Ognibene Will Fight Bloomberg All the Way to November Election
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Regardless of the outcome of the Republican primary in September, Mayor Bloomberg’s leading GOP opponent, Thomas Ognibene, “will be on the Conservative Party line all the way to November,” the challenger said yesterday.
The former City Council minority leader, speaking at a meeting of the Rotary Club of New York, promised to remain a conservative gadfly to Mr. Bloomberg throughout the campaign, and he lambasted the mayor for being indistinguishable from his Democratic opponents.
Mr. Ognibene has presented himself as the mayoral race’s only alternative for truly conservative New Yorkers, a claim seemingly bolstered last week when he received the endorsement of the Queens County Conservative Party. The chairman of the state Conservative Party, Michael Long, told The New York Sun on Sunday that he anticipates the other four county organizations will follow suit shortly. Mr. Ognibene told the Sun yesterday that the nods of the Bronx and Brooklyn Conservative Party are expected “within the next week or two.”
In the meantime, Mr. Ognibene is at work presenting the Republican mayor – a lifelong Democrat who changed party affiliation shortly before his 2001 campaign – as a turncoat who, in pandering to the city’s overwhelming Democratic majority, has damaged the party that elected him.
Indeed, Mr. Ognibene said yesterday, the mayor is farther to the left than the favorite punching bag of many New York Republicans: Hillary Clinton.
While New York’s junior senator has been moderating her stance on abortion, for example, Mr. Bloomberg received the Champion of Choice award from the National Abortion Rights Action League last week. The mayor also enraged some pro-life New Yorkers with his proposal, unveiled at that awards ceremony, to allocate at least $1 million in city funds for universal access to emergency contraception, which some consider a form of abortion.
Beyond his appeal to social conservatives, Mr. Ognibene also skewered the mayor on taxation. Tarring Mr. Bloomberg as a big-government Democrat, Mr. Ognibene faulted him for imposing “the biggest property tax in New York history,” referring to Mr. Bloomberg’s winning approval in late 2002 for an increase of 18.5% in city property taxes. The mayor, Mr. Ognibene said, was leading New York into a “never-ending cycle of increased taxes and increased spending.”
Where Mr. Bloomberg differed from his Democratic rivals, Mr. Ognibene said, is that they “are all fighting to find which is the best tax to raise.” He was referring to Mr. Bloomberg’s property-tax hike; a proposal from the Democratic front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, to tax stock purchases at the New York Stock Exchange; City Council Speaker Gifford Miller’s proposal for a package of changes in personal and corporate taxes; and Rep. Anthony Weiner’s plan to increase the city income tax on the largest earners to finance a tax cut for New Yorkers earning $150,000 or less. Only one of the Democratic candidates, C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, has not offered a tax plan.
During the question-and-answer session at the Rotary Club luncheon, Mr. Ognibene, a lawyer from Queens, suggested that New Yorkers should be less compliant in meeting the state’s high demands for tax revenue, saying that if the state’s levies on the city were too great, New Yorkers should engage in “the good old-fashioned American tradition of a tax revolt.”
To avoid having to raise taxes, Mr. Ognibene unveiled some cost-cutting proposals of his own yesterday.
One target was a bloated city bureaucracy, Mr. Ognibene said, pointing to the overabundance of city employees, who number around 300,000. Trimming the city’s workforce by 20%, he said, would save the city $3 billion a year and could be accomplished through layoffs, hiring more part-time workers, and merging city agencies with overlapping functions.
Mr. Ognibene also criticized Mr. Bloomberg’s record on education. Echoing nearly all of the Democrats in the race, Mr. Ognibene praised Mr. Bloomberg for having gained control of the city’s schools but faulted him for having squandered that opportunity to improve them. He accused the Bloomberg administration of micromanagement of education, saying it was failing the students, and he expressed concern about violence in schools, advocating vouchers to provide private-school educations for students unable to learn in public schools.
While Mr. Ognibene’s positions distinguish him from the rest of the mayoral pack, he dismissed the argument that they make him too conservative to govern in New York.
Mr. Ognibene spoke of himself as being in the tradition of Mayor Giuliani, who, he said, ran as a “real” conservative. Mr. Giuliani, however, was able to get Republican organizational support with his positions. Mr. Ognibene, it seems, will not. After the Queens County Republican Party endorsed his candidacy, the other four county organizations voted to support Mr. Bloomberg – endorsements, Mr. Ognibene said, that resulted from the mayor’s “guile, charm, and his pocketbook.”
That setback aside, Mr. Ognibene can still do plenty of harm to Mr. Bloomberg without the blessing of the city’s Republican machine.
A professor of public affairs at Baruch College, David Birdsell, said: “By pledging himself to the Conservative Party line throughout the election, it’s more likely people will vote for him during the Republican primary.” Mr. Ognibene’s commitment, Mr. Birdsell said, would energize conservative Republican voters.
He added that Mr. Ognibene’s continued needling of Mr. Bloomberg from the right could be “disastrous” for the mayor if, by having to defend himself among conservatives, he is pulled too far away from the center-left position he wants to strike for himself in the general election, when he faces an electorate in which Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one.
Running on the Conservative Party line may also have immediate financial benefits for Mr. Ognibene’s campaign, his campaign manager, Brendan Quinn, said yesterday.
While the campaign has raised surprisingly small sums in its grassroots fund-raising to date, Mr. Quinn said the Ognibene team is in meetings with interest groups – including organized-labor and right-to-life organizations – that have been waiting to see whether Mr. Ognibene would receive the Conservative nod before writing checks.
Indeed, anti-abortion groups may be key to Mr. Ognibene’s future fund-raising, the candidate and Mr. Quinn said. Mr. Ognibene said that at fund-raising events he would be discussing Mr. Bloomberg’s position on abortion and the mayor’s emergency-contraception initiative. The campaign is holding one event today, at the Regular Republican Club at Woodside. A larger fund-raising event is planned for Sunday at O’Reilly’s Restaurant at Maspeth, and will be attended by Mr. Long, other Conservative Party representatives, and a Republican state senator from Queens, Serphin Maltese.
The Ognibene campaign also plans an anti-abortion fund-raising mass mailing, but Mr. Quinn said he had to rewrite the materials in light of Mr. Bloomberg’s recent emergency-contraception proposal, which both Mr. Quinn and Mr. Ognibene described as a tactical gift to the campaign as it seeks conservative financial support.
