We’re already getting the remains of the Brazilian rainforest in our mailboxes touting the marvels of Mike Bloomberg as yet-again mayor, this months in advance of the actual voting. I suppose when your personal fortune approaches infinity, you have to do something to slow down its further accumulation and avoid world exchange-rate distortion.
But more interesting is the electoral slugfest erupting for the job of District Attorney of Manhattan now that Robert Morgenthau is retiring after 100 years on the job. Morgenthau is a city blueblood who has sat at that desk for so long his body is rumored to now swivel at the waist.
The job doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s high profile and rather glitzy. Assistant D.A.s under Morgenthau have included Sonia Sotomayor, Andrew Cuomo, Eliot Spitzer and John F. Kennedy, Jr. He has a thinly-disguised counterpart on ‘Law & Order’. So the knives are out.
Leslie Crocker Snyder dared to run against Morgenthau four years ago, which was taken as an act of lèse majesté. She’s probably all right but has an annoying tough-girl stance and is too conservative for this city.
Morgenthau had a long-serving deputy who was considered his heir, but like ruling elites everywhere, he knows loyalty only to families like his own and instead anointed Cyrus Vance, Jr., dumping the loyal drone who had served him for three decades like an aged servant on ‘Upstairs/Downstairs’.
For that reason alone, I’m voting for the third candidate, Richard Aborn, whose father was not famous. I’d already settled on him when I got a lovely piece of campaign literature in the mail lauding him for ‘taking guns out of the hands of criminals’. The picture shows Dick Cheney wielding a rifle.
[Correction: The original version of this post erroneously stated that the mayoral elections are in 2010. They take place in November 2009.]
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