He’s Mayor Doomberg!
Hizzoner was so worried that endorsing GOP mayoral candidate Joe Lhota would damage his campaign that he declared on Friday he will remain neutral in the upcoming battle for City Hall.
Lhota said he was perfectly fine with the mayor’s decision. “Joe did not ask for the mayor’s endorsement and he respects his decision to stay out of the race,” said Lhota spokeswoman Jessica Proud.
One source in the Lhota camp described the non-endorsement as a strategic decision.
“He’s doing this to help us,” said the source.
Getting the mayor’s backing would have opened up Lhota to criticism that he’s a Bloomberg clone.
His presumptive Democratic opponent Bill de Blasio used the same attack line to pummel rival Christine Quinn in the Democratic primary, said one source. “Why give that issue to de Blasio on a platter?” asked the source
Another insider said the non-endorsement would give Bloomberg’s criticism of de Blasio greater impact since he wouldn’t be seen as partisan.
Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told The Post he called Lhota Friday morning to give him the news an endorsement was off the table.
“We had a very good discussion,” Wolfson said, noting that Lhota understood the decision.
Wolfson insisted that Bloomberg won’t be changing his mind as the election progresses.
“The mayor’s decision was definitive,” he said.
The mayor has been saying for months that he knows whom he’s going to vote for. But he’s been coy about whether he’d be sharing that information with the public in the form of an endorsement.
For the first time Friday, he offered a new rationale for not taking sides.
“I don’t want to do anything that complicates it for the next mayor, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve decided I’m just not going to make an endorsement in the race,” Bloomberg said on his weekly WOR radio show.
“Whoever the voters elect, I want to make sure that person is ready to succeed,” the mayor added.
Earlier in the campaign, Lhota hinted that he might want Bloomberg on his team. But the GOP nominee has since made a point of distinguishing himself from both Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, his old boss.
Lhota highlighted one difference with the mayor during an appearance Friday morning on WPIX/Channel 11, where he pledged to restore “participatory” government through town-hall meetings in each borough.
Bloomberg held such meetings early in his tenure but has largely abandoned them over the last couple of years.
“I think the issue of stop, question and frisk would have been a lot easier for the community to understand if the mayor and his people explained exactly what the Supreme Court allows them to do,” Lhota said.
He also said there might not have been such a loud outcry in some communities about bike lanes if the administration had “discussed the strategy” behind them with local folks.
Bloomberg’s recent foray into the Democratic primary — when he stuck his foot in his mouth by telling New York magazine that de Blasio’s trumpeting of his multiracial family was “racist” — didn’t do anything to boost the mayor’s stock.
The odd remark scored de Blasio sympathy points and likely some additional support from Democratic primary voters.
At the same time, while the mayor is unhappy with de Blasio, he isn’t thrilled with Lhota’s rhetoric about returning to a different governing style, according to a city-based political consultant.
The consultant said Bloomberg is also still sore Lhota referred to him as being “like an idiot” in a post-Sandy interview for misstating the timetable for reopening the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Lhota was then running the MTA.
Asked about the mayor’s endorsement decision, de Blasio joked: “I was waiting by the phone.”
At an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn, he reiterated that he had been congratulated on his primary win by his former bosses Bill and Hillary Clinton — but said he doesn’t yet know if they’ll hit the campaign trail on his behalf.
“They both offered extraordinarily helpful advice. And we left it at that,” said de Blasio.
“Anything in the future has to be worked out in the future.”