It's the Money!

So I haven't updated the blog in quite some time, owing mostly to the fact that I have little to say to the world these days. I have particularly little to say about politics, yet here I go again....Here in New York City, we have an election coming up on Tuesday. I know this because the incumbent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been pestering me about it for months. His TV spots are omnipresent, his flyers have been a constant presence in my mailbox, and one of his volunteers even knocked on my door yesterday.

Bloomberg's oppenent is supposedly someone named William Thompson. I'm pretty sure this Thompson fellow actually exists, although the visible evidence for this proposition consists almost entirely of his appearances in Bloomberg ads, which are in turn mostly devoted to decrying the various nefarious ways in which Thompson has been attacking Bloomberg. Even if this last bit is true, most voters would never have known it since Bloomberg has outspent Thompson by an order of something like 15:1 (final figures TBA), apparently setting a record by shelling out more than $85 million of his own money. As for Thompson's campaign...I've seen a grand total of one TV spot, which aired twice during a ballgame the other night. It's like our very own Stalinist election, free-market style.

Obviously, I have no intention of participating in this absurd exercise, whose outcome was predetermined long before most New Yorkers had ever even heard of Thompson. I have nothing in particular against Bloomberg, who seems no worse than average for a politician, and I've made no attempt even to form an opinion of Thompson. But I'll be rooting against Bloomberg all the same, for more or less the same reasons I root against the Yankees and Goldman Sachs: some vague, sentimental notion that there ought to be some things (elections, championships, governments, etc.) that can't simply be bought. Ugh.