By the time New York’s mayoral candidates all got to the Campaign Finance Board’s debate Tuesday night, the first hour of it televised on Channel 4, so much had changed in the Democratic primary, starting right here: they had to come after Bill de Blasio the way they went after Chris Quinn at the start of the whole thing.
Because before they all started yelling at each other, and before those asking the questions began to act as if people had come to this debate to watch them and listen to them, it had come out that a new poll had de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, getting support from 43% of likely Democratic voters on Sept. 10.
It means that if the survey number holds over the next week and proves true at the polls, then there would be no runoff between the top two vote-getters, and de Blasio would go at Joe Lhota in November.
So for Quinn, who once was supposed to be the one to run away with this, and for Thompson, who made a big run at Michael Bloomberg four years ago, this was the last chance to change de Blasio’s momentum, and the narrative.
This they did not do. If anybody was helped by the ridiculous format, and a night that occasionally had the elegance of a hockey fight, it was de Blasio. Whether you agree with him or not, he somehow managed to stay away from getting tagged in a setting like this.
Somehow de Blasio did this when Quinn was coming hard at him on taking money from “slumlords” — you kept waiting for her to say that if she loses, the rats win — and because he eventually changed his position on term limits.
Maybe the best line of the night was a good, sarcastic throwaway from Anthony Weiner, after being cut off again by the moderators, this time on the issue of stop-and-frisk.
“Fifteen seconds on stop-and-frisk,” Weiner said, his tone telling you just how amazingly dumb the idea was that you could explain either “stop” or “frisk” in 15 seconds. Another example of the refs acting as if everybody had come to watch them officiate.
Oh, they came at de Blasio all right, on term limits and member items in the City Council. Quinn accused de Blasio of “talking out of both sides of his mouth,” and Thompson, who seems to have a much better chance than Quinn of making it into a runoff with de Blasio, said this to de Blasio in the second hour: “You’ve got to tell the people the truth.”
In the middle of all that, Thompson and Quinn coming at him this way, de Blasio said to Quinn, “It takes chutzpah to give the mayor a back-room deal [on a third term] and criticize others.”
Before all this, in the afternoon, I asked Mark Green — who ran against Bloomberg for mayor in 2001 and later ran, and lost, against de Blasio for public advocate — whether what’s been happening in the polls lately was a de Blasio surge, or just a repudiation of Chris Quinn.
“Both,” said Green, who currently hosts a national radio show called “Both Sides Now.”
“Because of Quinn’s closeness to Bloomberg in general and on term limits in particular, it appears she has a 20% limit among Democrats. Her support of Bloomberg on term limits is like Ford’s pardon of Nixon — an unprincipled original sin that voters can’t forget.”
Then he talked about how consistent de Blasio has been with his message, how he caught a huge break when what Green called “Weiner’s Scandal, Part Two” happened, and how Weiner’s fall with outer-borough whites helped de Blasio tremendously.
“Now begins the front-runner’s gauntlet,” Green said. “Will the guy talking about a tale of two cities escape the tale of two de Blasios, on term limits and landlords and the rest of it?”
Green added that so far, de Blasio seemed to be doing just fine with that, but he wondered what might happen if it is de Blasio against Thompson in a runoff and the losing candidates decide to get behind Thompson.
“And I have to say, there was a little bit of blood on the floor in the last half hour on term limits,” Green said when it was over.
If de Blasio does end up in a runoff, if he doesn’t get to 40% next week, the fact that the others did draw some blood during the Internet-broadcast-only part of the night might matter, and more than somewhat.
But the ones chasing de Blasio needed to do more than draw blood Tuesday night, just because the next week will be all ads and the Jewish High Holy Days, when many eyes will be off the race. In a loud, messy, badly run debate, they needed to hurt de Blasio bad. Came close at the end. Did not.
