Mayor Mike Uses Millions to Show He's a Man of the Masses

Mayor Bloomberg rolled out his first television commercials of his campaign today, almost six weeks prior to when he hit the airwaves in his 2005 run. With the $3 million he's pouring into the ads, that run in both English and Spanish on major networks over the next two weeks, Bloomberg will be spending half of his competitors' total individual budgets for the primary season since they are accepting public financing. The Times says that Bloomberg's could be "the biggest and most expensive political advertising campaign in the city’s history."

The commercial shows Bloomberg as a man of the people who hears about the economy "when he takes the subway, when he walks through the neighborhoods" (but not when he finds himself buying Shake 'n Bake at the grocery store?) The ad attempts to take on a positive tone with a focus on jobs, so much so that the mayor repeats the word at one point.

The same tone can't be said for the mayor's phone surveys, which Anthony Weiner is still categorizing as push-polling. Weiner said that the Bloomberg campaign's negative questions to voters about him signal something “very nasty and very divisive. This looks like, sounds like, walks like and quacks like a push poll, which is one of those things in politics that, even in a dirty campaign—you often don’t even see push-polling."

After the jump, hear the progress the mayor is making with his Spanish as he unveils his first Spanish language commercial of the election cycle (we wonder if his Spanish has improved since 2005).