William C. Thompson Jr. walked into Tuesday night’s mayoral debate a likeable man who is being outspent 16 to 1, and whose views and background are more than a bit of a mystery to many New Yorkers.
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James Estrin/The New York Times
William Thompson greeted his supporters before his debate with Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday night.
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Unfortunately for Mr. Thompson, he seemed to have exited in the same fashion.
Save for his accent, which carries the unmistakable cadence of his native Brooklyn, and for his insistent attacks on Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s flip-flop on term limits, Mr. Thompson, the city comptroller, resembled a painter who left too much of his canvas blank.
He grew up as the high-achieving son of a prominent politician and a teacher in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood of elegant brownstones that now suffers a plague of foreclosures and homelessness. During his time on the Board of Education, he voted for two chancellors who concentrated on the poorest students and wrested power from corrupt local school boards. Test scores rose sharply in his final years there.
A viewer would have learned little to nothing of these facts. Mr. Thompson’s personal anecdote count Tuesday totaled zero.
The conundrum for Mr. Thompson is that he’s carved a three-decade career in public life by being a conciliator, a nimble-footed inside player herded board members to votes and — with one notable exception — really tried to avoid annoying former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
He lacked power to make most policy decisions and seemed allergic to crusades. All of which is perfectly defensible, but public powerlessness is not the stuff of compelling narratives.
On Tuesday Mr. Bloomberg attacked him, erroneously, for being “in charge” of the schools in the 1990s. Mr. Thompson scrunched his face, incredulous.
“I was in charge?” he said, turning to look at the mayor. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Mr. Bloomberg replied with just a hint of a Cheshire cat smile.
In fairness, neither mayor nor comptroller made the night electric; Mr. Bloomberg in particular tended to dole out energy a miserly watt at a time. The city is sunk into recession’s mire, unemployment tops 10 percent — black male unemployment edges toward 50 percent — and foreclosure threatens working class families, and the candidates made glancing mentions of all of this. (Neither candidate uttered the word foreclosure).
A reporter asked the candidates about a controversial fact of life in minority communities: Police each year frisk more than half a million young men, more than 80 percent of them black or Latino. The number of frisks has increased during the past decade, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of teenagers and college students. Police have arrested fewer than 5 percent of this number.
Mr. Thompson wants to curtail it. “We know it’s being overused,” he said.
Mr. Bloomberg conceded no problem. “I do think the police have struck a good balance,” he said soothingly.
Mr. Bloomberg is not much for emoting. He rolls his eyes, his voice cuts monotone and his touch is rarely common. But he came into the night with considerable advantages. He is a reasonably popular two-term incumbent (residents tend to like his policies more so than him), and he sits atop a great green bag of personal swag, having so far spent $65 million of his own money on this campaign.
Mr. Bloomberg, an independent, is unsentimentally promiscuous about party loyalty. But in his governing style, he looks an awful lot like a moderate Democrat, which complicates matters for Mr. Thompson, who as it happens is a moderate Democrat.
None of which is to suggest that Mr. Thompson has no line of attack — the decaying economy suggests opportunity. But the Thompson campaign has been curiously relaxed — last weekend he appeared at two churches, according to his schedule. He offered passionate words Tuesday night about the plight of middle-class New Yorkers.
But he offered no storehouse of stories of actual suffering to put meat on the bones of his attack.
Instead Mr. Thompson concluded as he began, by doubling down on a single bet: term limits. The election, he said, will be New Yorkers’ referendum on term limits. “And that we say: We are not for sale!”
In less than four weeks, he’ll find out if that is enough.
