Democrats Shift to High-Gear Campaigning

With barely two weeks to go before the Democratic primary election, the mayoral candidates ran between churches, festivals, parades, and the steps of City Hall yesterday, aggressively trying to meet voters and share their ideas before New Yorkers head to the polls.The fast-paced day of campaigning – which for most of the candidates started before many New Yorkers had sipped their first cups of coffee and ended after the evening news – will become the norm between now and September 13, the day when two, if not three, of the Democratic contenders’ campaigns end.“We are 100% focused on delivering Gifford’s message to New Yorkers,” a spokesman for the Gifford Miller campaign, Reggie Johnson, said. He vowed that between now and primary day, his candidate, the City Council speaker, “will not be outworked in going out in New York.”Yesterday, Mr. Miller started his day at a church in Queens at 10 a.m. and finished with a visit to the Caribbean American Festival in Brooklyn at 6:45 p.m.The Weiner campaign spokesman, Anson Kaye, said he wouldn’t be so quick to assume the council speaker would be campaigning the hardest.He said Anthony Weiner “has always been a very energetic legislator and campaigner” and said the Brooklyn-Queens congressman’s pace would be even brisker in the coming days. “No one has ever accused Anthony Weiner of lacking energy,” Mr. Kaye said. “He’ll be out there morning, noon, and night.” Mr. Weiner’s day started at 7:30 a.m. yesterday, when he held the finish line at the Manhattan half-marathon. After five more events, he wrapped up his day at a Hudson River Trust event at 7:45 p.m.Today, Mr. Weiner will unveil his second and third television advertisements, which focus on two of his campaign’s main themes: tax cuts and schools. Mr. Kaye said that in the coming weeks Mr. Weiner would be talking more about specific ideas for cutting taxes and cutting waste, as well as sharing new ideas about housing and law enforcement.The C. Virginia Fields campaign will also ramp up its advertising push this week, the campaign spokeswoman, Kirsten Powers, said. The Manhattan borough president’s camp will unveil two new radio ads today. On Wednesday it will present its television ads, which are scheduled to have their debut the following day.Ms. Powers said Ms. Fields will be working “very long days” and “doing as much voter contact as she possibly can” in the coming weeks.The Democratic front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, had a shorter day than some of his competitors yesterday. He started at noon at a church in Queens and ended at 4:30 p.m. at La Fiesta Folklorica in Central Park.At a 2:30 p.m. announcement on the steps of City Hall, he repeated his assertion that the Bloomberg administration is underestimating how many students are dropping out of high school. He said a Harvard study, which looked at the 2001 cohort of graduates – the year before Mr. Bloomberg took office – is a better measure than the yearly results released by the administration, because it does not exclude special education and “discharged students” as he said the Bloomberg figures do.“Mike Bloomberg doesn’t think all students should count,” the former Bronx borough president said. “I do.”Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, said Mr. Ferrer is wrong on the facts. He said that not only is the Harvard study outdated, but the city has been calculating graduation rates the same way since 1991, when Mr. Ferrer had an appointee on the Board of Education. Also, “discharged” students are not teenagers who are kicked out of school for bad performance. They are students who move out of New York or switch into private or parochial schools.“The methodology hasn’t changed, and the data shows that graduation rates are increasing under Mike Bloomberg because of the reforms he has championed – which Ferrer predictably opposed,” Mr. Loeser said.Mr. Bloomberg marched yesterday in the Pakistani Day Parade, accompanied by his girlfriend, Diana Taylor; his eldest daughter, Emma, and his son-in-law, Christopher Frissora.Before the parade, the mayor was asked his thoughts on Cindy Sheehan, the mother who has camped outside President Bush’s Texas ranch to protest the death in Iraq of her soldier son, Casey Sheehan. Mr. Bloomberg said it is not a local issue and didn’t offer an opinion on it.Later, Mr. Ferrer agreed that it was not a local issue but said: “How can you not feel for a mother? … My heart goes out to Cindy Sheehan and her plight.”

Democrats Shift to High-Gear Campaigning

Democrats Shift to High-Gear Campaigning

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