Oct 8, 2009 12:56 pm US/Eastern
DNC, Top Dems Steer Clear Of NYC Mayoral Race
National Party, Democratic Leaders Silent On Candidate Bill Thompson
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
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New York City Comptroller William Thompson.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
A Democrat is struggling to unseat the mayor of the nation's largest city, but the national party and its top Democratic leaders have been silent.
The Democratic National Committee has said nothing about William Thompson Jr.'s uphill battle to unseat the popular billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
By this point in the last mayoral race in 2005, the DNC had dispatched its then-leader, Howard Dean, to campaign with Bloomberg's Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer.
Well-known Democrats like John Kerry, John Edwards and Tom Daschle had also crossed state lines to help Ferrer.
And in the 2001 race four years earlier, DNC head Terry McAuliffe was involved on a number of levels.
Thompson says it has not occurred to him to ask for their help.
The mayoral candidate has released a slew of ads this week targeting Bloomberg's wealth and his push for changing the law on term limits.
"Mike Bloomberg overturned term limits because he doesn't think your vote counts. After eight years of giving everything to the developers and Wall Street, we need a mayor who's going to put City Hall back on the side of the middle class," he said in one of the ads.
Dr. David Birdsell, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College said Thompson almost has to go on the attack. "He doesn't have much of any other way to try to make the case. He's got to create some running room for himself. It's hard to see how that happens if he's simply calm, sober, sedate in his litany of indictments of this administration."
CBS 2 HD's Pablo Guzman caught up with Thompson Wednesday morning at a campaign stop at a Jewish community center in Flatbush, and asked him about the risk of changing his tone. "Mr. Thompson, the ads that you've released today, some people say take kind of a stronger tone that they're not accustomed to. Almost attack ads."
Thompson's response: "I think they're ads that tell the truth. They're not attack ads, no. I think they're ads that tell the truth. If you look, the only ads that are, the only attack ads are being run by Mayor Bloomberg."
"I don't know what the strategy is, my opponent's campaign is. What I'm trying to do is explain our record and I'll continue to do that. He's going to have to explain. I don't know what the purpose of the ad is. I haven't seen it," Mayor Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg's own campaign finance reports released last week show he has spent $65 million of his own money so far, $22 million of that on television alone.
Some polls show the gap between the two candidates shrinking from 10 to just eight points, which may explain why both sides are turning up the heat.
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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