UFT Threatens To Use Its Own Campaign Funds To Destroy Spitzer

The Times has an article out tonight saying business leaders and labor are joining together to put a stake through Spitzer's run for city comptroller:

Business leaders leapt into the ruckus, finding common cause with organized labor as they described Mr. Spitzer as ill-suited to the job of managing the city’s multibillion-dollar pension system and policing city spending. 

Such a post, said Kathryn S. Wylde, the head of the New York City Partnership, made up mainly of real estate, Wall Street and insurance firms, requires intense collaboration and diplomacy with the mayor’s office, the business community and municipal labor unions. 

“The tone of the Spitzer announcement and history suggest that’s not the way he would approach the job,” she said in an interview. 

...

It appeared that the muscle for the anti-Spitzer operation might emerge from the city’s labor unions, which view Mr. Stringer as a reliable ally, and are wary of the less predictable Mr. Spitzer, who has not hesitated to confront them in the past. 

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said all options — including tapping its own campaign funds for television ads — were under consideration. “We’re going to make sure that we do everything in our power to make sure Scott is the next comptroller,” he said. “Weiner has kind of been given a free pass.”

The one good thing to come out of all of this is, it looks like Weiner's "free pass" has been revoked:

From corporate boardrooms to the headquarters of the city’s Democratic political campaigns, phone lines lighted up and strategy sessions were organized on Monday with a single mission in mind: stopping Eliot Spitzer. 

The surprise decision by former Governor Spitzer to run for citywide office startled and galvanized the city’s political establishment, which worried aloud about handing the TV-savvy and self-financed candidate a new megaphone. 

In candid conversations, some of the leaders expressed acute regret over their failure to swiftly undercut the mayoral campaign of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, another scandal-scarred candidate for citywide office, and said they would not make the same mistake twice. 

 

...

Strikingly, Democratic leaders drew parallels between Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Weiner, trying to lump them together as two wayward men obsessed with reclaiming power and unworthy of redemption, in a direct appeal to women voters who may decide the races. 

“For me the question with both Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer is what have they been doing to earn this second chance?” asked Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a Democratic candidate for mayor. She said she had seen little that would “redeem themselves from their selfish behavior.” 

They gave Weiner a "free pass" because he's a reliable neo-liberal happy to not upset the gravy train both business and labor leaders have been riding for the last 40 years.

But Spitzer is anything but reliable and they won't give him a free pass to the comptroller office.

Unfortunately for Weiner (though fortunately for us), Anthony's free pass looks to be the first piece of collateral damage from the business/labor War on Spitzer.