NYC tests Obama's zeal for change

On Sunday, President Barack Obama will be campaigning for New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine in Newark, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. One day later, Vice President Joe Biden will also hit the campaign trail a few hours north of there, on behalf of Democrat Bill Owens in the upstate New York special election.

Though neither will be very far away from New York City, there are no plans for them to lend a hand to Democrat Bill Thompson, the city comptroller who’s challenging Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent running for a third term on the Republican ballot line.

That’s no accident. While Obama ostensibly supports the Democratic nominee and has even offered him a backhanded endorsement, the president has actually established a much closer political relationship with Bloomberg—a mutually beneficial association that both have an interest in keeping intact.

“I think Obama has been smart in walking a fine line between not totally pissing on Thompson and gratuitously embarrassing him and undermining the party, but at the same time not alienating Bloomberg and making a futile gesture and backing a candidate who has no chance of winning,” said Dan Gerstein, a New York-based Democratic political consultant who is not active in the mayoral race.

Past the natural affinity between a Democratic president and an incumbent mayor of America’s largest city, observers say that Bloomberg helps Obama burnish his post-partisan credentials in the face of GOP resistance in Washington and also can pinch hit as a face of business support or even Jewish support—while the president in turn helps the mayor to solidify a national profile that faded after spending months last year hyping a potential third-party run that he later shelved.

Former Mayor Ed Koch, a vocal Bloomberg supporter, went so far as to deem “the relationship between Obama and Bloomberg comparable to the relationship between La Guardia and FDR. Each likes the other, and each knows it’s to the advantage of both that they both succeed.”

The mayor has already visited the president at the White House twice, and Obama gave Bloomberg some love with a friendly joke at the billionaire’s expense in his much-watched National Correspondents Dinner speech. The president has twice praised Bloomberg by name as “the outstanding mayor of New York,” once at a bill signing at the White House, and again at the president’s Wall Street speech at New York’s Federal Hall in September—where he made no mention of Thompson, who was also in attendance.

For his part, Bloomberg traveled to Florida during the campaign to urge Jewish voters to denounce the fast-spreading false rumor that Obama is secretly a Muslim.

Together, the pair has frequently provided political support for each other. This April, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs touted Bloomberg and his frequent partner in post-partisan posturing, California’s Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as leaders the president has consulted “about the important decisions” on transportation, and infrastructure and the stimulus.

And earlier this month, Bloomberg was included in a long list of prominent politicians—all the rest of them Republicans—who Obama claimed “came out in support of reform” of his push for health care reform, in contrast to the D.C. lawmakers who continued to resist progress.

Obama’s biggest gift to Bloomberg, though, wasn’t part of any deal. Rather, it was the stimulus package, which Koch notes “helped cities and incumbents all over by filling budget holes that otherwise would have forced layoffs.”

As Wall Street has staggered, the stimulus money papered over the city’s revenue gaps, protecting the mayor’s expensively cultivated image as a tough-minded, ultra-competent businessman. In the first mayoral debate, there wasn’t a single question about the economy.

New Yorkers have been receptive to Thompson’s complaint that Bloomberg broke his word and changed the law to run for a third term–remarkably 10 percent of likely voters who approve of the job the mayor is doing nonetheless would like to see him voted out of office. But Thompson, who could be charitably described as a mediocre campaigner and has been vastly outspent, hasn’t managed to connect that complaint to any broader call for change.

The White House has twice limply signaled its support of Thompson. After first saying in May that “the President doesn't intend to make any political endorsements in the New York mayor's race,” Gibbs earlier this month responded to a query about the race by taking pains to avoid Thompson’s name.

“The president is the leader of the Democratic Party and as that would support the Democratic nominee,” Gibbs conceded, before adding that Obama “has had a chance to… meet, know and work with Mayor Bloomberg and obviously has a tremendous amount of respect for what he's done as well."

In an appearance in New York last week, Obama took care not to put the words “Thompson” and “endorse” anywhere near each other, lest the party’s local standard bearer in the election use the president’s endorsement in a television ad, nor did Obama stand beside his fellow Democrat, lest that image end up in a campaign mailer.

“Our candidate for mayor, my friend Billy Thompson, is in the house,” Obama said at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, pointing to the comptroller, sitting in the crowd.

Koch called it a “perfunctory endorsement,” noting that Obama “didn’t even have Billy stand next to him, just took notice of the fact that he was in the audience.”

Thompson himself seemed to agree. After the event, POLITICO’s Carol E. Lee asked the comptroller if he thought Obama’s remarks amounted to an endorsement. He pointed at her, and replied, “No. Do you consider that an endorsement?”

Cutting off a Democrat who would be just New York’s second black mayor is a potentially risky move for Obama, whose White House waded into New York politics earlier this year to warn another high-profile black Democratic officeholder, embattled Governor David Paterson, against running for a full term next year.

But with the most recent polls showing Bloomberg reopening a double-digit lead, it’s unlikely that the White House’s tepid support for the Democratic nominee will get much warmer in the race’s final weeks.

Koch said that while “I’m not an intimate of either, I do believe that when the president has met with the mayor, it’s been very warm meetings and clearly situated so it’s very public,” he said.

Referring to a 2007 meeting at a Manhattan luncheonette between Bloomberg and Obama, he noted that the “last time I saw them together in a picture was in a restaurant next to the window—that was carefully chosen.”

The press, tipped off to the meet, watched from outside the glass, and the pair earned a photo op, while the only “news” that came out of the meet was that Obama picked up the $17 tab (plus a $10 tip) for lunch with the city’s wealthiest citizen.

Bloomberg hasn’t always been so favorably disposed to Obama. After ended his own flirtation with a presidential bid in 2008, the billionaire mayor withheld his own endorsement in that race, and, according to a recent biography, he “privately called Obama inexperienced at running things and too willing to make political compromises.”

But Obama, said Gerstein, “recognizes that there’s a benefit for him to maintaining a good relationship with an independent, nationally respected, centrist pragmatist, pro-business guy like Bloomberg. Also having an alliance with the mayor of New York City is always good for a Democrat in the White House.”

“Being on good terms and having a mutual affection with Bloomberg is not going to convince anyone that Obama is post partisan,” he said, “but it’s a small bit of validation, and every piece helps.”

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