Sunday, October 23, 2005
Money talks in race for victory
EVEN by US standards, campaign spending in the New York mayoral election race has reached levels bordering on the obscene.
By the time the November 8 poll comes around, the billionaire Democrat-turned-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to have splurged an extraordinary $US100million-plus of his own money trying to get re-elected.
When Bloomberg gave his personal fortune a $US74 million haircut to fund the advertising blizzard that won him the 2001 campaign, people were amazed. Now that sum looks almost measly.
In US politics, only presidential campaigns exceed this level of spending, so you can't help but feel sympathy for Democrat Freddy Ferrer whose campaign, so far worth about $US7million ($9.3million), is dirt-poor by comparison.
He's up against a man worth $US5billion, who was ranked the 40th richest American by Forbes magazine and who is seemingly prepared to spend whatever it takes to win again.
The result is that Ferrer is being hammered 7 to 1 in TV advertising, and that's before taking into account the exceptional production quality of the Bloomberg material.
And if that's not enough, Ferrer is also being crucified in the polls. The last two have had him trailing Bloomberg by 27 and 28 points. The fact that Bloomberg continues to spend his own money at such a staggering rate when the polls have him so far ahead only serves to underline just how much he wants to win.
But for a real sense of just how desperately Bloomberg craves a second term, the tragic case of the baby boy who died last year after contracting the herpes simplex virus in a little-known Hebrew circumcision rite is instructive.
The infant and his twin brother became exposed to the cold sore virus while undergoing metzitzah b'peh, a bizarre oral-genital suction practice that involves a mohel -- a person ordained by the Jewish faith to perform circumcision -- sucking blood from the freshly mutilated penis to clean out impurities.
According to court documents, the twins developed fever and lesions in the genital area soon after the procedure. The were admitted to hospital but two days later, one of the boys died of liver failure attributed to Type 1 herpes simplex virus.
While liberal Jews today subscribe to safer and more politically correct methods of infant circumcision, the traditional method has remained in favour with many Orthodox Jews in New York, particularly those of the Hasidic sect.
So when Bloomberg responded to the baby boy's death by ordering health commissioner Tom Frieden to issue a lawsuit against Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer of Brooklyn, the mohel allegedly responsible, there was an outcry from sections of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
At first, nobody thought Bloomberg, a liberal Jew himself, would cave in. After all, public health policy, along with aggressively raising education standards in New York schools and giving his highly popular Police Commissioner Ray Kelly carte blanche on anything needed to guard against terrorism, had been the hallmark of his administration.
In these key areas, upsetting sectional interests in the name of principle had never bothered Bloomberg. His highly unpopular (but now accepted) decision to ban smoking in New York restaurants is a classic case in point.
But an election year is different so in August, Bloomberg agreed to discuss the circumcision issue with concerned rabbis.
After the meeting, rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organisation spelled out clearly what Bloomberg was told. "The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practised for over 5000 years," Niederman said. "We do not change. And we will not change."
A month later, Bloomberg and Frieden folded. The city of New York quietly withdrew its lawsuit against Rabbi Fischer, along with an accompanying court order banning him from using the oral suction technique.
But in the most shameless play of all, Bloomberg turned the whole case over to an Orthodox rabbinical court, or bet din, for resolution. It was possibly the first time in New York history that the city had asked a religious body to adjudicate an issue of public health.
Forced to carry the can, Frieden performed a spectacular backflip, saying his department had "no intention of banning or regulating the practice of metzitzah b'peh" and that he was satisfied that Fischer would not practise circumcision until the Jewish court had ruled.
A grateful Niederman thanked Bloomberg for showing "respect and support for religious Jews to practise their religion".
Nobody, not even Ferrer, seemed at all interested in research published in the August 2004 issue of the medical journal Pediatrics showing that ritual Jewish circumcision practices involving direct oral-genital contact carried a serious risk for transmission of HSV from mohels to neonates.
While Bloomberg's people reject claims the Mayor has put fear of an election-year backlash from Jewish voters ahead of protecting defenceless children, New York Post political editor Greg Birnbaum is not so sure.
"I was very surprised the Mayor threw up his hands and punted this off to a Jewish religious court for them to decide -- basically, let the Jewish community decide on their own," Birnbaum says.
"For a mayor who has taken such an active interest in public health issues -- made it a personal crusade -- it just doesn't fit. Was it about votes? I don't know, but I think it's a very good question."
Speaking of Bloomberg in the 2001 campaign, the veteran political consultant Norman Adler wondered whether a Jewish candidate unsure of his identity could ever win over a city known for its ethnic tribalism.
To Adler, anyone seeking public office in New York who is fortunate enough to be Jewish should trumpet his Jewishness for all it's worth.
"I think he's basically rich so he doesn't think that the rest of that political stuff is necessary," Adler said at the time. "But he'll learn." The circumcision backdown suggests he has.
But according to City Hall insider George Artz, a press secretary to former mayor Ed Koch and a father confessor to a generation of New York politicians, the city's Jewish vote can never be assumed.
Artz says that while Jewish voters are by and large a liberal to middle-of-the-road bloc that usually tends to vote Democrat (something he says won't be a problem for Bloomberg, who only became a Republican because he couldn't win a Democratic primary), their loyalty, even to Jewish candidates, can be fickle.
"Koch is a Jew but when he was mayor, he always felt the Irish were more loyal to him than the Jews," Artz says. "And you've got to remember there is a significant Orthodox Jewish vote out there which is conservative."
This was clear in last year's presidential election when two of the only three election districts George Bush managed to win in New York were in Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.
Bloomberg has courted these areas heavily while at the same time distancing himself from the GOP and from Bush and the war in Iraq in particular, a political necessity given that registered Democrats in New York outnumber Republicans five to one and polls that show the President is loathed here more than anywhere else in the nation.
But at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in June, Bloomberg extolled the Bush administration's Middle East policies and insisted the Democrats cared little for Israel, a country he visited for the first time this year as Bush's representative at the opening of a new Holocaust memorial in Tel Aviv.
Such political inconsistency, however, is a regular feature of New York political life and Bloomberg has benefited from it most through the willingness of many well-known Democrats to publicly support his re-election.
The list includes Koch, ex-governor Hugh Carey, a fistful of currently serving state assembly members, two borough presidents, eight city council members and numerous Democrat-affiliated trade unions and non-government organisations.
While such treasonable conduct is the exception rather than the rule in Australian context, New Yorkers regard it as normal. The bigger sin, according to Artz, is to talk about working constructively with whoever wins.
"In New York, you have to be for somebody," Artz says. "Those who sit on the fence get splinters. Smart people go with the guy who is going to be the winner."
Birnbuam says Bloomberg's technocratic rather than political leadership style has also been a factor in Democrat desertions. "The Democrats who have crossed over don't feel like they've betrayed their principals," he says. "It's not like a Democrat supporting Bush, for example."
With two weeks to go, Bloomberg is clearly the favourite but, remembering the double-digit swing that gave him victory in the final week in 2001, he is unlikely to leave anything to chance. As Birnbaum puts it, Bloomberg has "more money than God".
According to data compiled by Nielsen Media Research, Bloomberg ran more than 5000 ads on free-to-air TV between May and September, compared with less than 1500 by Ferrer. On cable TV, the imbalance is even more profound.
According to a New York Times review of advertising purchase orders at Time Warner, Bloomberg has so far bought more than 5000 cable spots compared with Ferrer's 600.
Ferrer's campaign team claims Bloomberg is now spending more than $US2 million a week on television advertising alone and that the typical viewer is seeing 20 of his ads a week compared with just three or four of theirs. Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin expert in political advertising, says Bloomberg is "carpet bombing" Ferrer out of contention.
But if money really can talk so loud, Bloomberg might want to listen to Jonathan Zenilman, a Jewish professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, a research centre named after the mayor who has been its biggest financial supporter.
An expert on sexually transmitted disease, Zenilman has denounced Bloomberg's failure to ban Jewish mohels from sucking blood with their mouths from a baby's penis in the circumcision rite.
"It is a major public health hazard," Zenilman has said. Hopefully, when the election is over, Bloomberg will listen.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17009944%255E2703,00.html
EVEN by US standards, campaign spending in the New York mayoral election race has reached levels bordering on the obscene.
By the time the November 8 poll comes around, the billionaire Democrat-turned-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to have splurged an extraordinary $US100million-plus of his own money trying to get re-elected.
When Bloomberg gave his personal fortune a $US74 million haircut to fund the advertising blizzard that won him the 2001 campaign, people were amazed. Now that sum looks almost measly.
In US politics, only presidential campaigns exceed this level of spending, so you can't help but feel sympathy for Democrat Freddy Ferrer whose campaign, so far worth about $US7million ($9.3million), is dirt-poor by comparison.
He's up against a man worth $US5billion, who was ranked the 40th richest American by Forbes magazine and who is seemingly prepared to spend whatever it takes to win again.
The result is that Ferrer is being hammered 7 to 1 in TV advertising, and that's before taking into account the exceptional production quality of the Bloomberg material.
And if that's not enough, Ferrer is also being crucified in the polls. The last two have had him trailing Bloomberg by 27 and 28 points. The fact that Bloomberg continues to spend his own money at such a staggering rate when the polls have him so far ahead only serves to underline just how much he wants to win.
But for a real sense of just how desperately Bloomberg craves a second term, the tragic case of the baby boy who died last year after contracting the herpes simplex virus in a little-known Hebrew circumcision rite is instructive.
The infant and his twin brother became exposed to the cold sore virus while undergoing metzitzah b'peh, a bizarre oral-genital suction practice that involves a mohel -- a person ordained by the Jewish faith to perform circumcision -- sucking blood from the freshly mutilated penis to clean out impurities.
According to court documents, the twins developed fever and lesions in the genital area soon after the procedure. The were admitted to hospital but two days later, one of the boys died of liver failure attributed to Type 1 herpes simplex virus.
While liberal Jews today subscribe to safer and more politically correct methods of infant circumcision, the traditional method has remained in favour with many Orthodox Jews in New York, particularly those of the Hasidic sect.
So when Bloomberg responded to the baby boy's death by ordering health commissioner Tom Frieden to issue a lawsuit against Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer of Brooklyn, the mohel allegedly responsible, there was an outcry from sections of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
At first, nobody thought Bloomberg, a liberal Jew himself, would cave in. After all, public health policy, along with aggressively raising education standards in New York schools and giving his highly popular Police Commissioner Ray Kelly carte blanche on anything needed to guard against terrorism, had been the hallmark of his administration.
In these key areas, upsetting sectional interests in the name of principle had never bothered Bloomberg. His highly unpopular (but now accepted) decision to ban smoking in New York restaurants is a classic case in point.
But an election year is different so in August, Bloomberg agreed to discuss the circumcision issue with concerned rabbis.
After the meeting, rabbi David Niederman of the United Jewish Organisation spelled out clearly what Bloomberg was told. "The Orthodox Jewish community will continue the practice that has been practised for over 5000 years," Niederman said. "We do not change. And we will not change."
A month later, Bloomberg and Frieden folded. The city of New York quietly withdrew its lawsuit against Rabbi Fischer, along with an accompanying court order banning him from using the oral suction technique.
But in the most shameless play of all, Bloomberg turned the whole case over to an Orthodox rabbinical court, or bet din, for resolution. It was possibly the first time in New York history that the city had asked a religious body to adjudicate an issue of public health.
Forced to carry the can, Frieden performed a spectacular backflip, saying his department had "no intention of banning or regulating the practice of metzitzah b'peh" and that he was satisfied that Fischer would not practise circumcision until the Jewish court had ruled.
A grateful Niederman thanked Bloomberg for showing "respect and support for religious Jews to practise their religion".
Nobody, not even Ferrer, seemed at all interested in research published in the August 2004 issue of the medical journal Pediatrics showing that ritual Jewish circumcision practices involving direct oral-genital contact carried a serious risk for transmission of HSV from mohels to neonates.
While Bloomberg's people reject claims the Mayor has put fear of an election-year backlash from Jewish voters ahead of protecting defenceless children, New York Post political editor Greg Birnbaum is not so sure.
"I was very surprised the Mayor threw up his hands and punted this off to a Jewish religious court for them to decide -- basically, let the Jewish community decide on their own," Birnbaum says.
"For a mayor who has taken such an active interest in public health issues -- made it a personal crusade -- it just doesn't fit. Was it about votes? I don't know, but I think it's a very good question."
Speaking of Bloomberg in the 2001 campaign, the veteran political consultant Norman Adler wondered whether a Jewish candidate unsure of his identity could ever win over a city known for its ethnic tribalism.
To Adler, anyone seeking public office in New York who is fortunate enough to be Jewish should trumpet his Jewishness for all it's worth.
"I think he's basically rich so he doesn't think that the rest of that political stuff is necessary," Adler said at the time. "But he'll learn." The circumcision backdown suggests he has.
But according to City Hall insider George Artz, a press secretary to former mayor Ed Koch and a father confessor to a generation of New York politicians, the city's Jewish vote can never be assumed.
Artz says that while Jewish voters are by and large a liberal to middle-of-the-road bloc that usually tends to vote Democrat (something he says won't be a problem for Bloomberg, who only became a Republican because he couldn't win a Democratic primary), their loyalty, even to Jewish candidates, can be fickle.
"Koch is a Jew but when he was mayor, he always felt the Irish were more loyal to him than the Jews," Artz says. "And you've got to remember there is a significant Orthodox Jewish vote out there which is conservative."
This was clear in last year's presidential election when two of the only three election districts George Bush managed to win in New York were in Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn.
Bloomberg has courted these areas heavily while at the same time distancing himself from the GOP and from Bush and the war in Iraq in particular, a political necessity given that registered Democrats in New York outnumber Republicans five to one and polls that show the President is loathed here more than anywhere else in the nation.
But at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in June, Bloomberg extolled the Bush administration's Middle East policies and insisted the Democrats cared little for Israel, a country he visited for the first time this year as Bush's representative at the opening of a new Holocaust memorial in Tel Aviv.
Such political inconsistency, however, is a regular feature of New York political life and Bloomberg has benefited from it most through the willingness of many well-known Democrats to publicly support his re-election.
The list includes Koch, ex-governor Hugh Carey, a fistful of currently serving state assembly members, two borough presidents, eight city council members and numerous Democrat-affiliated trade unions and non-government organisations.
While such treasonable conduct is the exception rather than the rule in Australian context, New Yorkers regard it as normal. The bigger sin, according to Artz, is to talk about working constructively with whoever wins.
"In New York, you have to be for somebody," Artz says. "Those who sit on the fence get splinters. Smart people go with the guy who is going to be the winner."
Birnbuam says Bloomberg's technocratic rather than political leadership style has also been a factor in Democrat desertions. "The Democrats who have crossed over don't feel like they've betrayed their principals," he says. "It's not like a Democrat supporting Bush, for example."
With two weeks to go, Bloomberg is clearly the favourite but, remembering the double-digit swing that gave him victory in the final week in 2001, he is unlikely to leave anything to chance. As Birnbaum puts it, Bloomberg has "more money than God".
According to data compiled by Nielsen Media Research, Bloomberg ran more than 5000 ads on free-to-air TV between May and September, compared with less than 1500 by Ferrer. On cable TV, the imbalance is even more profound.
According to a New York Times review of advertising purchase orders at Time Warner, Bloomberg has so far bought more than 5000 cable spots compared with Ferrer's 600.
Ferrer's campaign team claims Bloomberg is now spending more than $US2 million a week on television advertising alone and that the typical viewer is seeing 20 of his ads a week compared with just three or four of theirs. Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin expert in political advertising, says Bloomberg is "carpet bombing" Ferrer out of contention.
But if money really can talk so loud, Bloomberg might want to listen to Jonathan Zenilman, a Jewish professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, a research centre named after the mayor who has been its biggest financial supporter.
An expert on sexually transmitted disease, Zenilman has denounced Bloomberg's failure to ban Jewish mohels from sucking blood with their mouths from a baby's penis in the circumcision rite.
"It is a major public health hazard," Zenilman has said. Hopefully, when the election is over, Bloomberg will listen.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17009944%255E2703,00.html
Comments:
Mexico is the number one source of Meth and heroin entering the United States. Send troops to border. Don’t think terrorists and drug dealers haven’t blended in with fruit pickers. Or that fruit pickers aren’t drug mules. Furthermore, we must amend the 14th amendment: nobody who illegally enters USA should have a child that is born here granted citizenship. American citizenship is a privilege secured by blood, sweat and tears. It shouldn’t come so cheap. It shouldn’t be treated with such disrespect. In essence, disregard for our laws illuminates the true colors of many illegal immigrants. And they aren’t red, white and blue. Yes, some illegal aliens (disabled and elderly) require special treatment. Some love America. Still, the reality is Mexico sends us their most uneducated, uncivilized people, so they don’t have to educate or provide services for them. It’s time to force Mexico to take care of their needy citizens. The fiesta on America's dime is over.
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: February 10, 2008 10:05 AM
: February 10, 2008 10:05 AM
