The largest branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New York City, 1199 SEIU, is airing 60-second radio ads in support of NYC mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio during the last two days of the city's primaries. One of them enlists the help of Junot Diaz, the Dominican-American novelist whose debut "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, and who joins the city's biggest health care workers union in endorsing de Blasio and slamming Mayor Michael Bloomberg for comments made to New York magazine over the weekend in which Bloomberg called de Blasio's campaign "class warfare and racist".
"Mayor Bloomberg seems to think that showing up in a photo with your black wife is racist, and that addressing the stark inequality that is plaguing our city is class war," says Diaz in the ad, "and that all the problems of our city would be solved if we all just had more billionaires in our neighborhoods. Bloomberg can pretend all he wants that the forces that produce inequality aren't driving out families and destroying neighborhoods and causing unnecessary suffering. It's this kind of conservative derangement that is turning New York into two starkly unequal cities."
"Bloomberg can keep hunting for billionaires," the ad continues. "Me, I'm backing de Blasio for the next mayor. De Blasio intends to forge a new covenant for our city - one that prizes democracy over privilege, justice over inequality, and makes the problems of immigrant families no less important than the problems of billionaires. When Bloomberg looks at a photograph of de Blasio's family, he thinks racism. Me, I just think New York."
In the New York magazine interview, the mayor had derided the relatively prominent role the candidate's wife and children have played in it. De Blasio is white and his wife is black. After calling the campaign "class-warfare and racist", Bloomberg qualified his comments, saying, "He's making an appeal using his family to gain support. I think it's pretty obvious to anyone watching what he's been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It's comparable to me pointing out I'm Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote. You tailor messages to your audiences and address issues you think your audience cares about."
1199 SEIU has been campaigning hard for Democrat de Blasio, the current Public Advocate who leads the race by as much as 14 points in the polls. The health care workers' union has tapped Russell Simmons and John Leguizamo to help out, and though most of its 200,000 members are African-American, it has sought to reach the estimated one-quarter of New York City which is Hispanic through Spanish-language radio and newspaper ads, robo-calls and emails.
RELATED: Immigration Reform 2013: SEIU Ads Target House Republicans
© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
