NYC voters consider 3rd term for Bloomberg

Saturday, November 21, 2009 9:47 AM

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Monday, November 02, 2009

NEW YORK, USA (AP) - How badly does Michael Bloomberg want a third term as mayor of New York? The billionaire is spending $35,000 an hour out of his own pocket and could burn through more than $100 million on what is already the most expensive self-financed campaign in American history.

Even though he has always been ahead - now leading his Democratic opponent by 15 to 18 percentage points in the polls - Bloomberg has spent money as if the race were a dead heat, buying non-stop ads, targeted automatic telephone calls and high-priced consultants' time.

For Bloomberg, a 67-year-old media tycoon with an estimated worth of $17.5 billion, his biggest challenge has been in overcoming the negative publicity of reversing his longtime support for term limits and persuading the City Council to change the law last year so he could run for a third term.

His Democratic challenger, city comptroller William Thompson Jr, has run ads hammering Bloomberg over the reversal, but his message has been drowned out by Bloomberg's barrage of advertising, which began in April and never let up. Recent polls show the percentage of voters less likely to choose Bloomberg because of term limits - about 43 per cent -hasn't changed.

More than a week before election day, Bloomberg had already broken his own spending record of $85 million from the 2005 race, dwarfing even the $63 million that Texas billionaire Ross Perot pumped into his independent presidential run in 1992.

In 2001, when Bloomberg was running as a politically untested former CEO, he said early on that he could not envision spending more than $30 million because "at some point, you start to look obscene".
He went on to spend $74 million that year.

Bloomberg has gotten praise from independent budget analysts on his financial management. When the city's economy deteriorated after the World Trade Center attack, he raised taxes and fees while trimming the budget and looking for ways to diversify the economy beyond Wall Street.