ABOUT-FACE: City politician Julie Menin has a real diversity of beliefs — switching from the Democrats to Independence to Republicans and back to the Dems in less than a couple years. (
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Julie Menin, the Democratic front-runner in this year’s race for Manhattan Borough President, likes to party hop.
In the span of 17 months, Menin changed political parties three times.
She registered as a Democrat in November 2001. Three months later, in February 2002, she became a member of the Independence Party. A month after that, in March, she joined the Republican Party. And in July 2003, she boomeranged back to the always-accepting Democrats.
At least two of the party defections coincided with key political appointments that helped Menin raise her political profile from downtown community activist to powerful contender for borough-wide office.
After Menin — a 45-year-old lawyer and former restaurateur whose husband, Bruce, is a real-estate developer — joined the GOP in March 2002, she donated $11,000 to the campaign of then-Gov. George Pataki, a Republican.
Three months later, in June 2002, Mayor Bloomberg, still a Republican at that time, appointed her to the city’s redistricting commission. Soon after, in November, the powerful Lower Manhattan Development Corp. — headed by Pataki crony John Whitehead — enlisted Menin for its mission-statement-drafting committee.
Menin got another prestigious LMDC gig in April 2003 — when she was named to the 14-member panel on the design for a Ground Zero memorial.
In 2005, Menin — by then a Democrat again — became the chairwoman of Manhattan’s Community Board 1. In 2006, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation named her a board member. And in 2007, Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed her to the LMDC board.
Critics cynically derided Menin’s flip-flopping.
“It’s opportunistic,” said City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a fellow Dem also running for the borough-president gig. “[Voters] should evaluate someone who’s switched parties that often.”
An adviser to one of her opponents said Menin will face “ a super steep hill” in any Democratic primary and that she will have to explain “why she jumped to the Republican Party for any length of time during George W. Bush’s first term.”
Menin has amassed the largest campaign war chest — $1 million — of any Democratic candidate in the BP race, including even City Council members Brewer, Robert Jackson and Jessica Lappin.
Lappin and Jackson, who have raised $683,000 and $282,000 respectively, declined to comment on Menin’s party affiliations.
Menin’s spokesman, George Arzt, downplayed the party-swapping, saying she’s “been a Democrat for all but a year and a half of her last 27.”
“In 2002, she was working 24/7 with the [Republican Pataki] administration to help rebuild downtown,” Arzt said. “She thought she could help her community by showing her support for the state administration’s rebuilding efforts.”
Arzt did not address Menin’s one-month dalliance with the Independence Party — whose past leaders include the controversial Lenora Fulani, who once described Jews as “mass murderers of people of color.”