Like waistcoated art patrons peering through their pince-nez during an auction of Dutch Masters at Christie’s, multimillionaires . . . and billionaires . . . who reside in the rarified ether of New York City are tentatively raising their bidding paddles in an attempt to snap up the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Kirsten Gillibrand who, it would seem, isn’t catering to Wall Street slavishly enough for the fat cats’ liking:
Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of The Daily News, is considering a bid for the Senate seat now held by Kirsten E. Gillibrand, according to two people told of the discussions.
Perhaps Morty, like a shark, caught a whiff of the miasmic smell of epic FAIL that has been wafting from the Ford non-campaign:
Harold Ford of Tennessee, Merrill Lynch, the DLC, NBC and the Park Avenue Regency has been campaigning against the excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for six weeks now, and he remains a pathetic loser in the Siena poll. According to the new poll, Gillibrand leads Ford by 42-16, slightly better than the 41-17 margin in last month’s poll.
I can only imagine what a blunderbuss of pompous entitlement a Zuckerman campaign would be, since Morty has been, in the past, so fond of bulldozers:
Zuckerman owns a 5-acre oceanfront estate in East Hampton. But he obviously thinks he may own the beach, too. On Tuesday last week – at 4 a.m., no less – a village police officer spotted a bulldozer barreling down the beach, moving the dunes to protect Zuckerman’s Hamptons investment. Needless to say, the nocturnal development was illegal. Zuckerman had contracted to have some landscaping done.
By the way, a wide-eyed and innocent Zuckerman claimed he had never instructed anyone to remove those pesky dunes. Perhaps he was just engaged in Palestinian home bulldozing role play.
So when can we look forward to Mort Zuckerman’s upstate listening tour? Can we expect to see him wading through dairy pastures, cow dung stuck to the soles of his $1500 A. Testoni oxfords, as he shakes hands with struggling farmers? Will Zuckerman forego the Memorial Day soirees on Georgica Pond for the annual Adirondack Polka Festival in Old Forge, NY?
Or will he just disconnect the phone and jet off to Aspen again? That should play well in Endicott.
And what does Harold Ford make of this latest big money threat to his inchoate Senate conquest? Perhaps we should check his Twitterfeed, the one that his own non-campaign staff was unaware he had started:
When City Hall asked Harold Ford Jr. spokeswoman Tammy Sun yesterday if the pseudo-candidate was behind the HFord2 Twitter account, Sun replied, “We are not involved at all with that. Don’t know who is doing it. Could just be a fan.”
And this is from Ford’s spokesperson? Oy.
It certainly is turning into quite the field of Olympic-grade twits trying to buy Gillibrand’s seat this fall. I wonder who the next Lord of New York to jump into the bidding will be.
