Obama’s Embrace, Lukewarm. A Judas Kiss?

Thompson's Election Night HQ, Hilton, 54th & Sixth Avenue. Picture by Ashley Carpenter

Thompson

Sometime deep into the evening of November 3 at the Election Night HQ of William C. Thompson III, NY Governor David Patterson, who had received a tepid applause after he took to the podium, said what needed to be said as a surge swept the Hilton third-floor room that an upset could be in the making as Thompson’s numbers seemed to be growing strongly in the hours after the polls had closed: QMfE, “A lot of Democrats this day stayed home, dropped the ball.” He spoke about an hour before the tenor of the evening, subtle but obvious, began tipping to OMG, he/we might actually defeat the Term Limits billion dollar mayor.

Then, of course, that surge tanked.

Had they – those there, those not there – been comatose because of the Obama embrace? NYT, October 9 headline: An Obama Endorsement, Sort of, for Thompson: It was an unusually lukewarm expression of political support from the White House, delivered in the conditional tense, without using the name of the candidate, and coming from a presidential spokesman, no less.

NY Post headline: Dinkins takes Obama to task for not supporting Thompson:  The city’s first African-American mayor blasted the country’s first black president for leaving Bill Thompson in the dust in the mayor’s race this year. “The president should’ve done more. He found time to go to Virginia, he found time to go to New Jersey and he should’ve been here,” former Mayor David Dinkins, who was in office from 1990 through 1993.

After Bloomberg’s winning strategy – $$$,$$$,$$$ – got him re-elected, the NY Times reported that the City Hall administration had politely but firmly told the White House to stay out of NYC.

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