After campaign records showed that Mayor Bloomberg had spent $85 million (through Friday) on his third term mayoral bid, people were amazed—it was, according to the NY TImes, the most anyone had personally spent on any sort of U.S. public office—and disgusted. But the Mayor defended the amount, saying yesterday at an event in Queens, "It costs a lot of money to get a message out and I'm trying to show what we've done and tell people."
The Daily News reports that the mayor added, "It's very difficult to get people to know in a city this size the breadth of the things we've done. I'm trying to reach out to every single community." Which his challenger, City Comptroller Bill Thompson, took as a sort of compliment, "He's worried about my candidacy - or you have to believe he's trying to get the people of New York to forget about his record, and that's why he's spending this amount of money."
In the meantime, the Daily News' editorial board endorsed Bloomberg for a third term: "By every significant measure - from plummeting crime and rising school achievement to more and better parks and cleaner streets - Bloomberg has led the city decisively in the right direction over the last eight years." This means all three of the city's major dailies have given the thumbs up to the billionaire incumbent—the Post endorsed him on Friday and the Times yesterday.
