Good Night And Good Luck Indeed

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the Jeanine Pirro campaign…
The wanna-be GOP Senator coffered a measly $438,555 in her inaugural fundraising period in the race to topple Sen. Hillary Clinton.
By way of comparison, Eric Gioia and Melinda Katz easily bested that figure in their little City Council races this year (sorry David Weprin, Pirro beat you by about $10k).
While it’s not a fair comparison (those Council figures were brought in over two years while Pirro has only had nine weeks) it does not bode well for future dialing-for-dollars prospects.
Consider a number of disturbing facts:
• Rudy Giuliani raised $7 million in his first filing.
• Rick “Sign it, sign it” Lazio raised $5 million.
• Every tried-and-true anti-Hillary donor out there was frothing at the mouth for months just waiting to cut a check to whomever became the Republican nominee for the office. And that’s all she could come up with?
• The Pirro campaign thinks this is a “reasonable” showing and blames everything from Hurricane Katrina to gas prices (what, no locusts?) for the low sum.
• Meanwhile, Hillary herself pulled in another $5 million in this period to bring her to a cool $27M total.
The one small piece of good news for Pirro is that her chief rival, Ed Cox, dropped out after Governor George Pataki endorsed her.
That may have had more to do with his lack of money on-hand than anything. The Pataki nod simply gave him an easy way out.
For Pirro, there is no such escape hatch. Again, I said it months ago — Pirro should have run for Attorney General, a natural slot for her. She could have made a better case for herself based on experience and would have had a battered Democratic nominee to face in the General Election.
It wouldn’t have been easy, mind you, but it wouldn’t have been impossible.
Unless Hillary Clinton takes up puppy-kicking on national TV, Pirro beating the incumbent junior senator will be just that.
On the home front…
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s numbers continue to soar. He is now at least 27 points up (depending on which poll you believe, if you even believe in polls at all) on Democratic candidate Fernando Ferrer. Just when it seemed like Ferrer might get a campaign issue to play with and exploit two weeks ago with Bloomy skipping out on the first debate, a terror threat struck and Hizzoner’s handling of the situation only made his numbers go up.
With less than a month to go now, Ferrer must pull out all the stops.
Beats me what his big bounce factor could be though.
However, you cannot completely discount his chances. After all, in early October 2001, Mark Green had the mayor’s race in the bag against relative unknown Bloomberg.
Green is now running in a crowded race for state attorney general, so you can see where counting his chickens got him.
Finally, the Campaign Finance Board doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in matching funds for the General Election over the past two weeks.
Here are the Queens recipients and the amounts they collected: Tony Avella (D-19), $68,704; Peter Boudouvas (R-19), $77,862; Renee Lobo (I-24), $1,083; Helen Sears (D-25), $17,890; Robyn Sklar (G-26), $28,356.
politics@queenscourier.com