Incoming!

As an earlier blog entry discussed, campaigns turn negative when candidates realize that they're trailing. The standard M.O. is to coax journalists with apparently tantalizing items since, as one leading gossip columnist once told me, "the page will be filled."

Got a taste of this last Friday when within 90 minutes my office either read the following items or got the following calls:

• one commentator asked why I had said on a CUNY-TV that the next PA would have to provide strong checks and balances to a strong mayor like Bloomberg -- wasn't I assuming that Thompson couldn't win? (Nooo, since prior to that answer I had explicitly said that Thompson "absolutely" could win.)

• a print journalist questioned why I accepted contributions from my brother Steve Green, founder of SLGreen Realty, and realtor Douglas Durst since their large gifts exceeded the maximum for those companies "doing business with the city." (Nooo, my brother is not on that list...and Durst's gift was in a prior campaign when this law did not exist.)

• The New York Post called to say it was doing an expose of how I was wrongly claiming credit for the 311 idea since other cities had previously done it and Giuliani had proposed it months before I did in the 2001 mayoral campaign. (Nooo, in fact a) I began publicly championing it when I brought together 12 former commissioners on July 5 2001 after the Giuliani administration had dropped the idea and b) Mayor Bloomberg at a Citizen's Budget Commission dinner in December 2002 generously and publicly thanked me for giving him the 311 idea that he successfully implemented.)

This was all in 90 minutes. In May. To quote Betty Davis, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride!"