Mike and Bill Meet One Last Time
If you skipped the debate between Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson, you probably made the right choice. For better or worse, nothing that happened last night is going to change what happens next week. And if you just wanted to watch two politicians verbally pummel each other for an hour, you could turn on a cable news channel at any time of the day or night. Then again you did miss opportunity to see the bilingual mayor casually break into Spanish for no apparent reason!
Mr. Bloomberg jabbed back, delivering one of the few memorable phrases of the debate when he used a bit of Spanish to say that Mr. Thompson's ineffectiveness ultimately created the need for mayoral control of the schools.
"Everybody looked at the job that was done in the 1990s when you ran the Board of Education, and they said, 'No más!" Mr. Bloomberg said, prompting applause from the audience.
Bloomberg may not have deserved the applause. He's been taking weekly Spanish lessons for eight years now. Surely he really could have delivered a little more than a "No más' if he wanted to wow the crowd, no? Then again, Bloomberg is a humble man and not the kind of guy who would ever want to show off in front of a crowd, so he must have held himself back so as to not embarrass Thompson, right? Yep, that must have been it.