Mayor Michael Bloomberg yesterday toured black churches in Queens with democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker just a week after his campaign was accused of racism.
When ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani hit the trail for Bloomberg last weekend, he did what he does best: he tried to scare the pants off New Yorkers -- specifically members of the Hasidic community. He warned them that if Democratic Comptroller Bill Thompson were elected mayor, he might not be able to keep them safe.
"It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership. Politics is important. It's important to our safety. It's important to our security," Giuliani told a crowd at the Borough Park Jewish Community Council on Oct. 18, according to the Daily News.
Bloomberg spokesman Howard Wolfson, who worked as Hillary Clinton's communications director during the 2008 Democratic primary race, dismissed the timing of the visit to black churches as nothing more than coincidence.
“If you look at our schedule over the course of the entire campaign, we’ve campaigned in black churches, we’ve visited mosques, we’ve visited synagogues. We’ve visited pretty much every neighborhood, every geographic area that you can come up with in this city and we’re going to keep doing that,” Wolfson said.
It goes without saying that Thompson scoffed at the denial.
“I don’t know that (Wolfson) can atone for those comments," said Thompson. "Not just Rudy Giuliani’s comments, but the mayor’s comments. They’ve gone back to the politics of the past and a politics of fear and a politics of division. It wasn’t just Rudy Giuliani, it was also the mayor that engaged in those comments and it was wrong.”
