Booker Backs Bloomie

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (pictured right) yesterday toured black churches in Queens with Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker (pictured left) just a week after his campaign was accused of racism.

Why the racism charge? When ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani stumped for the moderate mayor last weekend, he warned the Hasidic Jewish community that if Comptroller Bill Thompson (a black liberal Democrat) was elected, he might not be able to keep them safe. "It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership. Politics is important. It's important to our safety. It's important to our security," Mr. Giuliani told a crowd at the Borough Park Jewish Community Council on October 18.

As you may know, Newark, N.J. is located eight miles from Manhattan. Bloomberg spokesman Howard Wolfson, who worked as Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) communications director during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary race, dismissed the timing of the visit of Mayor Booker - a moderate-liberal Democrat - to black churches as nothing more than coincidence. “If you look at our schedule over the course of the entire campaign, we’ve campaigned in black churches, we’ve visited mosques, we’ve visited synagogues. We’ve visited pretty much every neighborhood, every geographic area that you can come up with in this city and we’re going to keep doing that,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Thompson scoffed at the Bloomberg campaign's denial that campaigning with Mayor Booker was a coincidence. “I don’t know that (Wolfson) can atone for those comments," said Mr. Thompson. "Not just Rudy Giuliani’s comments, but the mayor’s comments. They’ve gone back to the politics of the past and a politics of fear and a politics of division. It wasn’t just Rudy Giuliani, it was also the mayor that engaged in those comments and it was wrong.”