The Flack

It’s one thing to have your best-laid plans for a press conference thwarted by breaking news that draws away media attendees, but quite another to have your day intentionally foiled by a rival party. This seems to be the case of late with the Fernando Ferrer NYC Mayoral campaign.

Mr. Ferrer’s news conference to showcase the filthy conditions in a city subway station lost its bite when cleaning crews came and went an hour before the media arrived. The same scenario happened in a city park, once strewn with beer bottles and trash.

The challenge to Ferrer’s PR handlers, of course, is to alert reporters in advance so they may plan to cover, but without tipping their hats to his opponent, in this case the Mayor, who has the capacity to quickly take action to blunt the message. However insidious this sounds, one must give credit to the mayor for his campaign’s war-room mentality, a must-have these days given the 24/7 news cycle.

Of course, the Mayor’s cantankerous spokesperson “bristled at suggestions that the workers were trying to take the air out of Ferrer campaign events. ‘Not only does Freddy have no record, he doesn’t have any ideas of his own, which is why he had to steal this press conference idea from Giff Miller,’ said Stu Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign spokesman…” Talk about dubious credibility!

PR media politics New York

It’s no secret that the Mayor of New York holds a commanding — some say insurmountable — lead heading in to the September primaries and the November elections. The challenge for his challengers lies in creating news that catapults their candidates into the public eye — not the C. Virginia Fields variety. After all, Mayor Mike, as commander, still holds the cards that control the city’s news agenda.

So one has to give Fernando Ferrer’s press person Jen Bluestein credit for enterprisingly capitalizing on the Mayor’s media schedule yesterday, which featured him announcing a school essay contest. Ms. Bluestein created and released its own “school essay” humorously trumpeting the foibles of Mayor Mike.

This of course prompted Mayoral mouthpiece Stu Loeser to offer this sour note: “Although the winners of today’s contest can write better than the Ferrer campaign, the Ferrer campaign wins first prize for doing the best job at embarrassing their candidate with this pathetic attack.”

Stu, lighten up.