Yesterday, Newt Gingrich inexplicably took his working class rage over his increasing irrelevance in the Republican primaries out on Mayor Bloomberg, marking a line in the sand between those people who "buy the mayorship of New York" and those with $1.5 million worth of credit at Tiffany's. But that's no big deal to Hizzoner, who brushed aside the comment when asked by reporters yesterday: “Did he say something?" One source put it even more bluntly to the Post: “I don’t think he gives a s---.”
While campaigning in Mason City, Iowa, Gingrich was quoted as saying: “We don’t come out of a background where we can buy a seat or buy, as Mayor Bloomberg did, buy the mayorship of New York. I mean if you look at how much he spent, he just wrote a check and bought it.” Though Gingrich was probably really aiming his comment toward mortal enemy Mitt Romney, Bloomberg ended up being a casualty of his middle class bravado. One Bloomberg ally called it kind of pathetic: “I just think Newt is being off the cuff. The guy is not the most on-message person. It’s the desperate last days in Iowa and he’s ranting.”
When Gingrich visited the city at the start of the month, Bloomberg had said, “Whether you agree with him or not, he is certainly a smart guy." But Bloomberg made it clear yesterday that he has more important things to do—he has lives to save!—than worry about Gingrich's verbal arrows: “Look, my job is to do more events like this, to be able to say that life expectancy [is up], that crime has gone down, deaths by traffic [are down], that schools are improving, and that’s what I’m going to focus on.”
