The Morning After Winners (Thompson) and Losers (Bloomberg, UFT and Anthony Weiner), Updated

Updated Thurs. Nov. 5, 10pm

From the NYTimes today:

Said one top Bloomberg campaign adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect internal discussions: "If a poll had come out showing that the race was within five points, Barack Obama would have swung into town, the United Federation of Teachers would break for Thompson and Mike Bloomberg would not be mayor today."


Addition to loser list: Obama- See below under Losers

The big winner, and maybe the only winner in the mayoral election, was Bill Thompson. 51% to 46%. Add the other anti-Bloomberg candidates and it's a statistical tie: 51-49%.

All along I felt he was running for the 2013 race. Everyone declared him a loser from the very beginning. The obvious issues: Bloomberg was pretty popular and his money. But Thompson also ran an inept campaign, refusing to really go after Bloomberg on his education record and other issues. When Giulianni pulled the race card while campaigning with Bloomberg standing at his side, Thompson showed no fight back. A lot of the enthusiasm for Thompson that existed was due to anti-Bloomberg feeling.

Ed Notes was predicting from the get-go that Thompson didn't want to go overboard, preferring to husband his resources for the next time. And I felt that the lack of the UFT endorsement was a sort of quid quo pro, where he pretty much figured he would get it in 2013 in his face-off with Anthony Weiner, who the UFT despises. Thompson is now the most viable candidate in 2013 and has 4 years to build a war chest.

The losers:
The big loser is Michael Bloomberg. Listen to news reports and he's almost a laughing stock. Jeff Greenberg on Imus calculated what he spent per vote (I think it was thousands) and suggested Bloomberg should have just gone around in a Brinks truck and hand out a thousand dollars to everyone who promised to vote for him and he could have saved $50 million. (Thanks to Leonie, I realize he meant applying the thousand dollars a vote to the margin of victory. He could have spnet 50,000,000 by giving a thousand doilars each to 50,000 people who promised to vote for him. My math still may stink, so check it.)

By the way, if Bloomberg had donated the 100 million he spent for class size reduction in the 100 worst schools in the city he would have done a lot more to improve education for a great number of kids than anything else he's done in his education deforms. Remember what happened in Ed Koch's third term. May the same fate befall Bloomberg.

The other big loser is the UFT, which sat on the sidelines (see comments below). Their performance should cause as much embarrassment as Bloomberg faces. The numbers come out to their worst nightmare. At the debates over the Thompson endorsement at the October Delegate Assembly, the UFT leadership made the case that Thompson was a sure loser and at most could move the needle only 3 points. Let me do the math: subtract 3 from Bloomberg and I get 48%. Add 3% to Thompson and I get -- let me see now, it comes to 49% for Thompson. Thus, every time another idiot policy comes out of Tweed or out of the mouth of Bloomberg, every single teacher in the system should think about these numbers.

When the UFT folded on term limits in rejecting an ICE proposal at the October 2008 Delegate Assembly, Paul Egan also made a lame case, as I reported on my blog: In opposing the ICE amendment to the term limits resolution, UFT District 11 (Bronx) rep Paul Egan made the astounding argument that if each individual in the room went home and called their city council rep that would have a greater impact than if the UFT as an organization took a stand and pressured the reps to deny Bloomberg another term of office."

Will the election results affect the upcoming internal UFT elections? ICE/TJC will make sure to remind the members how Unity Caucus and Mike Mulgrew put Bloomberg in office.

(See the Ed Notes report from Philip Nobile on the Oct. DA:
Endorse Thomson Resolution Trashed at DA Fearful UFT Leaders Surrender to Bloombergs’s Reich)

Another big loser was mayoral wannabee Anthony Weiner, who folded like a cheap suit when faced with a few measly attacks from the Bloomberg machine. Counting on Thompson being the sacrificial lamb and would get swamped to the extent he would not be a viable candidate for mayor in the future (call it the Ruth Messinger syndrome), Weiner figured to be a shoo-in in 2013. In fact he could have beaten Bloomberg this time and maybe even handily. Look for a mea culpa, but his jelly fish spinelessness will not easily be forgiven.

Obama is also a loser here. He shunned Thompson while campaigning 5 times for Corzine. How embarrassing is that? What kind of message does it send to Democrats? Obama favors the millionaires like Bloomberg and Corzine over working politicians who came up through the ranks like Thompson.

ICE members comment on the election

Michael Fiorillo
The election results demonstrate the moral and political bankruptcy of the Unity Caucus, and particularly Randi Weingarten.

She was in many ways the chief enabler of Bloomberg's weak victory. Had she fought the overriding of term limits, had she exposed the fraud of Bloomberg's and Klein's educational regime, had she endorsed Thompson (admittedly, far from a perfect candidate), the entire political climate in the city might be perched on the edge of movement and change, and the axe might be a little further from teacher's necks. Instead, she took the craven route of sucking up to power.

Well, movement and change is going to happen regardless. Bloomberg's popularity and political support has been shown to be a Potemkin Village. If there is any validity to the Third Term Curse, then he is likely to soon become the most hated man in NYC.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Loretta Prisco

Certainly, Thompson was not all we wanted, but at least we would have a had a shot of having a more compassionate school system, kinder to kids and teachers. The media declared Thompson a loser a long time ago which seriously effected his ability to attract money and volunteers. If only our union...


Out of Oakland
The Perimeter Primate has left a new comment on your post "Comments on UFT and Bloomberg Embarrassing Win":

Yesterday I heard on the news that Michael Bloomberg had spent about $100 million on his campaign.

With a net worth of $16 billion (the most recent Forbes figure, making him world billionaire #17), the amount of money Bloomberg spent on his campaign was the equivalent of $312.50 to someone with a net worth of $50,000. In other words, it was a chunk, but not all that much -- relatively speaking of course.

I'm so sorry that the campaign finance laws of this country are permitting the wealth of this person to rule NYC. I'll keep my fingers crossed that more and more New Yorkers give him absolute hell for the next four years!

Election Yin and Yang

Just back from the gym. Ran into a UFT retiree. "Explain to me how the union could support a candidate who is against voting by secret ballot?" Huh? "What are you talking about? Where did you hear this?"

I know what's coming. Some kind of Obama trashing (the same thing happened last week with a retired fireman - why are they coming to me?)

"I was told by someone that he wants to take away the secret ballot." I begin turn 5 shades of green. "I don't want to talk about anything else. I just wanted to ask that question." "But McCain and Republicans view unions as enemies of big business."

I then started to explain that this position supports union attempts to organize.

"I don't want to get into it. But cry the beloved country." Oy!

Brilliant. Why get the real facts when all you need is an excuse to continue to bash Obama? My instinct is there's heavy racism acting here. The vehemence goes way beyond normal dislike of candidates. Like would this same conversation have taken place over Kerry or Gore given the same exact positions?

I also spoke to the gal who is having the Obama election night open house. She is from Canada and rethinking things if McCain wins. Or maybe just drink her way through tomorrow evening. Or the next 4 years.

On the other hand there's this from Five Thirty Eight's 3am polls:

Barack Obama's position has become somewhat stronger since our update this afternoon. We now have him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier today, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively.

I continue to find a hair's worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls -- even as Obama's position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren't.

However, Obama's win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he's gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).

Secondly, McCain's clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

Related to this is the fact that there are now very, very few true undecideds left in this race.

MORE

Klein (Naomi) and Klein (Joel)

I finally got a glimpse of Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine" at a panel discussion on the presidential election at Cooper Union Saturday night, where many NYC area activists, progressives, radicals, and those do-nothing community organizers gathered. Bet there were just a few coppers at Cooper lurking. I tried to smile often in case they wanted a clear picture.

The left is going crazy over Obama - and not positive crazy. People are extremely unhappy over his policies and especially his rightward drift over the past few months. How long before he starts to wear pant suits? However, where else can they go in this election? The answer is that some of the leading lights, while they will probably vote Obama because he is better than the alternative, do not view these elections as the end all and be all. Rather they look at things from the view of the level of activism and how that can force change outside the election process.

My immediate reaction is to say, "Good luck and good night" – in that order. But, darn, there's always that slight tug of optimism. Or why else would I even bother to stay involved in education? You see, I agree with the idea of creating an activist movement. But my small mammalian brain can only seem to narrow cast on the ed wavelength. And narrow cast even narrower on the union without getting too distracted.

But the UFT gets so boring so easily. Not facing the daily outrages that used to drive my anger and activism has an impact. Thank goodness for people like Under Assault, who today takes another shot at the UFT, this time focusing on the official propaganda tool, the NY Teacher.

Which brings me to Klein (Naomi), who is quickly becoming a legend for her clear thinking and analysis. And reporting too. Saturday night she was not too user friendly to Barack, stressing that he was more likely to continue Bush policies than McCain.

Huh?

Well, it seems Klein(Naomi) thinks that McCain is the real agent of change and after listing the Obama policies that line up with Bush, she pointed to the McCain claim that in the first 90 days they would remake government - mostly by eliminating it. Basically, we can see the irony being played out in front of us of the 90 days of The New Deal being dismantled 75 years later - in 90 days. That is the promise of the McCain campaign. Better eat your meat and get yer puddin' while you can because once they get rid of the FDA, FTA, etc. we will be "ptomaine nation."

That the forces backing Palin are in control of McCain and the Republican Party is increasingly clear, as he has become a total puppet so he can be president - with his strings being pulled. Not exactly a Manchurian candidate, but a puppet with the forces backing Palin pulling the strings.

Klein (Naomi) used her favorite word - "shock" to describe the tactic Palin/McCain will use.
I finally bought her book the other day and in the first few pages of reading about the 35 year war on progressives and liberals through the use of the shock doctrine, I was reminded of how Klein (Joel) and Bloomberg (Mike) used exactly that same philosophy to dismantle the NYC school system. There's more to it than I want to go into here, but those who have lived through multiple reorganizations and incompetence couldn't understand why a system in need of change would face the BloomKlein lunacy that has so shocked the system that my words to Klein (Joel) back in 2004 still echo in my mind - that the school systems of Kabul and Baghdad will recover sooner than the NYC school system. (I was later branded by Carmen Farina as having accused Klein of being worse than the Taliban. Hmmm!)

I really want to write more about the shock doctrine as I get further into the books. Today I was reminded by Under Assault about a piece done on that blog on this very idea back in January '08. So I'm going to shut up while you go over and read it.

http://underassault.blogspot.com/2008/01/shock-comparisons.html