You heard the speculation this week that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to let Obama assess places destroyed by Hurricane Sandy because he is rooting for Mitt Romney and didn’t want to give the president any photo ops. Looks like the rumors were wrong.
Bloomberg, who had previously said that he would not make a public endorsement in the 2012 race, apparently changed his mind after New York was pummeled by Hurricane Sandy…
Bloomberg’s endorsement comes as momentum for Obama seems to be building as the race ends“The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast — in lost lives, lost homes and lost business — brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief,” Bloomberg wrote.
“We need leadership from the White House — and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks,” the mayor continued. “His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants…which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.”
He then went on to praise President Obama’s “Race to the Top” education initative, his defense of a woman’s right to choose, and his support for marriage equality, noting that “I want our president to be on the right side of history.”
But, Bloomberg added, it’s not just that he likes Obama. It’s also that he doesn’t like Romney.
“In the past [Romney] has also taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care,” Bloomberg writes, “But he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the health care model he signed into law in Massachusetts.”
“If the 1994 or 2003 version of Mitt Romney were running for president, I may well have voted for him,” he added.
The endorsement comes as momentum for Obama seems to be building as the race ends.
The right-leaning RealClearPolitics, as of this writing, has the president and Romney tied in its summary of selected polls, while the site had the former governor ahead by at least two points earlier in the week.
The prediction website InTrade is giving Obama a 66.9% chance of winning.
And poor Nate Silver has taken a beating from the right because his statistical model on the blog FiveThirtyEight shows Romney has only about a 25% of winning 270 electoral votes.
In my opinion, the right wing is afraid that if too many nominally unbiased sites are predicting a Barack Obama win, their voting machine shenanigans will be exposed as obvious voting machine shenanigans. I do not know it for a fact but to enable the desired electronic voting machine machinations without to high a risk of being called out they need enough uncertainty in the outcome to make it plausible, i.e., plausible deniability which has become a Republican mantra when in power or not. I hope I am wrong, but there is a reason for the need to suppress anyone or any group that predicts an Obama win.