Low Hopes For Cunning Linguists

After ducking and dodging, hemming and hawing, not to mention offering an oddly-timed announcement of a terror threat, the Goliath of the mayor's race is finally prepared to debate his gaffe-prone David this Sunday and again on Monday.

Mark Green, the only person to have debated both Bloomberg and Ferrer head-to-head, calls the debates "not only a big moment, [but] the last big moment in the campaign."

"I remember after debating Bloomberg," Green told me, "I thought, 'Well I won that debate.' But he was way better than I anticipated and easily exceeded expectations." It's all about managing expectations, and Bloomberg's bar has been set comfortably low.

Mostly, New Yorkers know him through his advertising, which is safe territory for Bloomberg. It's cheap for him and it's his preferred-and tightly controlled-way to speak to the city.

Bloomberg so far has cherry-picked when and where he takes questions, making Ferrer, by comparison, look like a media whore.

Albeit, a broke media whore. Between Sept. 7 and Oct. 3, Ferrer spent $397,430 on TV, radio and print ads. Bloomberg has spent that much in a single day.

But there's always hope the debates will provide something valuable: the mega-gaffe. "I'd be looking at this tape of the debate very carefully to find some stuff that I can take out of it quickly," said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant not working with either candidate.

Minor glitches are magnified by television cameras and made radioactive when spun into commercials. Remember Jeanine Pirro asking, "Could I have Page 10?" Remember anything else from that speech?

"You can turn around an ad in four hours," Sheinkopf said. "The problem is, can you get enough frequencies on an ad?" What Ferrer needs, Sheinkopf says, is a blockbuster to get in the game," a mega-gaffe to air endlessly.

"The Ferrer campaign seems to think an ad campaign is: Release an ad and get coverage of the ad and not actually air the ad," said a Bloomberg aide. "But if you are actually trying to drive a message, instead of talking to 25 reporters [about the ad], it has to be on for? four or five days." Which ain't cheap if you're not a Bruce Wayne type.

While Bloomberg and Ferrer nestle into their podiums, and their hawk-eyed teams look for mistakes, both campaigns can take comfort in the legacy of Ed Koch, who recalled having 14 debates in 11 days against Mario Cuomo, "one of the great debaters. But victory does not always go to the great debater."

Which is a sure thing this time around, since there's not one on the ballot.

All Good News All the Time

One sure sign your city is in bad shape is spending $100,000 to purchase positive news coverage.

That's what happened this week when the Newark Weekly News (no italics warranted, and ranked by Google below the Christ Church Newark Weekly News Sheet), inked a deal with city officials to write only warm, fuzzy, happy stories about the city.

"The paper can only generate stories based on leads from the council and the mayor's office," reported Newsday.

But before writing off the free 25,000-circ paper as an uncritical rag, founder and editor Howard Scott explained that you won't find "negative news" or gossip on his pages.

"You have a big fight for the governor of New Jersey. Most people are not learning about the candidates," said Scott. "They are merely fighting and doing negative ads. We don't buy into that. We look at the record. If the record [is that] you have come to a community and have done well to that community, there must be some history of that."

There aren't even any ads for alcohol or tobacco because they harmfully affect the readers. A paper above the fray. Their endorsement is the gold stamp of approval in the Garden State, right? "No, we haven't [endorsed] and we probably won't. It's not to our advantage to endorse anyone," said Scott.

He went on: "Do we have critical reporters on staff? No. Do we have investigative reporters? No."

"We feel it's important for an urban community to look at and read something that will be inherently beneficial to them over and above those items that seem to be gossip, if you will," Scott explained to me.

The kicker is that the paper itself first pitched the idea, and the City Council unanimously approved it.

Before getting too uppity about wacky Newark Mayor Sharpe James and the gang across the river, though, let's pay tribute to our own agit-prop rag, the occasionally-printed Brooklyn Standard (again, no italics warranted), which is dedicated to providing in-depth coverage to the superb efforts of their benevolent parent company, Forest City Ratner, to build a stadium in the borough. Its first number, all dolled up like a real community newspaper (the lead head was BROOKLYN'S BOOMING-Atlantic Yards Will Bring Jobs, Housing and Hoops), but without the community or news parts, featured not only a letter to the "editor" from Mayor Bloomberg, but also lots of ads placed (and presumably paid for) by the city.

And then there's The New York Times (in danger of losing its italics, what with cat-fights breaking about about the paper, reporters shtupping sources and little getting reporting, not to mention their drooling endorsement of the mayor) whose new building Forest City Ratner is developing. And they're also providing warm, fuzzy stories. Paper of record indeed. Perhaps they could use the Brooklyn Standard as a wire source. Or hire the Newark Weekly News to ink some much-needed good news about the paper.

King of the Councilmaniacs

Speaking of spreading the good news, City Council candidate Tom White got what he paid for when he gave Queens Tribune associate publisher Michael Nussbaum $31,950 for consulting. He got (the next 20 callers also get) the paper's endorsement thrown into the mix, and (pay with a credit card and you'll also recieve) a campaign meeting inside Nussbaum's office. Shady stuff from my none too trustworthy old employer.

Like most such deals, this one seems too good to be true. After all, who in their right mind really wants, let alone needs, a ginsu knife that doubless as a flashlight or a seat on the City Council?

With the mayor's race all but decided barring a mega-gaffe, though, the plum spot is the also-ran position of Council Speaker (the job that made Giff Miller the star that he is). And this race is far from over. Here's the run-down:

Now that Clarence Norman is out and the Brooklyn Democratic Party no longer has a chairman facing jail time, will the city's largest block of Council members get their act together in time to install one of their own?

The last time around, the borough's boy was Angel Rodriguez, who ended up imprisoned for extortion and bribery, allowing Manhattan to claim the Speaker's post while valuable committee chairs went to Queens and the Majority Leadership post went to a 20-something freshman from the Bronx. The only borough to get fewer perks than Brooklyn's 16 Councilmanics was Staten Island, which holds only three seats.

That meltdown left then-leader Clarence Norman strictly a weak regional player, and thus opened the door for his indictment. The new Brooklyn leader, Assemblyman Vito Lopez of Bushwick, has to try and unite the Brooklyn Council members behind either Lew Fidler, who the elegation ousted as chairman or Bill De Blasio, who now co-chairs the delegation with Al Vann.

Lopez better move fast. He reportedly used campaign donations to pay off his leased sports car and other personal expenses-the same kind of charges that knocked Norman from power.

Majority Leader Joel Rivera, whose dad Jose runs the Bronx Democratic organization, is the Bronx's horse. It's hard to imagine much support for a kid too young to have seen Tron in theaters. They'll be a hefty price paid to his dad, though, in exchange for the Bronx's eight votes.

Manhattan, where there is no machine or cohesive delegation, has Christine Quinn of Chelsea. She spent tons of money winning over colleagues, but not a dime on her party's mayoral nominee, Fernando Ferrer. His backers on the Council undoubtedly will remember that.

The county with all the cards right now is Queens. The 14-member delegation is unified and is sitting on two of the most lucrative committee chairmanships: Land Use and Finance. Those chairs ain't just for sitting. Land Use Chairwoman Melinda Katz raised $660,000 for her re-election, and Finance Chairman David Weprin cashed in with $420,000. Anybody want a set of chairs?

The Mouse That Yawned

The city that never sleeps is on pace to have another four years of the most unexciting mayor in history. He is a far cry from the hunky John Lindsay; doesn't even try keeping pace with Ed Koch's seven or eight press conferences a day and wrinkles his nose at borrowing Rudy Giuliani's four-letter vocabulary.

He's a mouse, and he's been one with Washington and Albany. Albany did give Bloomberg control of the city schools. (It was free anyway.) But when it comes to increasing funding for those schools, or for first responders and anti-terrorism, the mouse barely gets a crumb.Ê

So far, he's on pace to spend $100 million on a citywide ad blitz for his own re-election, but he hasn't spent one red cent on ads blasting the state and federal lawmakers who vote to send resources away from Gotham. Is a full-page ad in the Troy Record or Dallas Morning News more expensive than one in the New York Times? Maybe those papers don't have a section for personal ads.

After Bloomberg's impending re-election, it's another year before voters pick a new governor, which means another year of silence about the real extent of the city and state's budget woes. Deficits are projected following this November's election (how convenient), but expect those projections to rise once the votes are certified.

Stripper Charity

It doesn't take a newspaperman with a paper cup, handwritten sign soliciting donations for Pakistani earthquake victims and a deadline outside a strip club to underscore a basic truth about this city: opulence and tragedy often share sidewalk space.

Daily News hack Michael Daly stood outside Scores with a cardboard sign asking for money for Pakistani hurricane victims and collected all of one dollar while thousands were spent inside, reaffirming-hold the presses!- that spending money on strippers and alcohol is frivolous.

Thanks. Now back to my mocha latte ($4) and home-delivered New York Times ($4.65 for the first eight weeks, not that I'm complaining) where another columnist was brokenhearted about America's stinginess to victims abroad.

"The 150,000 or so fatalities from the tsunami are well within the margin of error for estimates of the number of deaths every year from malaria," wrote Times-man Nicholas Kristoff in January. "Probably two million people die annually of malaria, most of them children and most in Africa, or maybe it's three million-we don't even know."

Well, Michael, there are plenty of strip clubs and tragedies. Unless, that is, your work is done?