Like any shrewd businessman, Michael Bloomberg knows the importance of test-marketing a new product—especially if the product in question happens to be himself. So Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire media mogul who is considering a run for Mayor on the Republican line, is conducting a series of focus groups to determine, in part, whether New Yorkers Read More
Six weeks before the Great Blackout of 2003, Mayor Bloomberg’s senior energy adviser quit his post amid a series of disputes over the administration’s approach to energy policy, The Observer has learned.
The adviser, Richard Miller, was a senior vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Miller had been assigned the task Read More
Bruce Teitelbaum, Rudy Giuliani’s most trusted political adviser, sidled up to a veteran New York operative recently and made a bold pronouncement.
“Bruce said, very openly, that if Rudy Giuliani wants it, he’ll be the Republican Party’s Vice Presidential nominee in 2004,” the operative told The Observer. “And he said that he thinks Giuliani is Read More
When Eliot Spitzer was growing up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he and his two siblings played a somewhat unusual game at the dinner table.
“We had an assignment process,” said Bernard Spitzer, Eliot’s father, a real-estate developer. “We would go around the table, and one of the three children would be asked Read More
Dennis Rivera, president of the city’s hospital workers’ union, controls the most powerful and sophisticated political operation in the city. This simple fact explains why the four Democratic Mayoral candidates have been wooing him for months in a frenzied–and, at times, unsightly–effort to win his blessing. All this intrigue has created a dilemma for the Read More
City Council Speaker Gifford Miller may be the second-most-powerful elected official in New York City, but as he wandered through the hallways of a housing complex for seniors in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood on Sept. 7, he could have been mistaken for the lowliest of City Council staffers.
Clad in a T-shirt and black slacks, the Read More
As he pursues his goal of implementing nonpartisan elections in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has found it easy to dismiss the plan’s vocal opponents as a cabal of patronage-enriched Democratic Party bosses who fear that reform will loosen their monopoly
on power.
But now, for the first time, the Mayor’s reform plan is Read More
A bipartisan group of prominent New York lawyers, former federal judges and former government officials has launched a fierce attack on the Bush administration’s conduct in the war on terror, charging that the detention of suspected terrorist Jose Padilla is unconstitutional.
The group, which includes a number of former high-ranking officials in Republican and Democratic Read More
Some of the city’s most influential preservationists are vowing to block plans to build a huge new terminal for Jet Blue Airways at John F. Kennedy International Airport, arguing that it will destroy a gloriouspieceofaviation architecture: Eero Saarinen’s T.W.A. terminal.
But the efforts of these preservationists have infuriated some of the city’s business leaders, who Read More
It’s safe to assume that Marc Racicot, the Montana-born chairman of the Republican National Committee, hasn’t spent a good deal of time in Washington Heights, the largely Latino neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan.
But that’s exactly where he’s headed on Thursday, July 24. On that afternoon, Mr. Racicot, along with R.N.C. senior adviser Read More
