a bloomberg for mayor (republican of new york, the current mayor, mike bloomberg, the rich guy with the tv channel, for you non-new yorkers) commercial this morning on the tv in the gym. no sound, just the closed-captioning.
woman speaking to the camera in the commercial, explaining why she voting for bloomberg.
“he’s not a flip-flopper.”
has this man lost his mind?
ok, so first off, i was on the cross-trainer, and was listening to my ipod shuffle, for which apple thoughtfully provided a big fix update last night, so it will hopefully shuffle better now, so i was half watching the tv.
but i know for sure that i saw the word “flip-flop” in the closed captioning of the bloomberg tv spot. i’m not sure if the woman was calling ferrer (fernando ferrer, the democratic candidate for mayor) a flip-flopper, or if she was saying that bloomberg wasn’t a flip-flopper.
it doesn’t matter.
just seeing the word flip-flop in the commercial in any context is enough to send me over the edge. like a lot of democrats, i was actually semi-considering voting for the republican bloomberg. he’s barely a republican, and was in fact a democrat until just before the 2001 election, when he decided it would be easier to win if he ran as a republican. so that, combined with his politics, make him more of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge republican.
but each word in campaign commercials is carefully crafted and vetted. so someone thought it would be a good idea to include that particular phrase. which amazes me. whoever approved that should be fired.
including bloomberg himself, if it was his idea or he approved it. what a bonehead move. every democrat with a brain in all of new york is going to be pissed off, because they associate that phrase with the nonsensical tarring of john kerry which, whether you liked john kerry or not, was inaccurate and duplicitous at best. everyone, including george w., has flip-flopped, and sometimes it’s a good thing. i certainly wish bush would do some flip-flopping on a few things.
but i digress. bush makes me do that.
my point is, for bloomberg to win, he has to get democrats in large numbers to cross party lines and vote for him. new york city is probably 70% democratic. and the use of that phrase is such a flash point for a lot of people.
like i said, if the election had been two weeks ago, i might have held my nose and voted for bloomberg. ferrer seemed like a retread…he’s run for mayor several times, didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about running this time, and was particularly inelegant in his comments about the diallo case, which is a big big deal in new york.
but this past week ferrer showed a spark. and now bloomberg does this. add those two things to my natural reticence toward voting for any republican no matter how liberal he or she may be, and you may just have a vote for ferrer.
or at least no vote for bloomberg.