equity stake holder:

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years. (Ed: "undercuts"?)

...

[Sources] said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.

The article also says nobody but Davis worked on the account. Little effort... $15,000 a month. Nice work if you can get it!

(It's worth reminding, or noting, that on Monday the McCain campaign held a telephone conference call whining that the New York Times was off base in their allegations about the camp's lobbyist ties.)
Link | | | 8:17 AM | Home
 

John McCain is a funny man. This just in...

MEDIA, Pa. -- Senator John McCain intensified his political attacks against Senator Barack Obama late today as he charged that his Democratic rival was frozen in the face of the financial turmoil gripping the country.

"The truth is, we don’t have time to wait for Senator Obama to recover from his paralysis in the face of this crisis," Mr. McCain told a roaring crowd at a rally outside the flag-draped Delaware County Courthouse here. Mr. McCain added, shouting, that "one week after this crisis began, Senator Obama has still not offered a plan of any kind" and that "Senator Obama has been M.I.A., my friends. That means missing in action."

Strike you as funny? I mean, shall we point out the obvious? There's plenty of time to wait for both Obama and McCain, seeing as how neither of them are President. There is no need for either one of them to turn on a dime here. None.

And should we also point out that earlier in the season the McCain camp thought Obama was being presumptuous on his European tour? Johnny's obviously forgotten that part.

Not to mention that, as a mere candidate. neither he nor Obama are getting all the information they'd get if they were President; and never mind the fact that "rapid response" has had us rushing into fires of late with no water in the hose.

Go for it, John: maybe your hand-picked audiences yuk it up, but cooler heads don't.
Link | | | 10:05 PM | Home

This is Captain America Calling, Part 2. Europe and Japan aren't so hot to trot with the bail-out suitors, their dance cards are all filled up.

OK, so the Kinks song wasn't exactly persuasive. Maybe some Randy Newman? As in, "they all hate us anyhow..."
Link | | | 9:49 PM | Home
 

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