Some of Mike's Best Friends are Black
After-election analyses are fun, when political reporters parse returns and exit polls and work to determine who voted for whom and why. But the real challenge in that effort isn't the data crunching, it's figuring out the socially acceptable ways to express what that crunched data says.
The mayor's wide support among minority voters is a sign that the strategy of the Democrat, Fernando Ferrer, to build on a dependable base of black and Hispanic votes fell victim to emerging political realities: that blacks and Hispanics no longer vote reflexively as a bloc, and that a middle-class coalition can trump traditional ethnic-based appeals. The winning multiethnic coalition turned out to be Mr. Bloomberg's.
He won a second term by wooing liberal defectors from Democratic ranks and by carrying every Assembly district in which white Catholics or Jews predominate. He also carried the only district in which Asians outnumber others.
In other words: All sorts of pandered-to minorities could get behind the rich Jew!
It's the American dream.
[Photo Tom Callan, 2005. All rights reserved.]
