Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (Photo: Getty)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a splash by endorsing President Barack Obama this afternoon, however the billionaire's backing won't come with any campaign cash from the mayor's new super PAC. Sources familiar with Mayor Bloomberg's plans told Politicker "his PAC is not going to be contributing to the president's campaign."

Mayor Bloomberg created his super PAC, Independence USA, last month. At the time of its launch, the PAC pledged to spend $10 million to $15 million during this year's election cycle on "candidates from both parties who pledge to work in a bipartisan fashion."

So far, Mayor Bloomberg's PAC has spent at least $1.4 million that has gone to both Democrats and Republicans. As of this writing, Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor who took a leave from City Hall to head the PAC on the mayor's behalf, has not responded to a request for comment on this story.

Lena Dunham (Photo: Twitter)

Lena Dunham, the star, creator and producer of HBO's hipster-ific series Girls, took to Twitter today to encourage her more than 200,000 followers to take on the Tea Party by "eat[ing] dope shit" at a series of dinners dedicated to raising money to defeat a "targeted list" of Tea Party incumbents picked by a liberal super PAC. The dinners are hosted by hosted by a group called Downtown For Democracy and Ms. Dunham's real-life best friend, Audrey Gelman (who uses the handle @grumplstilskin on Twitter and works as press secretary for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer) is a member of the Downtown For Democracy Board.

"Want to eat dope shit for a wonderful cause? Support D4D and my oldest best ‪#girl‬ @grumplstiltskin," Ms. Dunham tweeted along with a link to the dinner series.

The Downtown For Democracy dinners, aptly titled "Dining For Democracy," feature meals cooked by star chefs including Mario Batali and Momofoku Milk Bar's Christina Tosi. There will also be guest speakers and musicians including MSNBC host Alex Wagner and Michael Bloomberg's deputy mayor for government affairs, Howard Wolfson. Tickets require contributions ranging from $125 to $2,000.

Downtown for Democracy was founded in 2003 "to organize artists around the Bush/Kerry presidential election." During this election cycle, they're focused on defeating the "Tea Party 10," a list of Tea Party incumbents in Congress compiled by the liberal super PAC CREDO that includes, Allen West and Steve King.

A few hours later, Howard Wolfson, Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for communications and an old pal of Mr. de Blasio’s from their days on the Hillary Clinton Senate campaign, sent out a blistering response.

“When Bill de Blasio last served in the city’s executive branch there were 2,000 murders a year,” he said, referring to the public advocate’s tenure under former Mayor David Dinkins, a mayoralty that has lived on in the memory of Bloomberg’s supporters as a warning about the dangers of an unchecked bleeding heart lefty presiding over City Hall. “Today we are on track to have less than 500—a record new low. Mr. de Blasio may be nostalgic for the days when the ACLU set crime policy in this city, but most New Yorkers don’t want rampant crime to return ... Make no mistake, we will not continue to be the safest big city in America if Mr. de Blasio has his way.”

The next day, Mr. de Blasio arranged another news conference to denounce Mr. Wolfson’s denunciation of him.

And so it has gone: With the 2013 mayoral election still over a year away, stop-and-frisk has emerged as one of the most important and fraught issue in the early days of the campaign.

Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer has been out front on the topic for nearly a year, visiting 19 churches and delivering a major address on the issue alongside Newark Mayor Cory Booker. (Privately, supporters of his scoff that Mr. de Blasio only jumped in once Mr. Stringer made it an issue.)

“Scott was out there early and pushing the issue; I’m happy about that,” said City Councilman Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn, who is neutral in the 2013 mayor’s race and whose own arrest at last summer’s West Indian Day Parade by police unaware of who he was served to spark a call for reforms.

But it is not just the two of them. A week after Mr. de Blasio’s series of pressers, Council Speaker Christine Quinn—whose status as the early frontrunner has been solidified by her implicit vow to carry on the legacy of Mr. Bloomberg and by her current ability to wring concessions out of the other side of City Hall—coaxed out of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly a series of reforms that included greater training for officers. Then, John Liu, the city comptroller whose fundraising scandal threatens to derail his own mayoral ambitions, called for the practice to be outright abolished.

“This is not what a democratic society is about,” he told The Observer. “It smacks of martial law.”

Organizers are planning a massive protest on Father’s Day, hoping thousands of New Yorkers will turn out for a silent march up Fifth Avenue. George Gresham, the president of the powerful labor union 1199/SEIU, recently announced they couldn’t “ever support anyone who wants to be in the leadership of New York City if they are not speaking out against this policy of stop-and-frisk.”

For Mr. Wolfson, it is this desire that is motivating the denunciations of the administration’s police practices.

“You have a group of candidates running for office who know that they need to appeal to 40 percent plus one in a Democratic primary electorate—which is a very small percentage of people in this city—and they have positioned themselves accordingly, aided and abetted by the ACLU and The New York Times editorial board,” he said. “Anyone who is now running for mayor will have to pass the New York Times test on stop-and-frisk.”

He decried the fact that a “very small minority of people will decide who the next mayor is,” and suggested that a “credible Republican candidate” would be necessary to keep the contenders from promising to return the city to the scarred 1970s. (Remember, this is a man who used to advise Hillary Clinton.)

To Mr. de Blasio, such a response is “unbelievably off topic.”

“It was not mature, not serious,” he said. “It was name-calling, and by the way, strangely old-school. It was like something you would have heard in the 1980s national political discourse. To accuse someone of being so close to the ACLU? That is strangely out of time.”

Mr. Stringer concurred. “I resent that so much,” he said. “I grew up in this city all my life. I was here in the 1970s. I was here during Son of Sam. The A Train was a rolling crime scene. Nobody wants to go back to that, including me. But there are ways to be both tough on crime and smart on crime.”

There is little doubt that the NYPD has been stopping more and more New Yorkers on the street—ostensibly in the search for illegal handguns—questioning them and in many cases searching their cars or their pockets, and that the increased number of searches has not led to a corresponding increase in arrests. Last year, police collected 780 guns after stopping over 685,000 people. In 2003—back when the city’s crime rate was dropping, rather than stabilizing—police recovered 604 guns while only stopping 160,851 people. Mr. Bloomberg defended stop-and-frisk, as if his legacy depended upon it. He counts over 5,000 fewer murders in the city due to the practice (a number arrived at comparing the murder rate over the last ten years with the ten before, a period that includes the crime-ridden early 19990's.) When an editorial in The New York Times called on the administration to be more like Philadelphia and curb the practice, Mayor Bloomberg shot back, “I just have to wonder what kind of world they are living in.”

The phrase stop and frisk has come to stand as a catchall for overzealous policing, but none of the candidates, including Mr. Liu, actually believe that the NYPD doesn’t have the right and the duty to stop someone they suspect of being a criminal. The current number, they concede, is too high, but they are unanimously reluctant to name a more appropriate figure. They call for a series of reforms that nibble around the margins instead, including greater oversight of the practice and more community policing. The City Council has proposed that police officers leave a business card with their name and rank with all suspects who are stopped but found to have nothing on them.

Politically, it is unclear how the issue will play out when voters go to the polls next summer. A recent Daily News poll found support divided, with half of the respondents finding the practice legitimate police work that keeps the city safe, and the other half calling it “racially insensitive.” Most of the opposition to the practice is centered around the poor, minority neighborhoods where the practice is most widespread, votes that seem most likely to go to Bill Thompson, the city’s former comptroller and the only African-American candidate in the race. (Mr. Thompson has been much more muted on the subject than his competitors, telling The Observer in an interview only that he thought the issue would play out in the mayor’s race as part of a broader discussion of policing issues.) All of the candidates expect that to change, as the practice grows more and more widespread, even if the notion of being pulled over by the police remains an abstract prospect for most white New Yorkers.

If there is significant oppo-sition among white voters to stop-and-frisk, it would mark a sea change in the way New Yorkers think about public safety. Since the days of Mr. Dinkins, and before, being called soft-on-crime meant a trip to political purgatory. And there hasn’t been anything like the Abner Louima incident or the Amado Diallo shooting that has galvanized popular opposition to the police.

“It is amazing. Stop and frisk has become police misconduct times 10,” said Mark Green, the former public advocate who made former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s oversight of the NYPD a central issue in his 2001 mayoral campaign.

“You have to be pretty smart to figure out exactly the political gains or costs. Are there some minority voters who are infuriated that this is happening to their neighborhood kids, and some white liberals who feel their ideology is being violated for no good purpose? Yes, yes. But whether that number is 2,500 people or 25,000 people, no one will know. And that number remains the difference between going to City Hall and going to political Palookaville—where I am,” he added.”

dfreedlander@observer.com

twitter.com/freedlander

Bill de Blasio (Photo: Facebook)

After Public Advocate Bill de Blasio announced his platform for reducing the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactics yesterday afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg's office responded rather sharply, stating through Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, “Mr. de Blasio may be nostalgic for the days when the ACLU set crime policy in this city, but most New Yorkers don’t want rampant crime to return.” Although he had already responded through a spokesman, Mr. de Blasio pushed back even further on the criticism in a conference call with reporters earlier this morning.

"The thousands and thousands of people demanding a response here would like to see the mayor talk about their response, instead of bluntly this very crass counterattack we saw yesterday, which did not in any way shape or form address the issue," Mr. de Blasio said, while stating that the mayor "is turning a blind eye" towards mounting criticism.

However, when we asked, Mr. de Blasio admitted the mayor's response may have elevated the issue further and helped his own advocacy on the issue.

"I do think the arrogance of his response has pointed out that the mayor is not taking it seriously," he told The Politicker. "I'm sure it's going to get more and more folks [involved] who would like to see a change."

Mr. de Blasio's announcement yesterday has also elevated the positions of some of his fellow 2013 mayoral contenders, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer who's been previously rather vocal on the issue and Comptroller John Liu, who came out with the most radical plan of the bunch, calling for a complete ban on the police tactic.

Mr. de Blasio wasn't impressed with Mr. Liu's plan, however.

"Stop-and-frisk used in the right measure is an incredibly important crime fighting tool," he said in response to another reporter's question on the topic. "I disagree thoroughly with anyone who says we've got to ban it."

Howard Wolfson

Mr. Wolfson earned the activist's ire by defending the mayor's budget in the media. As of this writing, Mr. Wolfson and the mayor's office have not responded to The Politicker's request for comment about the phone flap, but the mayor's office was quite proud of the budget when it was first rolled out. In a presentation at City Hall in February, Mayor Bloomberg praised his budget plan for closing a $2 billion gap without tax increases or layoffs of teachers, firefighters and police officers. The mayor's proposed budget included $437 million in cuts.

Campaign for Children is supported by several New York City politicians including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and a slew of Council members. The campaign is also supported by over 150 local organizations including the Children’s Aid Society, YMCA of Greater NY, UJA-Federation of New York and Alianza Dominicana.

The city's anti-diabetes ad featuring a fake amputee. (Photo: New York Times)

Deputy Mayor for Government Affairs Howard Wolfson and New York Times Metro Editor Carolyn Ryan battled on Twitter this afternoon over an article that pointed out a city ad warning oversize portions of sugary drinks can lead to diabetes and potentially lost limbs used photoshopped pictures rather than real amputees. Mr. Wolfson sent out four tweets over a four hour period defending the ad and asking whether the Times uses real subscribers or actors in its ads.

After his first message didn't generate a response from the Times, Mr. Wolfson fired off another missive.

Mr. Wolfson's second tweet provoked a response from Times Metro Editor Carolyn Ryan defending the story.

Mr. Wolfson countered by saying it's a fact sugary drinks can cause obesity and diabetes.

Ms. Ryan stuck to her guns.

Mr. Wolfson answered by bringing up his grandmother, who he said was forced to undergo a leg amputation due to diabetes.

As of this writing, Mr. Wolfson had the last word in the Twitter tiff.

Mr. Wolfson was indeed correct that actors appear in the Times' ads. Interestingly, Wil Petre, an actor who appeared in a commercial for the paper's "Weekender" subscription, also appeared in a hilarious parody of the same commercial that spoofed the New York Post.

"I think the tweets pretty much covered it from my end," Mr. Wolfson told The Politicker when we asked him about the dustup.

We also reached out to the article's author, Patrick McGeehan for his take on the situation. He said Mr. Wolfson hadn't attempted to speak with him directly and suggested we speak with Ms. Ryan.

"I don't really do the Twitter thing much, I kind of left it to Carolyn," Mr. McGeehan said. "I didn't engage on it. I was busy reporting today."

Ms. Ryan said she was on a tight deadline with "kind of a sensitive story" and wouldn't be able to comment until later on.

We'll update if we hear from her or if she and Mr. Wolfson resume their Twitter spat.

Full Disclosure: Hunter Walker worked as an intern at the New York Times from 2006-2007. He also has a "Weekender" subscription to the paper.

But instead, a few days before Thanksgiving, Mr. Wolfson crowded into a second floor meeting room in City Hall to brief a dozen or so reporters about the latest news in the Bloomberg administration’s ongoing struggle with protesters down at Zuccotti Park. The ostensible purpose of the impromptu press scrum was for Mr. Wolfson, whose official title is deputy mayor for government affairs and communications, to brief the press on preparations the city was undergoing to prepare for what Occupy Wall Street described as a “Day of Action,” a massive nationwide protest to galvanize the movement. As anyone who saw him on the trail when he was shilling for Ms. Clinton during her bruising 1999 run for U.S. Senate, or during her even more bruising 2008 run for president, or any of his side gigs for Fox News or the 2004 John Kerry campaign, it was vintage Wolfson. He said that tens of thousands of protesters were going to descend on the city, thus making anything less seem like a disappointing showing for the Occupiers. He rerouted questions about the administration’s raid on Zuccotti Park a few days prior into a discussion about the unwillingness of Mayor Bloomberg’s chief critics to take a definitive stand on the raid, holding up for ridicule some of the more outrageous statements they had made.

(“It always astonishes me,” said Hugo Lindgren, the editor of The New York Times Magazine and a friend of Mr. Wolfson’s since his student days at Duke. “He has the ability to seem natural and conversational and somehow stay right on message.”)

During the raid, one city councilman, Ydanis Rodriguez, had been arrested and detained for 17 hours. Before Mr. Wolfson met the press, Mr. Rodriguez held a press conference of his own, in which he showed off cuts on his face from the police and alleged that he was targeted due to his stature as an elected official and outspoken critic of the Bloomberg administration.

When Mr. Wolfson was asked about the allegations, he looked confused for a moment.

“Wait. Are you saying he is saying he was particularly singled out because he was a councilman?” he replied, nodding to himself, as if he were trying to wrap his head around an idea—that a city official would be given special treatment of a punitive sort—so preposterously outside the realm of possibility that it tested the ability of human mind to logically progress from one thought to the next.

Yes, instead of state dinners and nuclear codes and facing down the Great Recession and the Tea Party, Howard Wolfson is here, attending late-night community meetings in Queens, wrangling over budget items with members of the City Council, and batting clean-up for Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

A few years ago, when Mr. Wolfson was considered one of the leading Democratic strategists in the nation, he seemed destined to settle in for the kind of easy life that a television pundit enjoys, or as a high-powered Democratic lobbyist.

Now, he is a bureaucrat. It’s as if Karl Rove had left the White House to go work for the Dallas Water Utilities, or James Carville eschewed his regular rounds on Crossfire or Meet the Press after successfully steering the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, and served as a spokesman for the mayor of Baton Rouge.

“I don’t consider myself in that league,” Mr. Wolfson said in an interview last week. “I have never won a presidential campaign.”

This is true, but that may be due more to Mr. Wolfson’s having been tasked with making the case for a campaign that has come to be remembered for one of the biggest implosions in political history than to anything Mr. Wolfson failed to do. Back then, Mr. Wolfson had become one of the chief antagonists of then-candidate Obama, fielding daily conference calls with hundreds of reporters at a time. Former campaign officials recall him as the last man in the foxhole, the one who kept on fighting, kept on attacking, kept on getting into the office earlier and earlier even as the rest of the staff began angling for jobs in a future Obama White House.

The decision to come to City Hall, Mr. Wolfson says grew out of the ashes of that campaign.

“My goal was to go to the White House,” he said. “If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, my goal was to go into government. I was not going to go back into the private sector. I had my heart set on returning to government. You play a certain role in a campaign that you are really invested and believe in, and why not go into government and continue to try and achieve some of the outcomes that you were promising during the campaign?”

Bloomberg insiders, many of whom had been with the mayor since he first ran for office in 2001, were skeptical of Mr. Wolfson, knowing that he came out of an environment that seemed to epitomize political dysfunction. Eventually, he took over Kevin Sheekey’s role as City Hall’s political director, but his portfolio has broadened and turned wonkier over time, encompassing budget and land use and education policy negotiations with lawmakers here and in the city.

“I think that what is interesting about Howard is that he came in with heavy-duty political experience, and made the transition fairly quickly and very seriously to a real governing role in a way that was more than anybody, including himself, expected,” said Micah Lasher, the Bloomberg administration’s chief Albany strategist.

Those inside and outside the administration say that they have noticed a distinct shift of emphasis as Mr. Wolfson has grown into the role formerly occupied by Mr. Sheekey. Whereas Mr. Sheekey—who is now at Bloomberg LP­—was consumed with the dark arts of politics, staying just out of reach of reporters and coming up with dozens of complicated schemes at a time (or at least creating the illusion that he was), Mr. Wolfson has run the political side of City Hall like a political campaign: problems come up, solve them. Stay on message. Stay on offense. Keep your allies close. Avoid needless political cat fights.

It is Mr. Wolfson who has tried to dial down some of the rhetoric with Albany. It was he who advised that the administration pause after uproar over its new homeless policy. When the City Council hauled administration officials before them after the blizzard snafu, Mr. Wolfson took over and ran point with the media (he was on vacation during the blizzard itself, and so could only look on and cringe when the mayor made his famous suggestion that snowed-in New Yorkers go see a Broadway play).

“He has given a political sense to an administration that has often lacked a political touch,” said one local official who is often an administration antagonist.

The third term has been (to put it mildly) a rocky one, and Mr. Wolfson has often been called to specific projects when they seem to be going off the rails. When a lack of public support threatened to derail the city’s bike lane expansion, Mr. Wolfson took over the message, answering critics point-by-point, and strapping on a helmet and spandex to become the city’s cycler in chief.

“It was not a surprise to anybody that it was a difficult winter with the press on the bike lanes. He came up with ways to answer the questions point by point that were made by reporters, and that strategy was really effective,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, adding “You are seeing a leaner, meaner Howard Wolfson because of the bike lanes.” (Mr. Wolfson lost 25 pounds after taking to his bike.)

“I was tired of our commissioner getting misrepresented, and I was tired of other people having their day in the papers,” Mr. Wolfson said. “So I said, ‘We are fighting back.’ This is going to be an ongoing struggle, but if you look at the polling, this issue is absolutely headed our way.”

Then, Mr. Wolfson took to Twitter to answer criticisms directly and to engage with like-minded supporters. It is a technique that has now infused the entire press office at City Hall, which has taken to the social media platform to rebut stories it disagrees with, often retweeting a negative headline with the simple words, “Not True.”

His influence around City Hall has been felt in other ways as well, administration officials say. Mr. Wolfson has been one of the driving forces behind the mayor’s so-called “Freedom Agenda,” in which Mr. Bloomberg lines up solidly behind the Ground Zero Mosque, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and even the free speech rights of the kids in Zuccotti, and he has had a heavy hand in some of the mayor’s more elevated rhetoric in the service of that agenda. He guided the mayor on his political endorsements last year, in which Mr. Bloomberg spread his money and his support to a handful of socially liberal fiscal conservatives in both parties.

When Mr. Wolfson took the job inside City Hall, the widespread assumption among political observers was that it meant something big was in the offing for the future of Mike Bloomberg—if not a presidential run then something equally as big. Why else, after all, would a political superstar come here?

Because he wanted to, Mr. Wolfson said. “I was coming here to do the job of deputy mayor for government affairs and communications. I was not aware that we were launching the Apollo Project.”

Still, politicos, especially those lining up in opposition to Mr. Bloomberg, wonder if Mr. Wolfson won’t jump ship for some kind of national-level job in advance of the 2012 elections. The press, they say, is already cowed by him (“There is this mythology that surrounds him,” said one rival flack. “He has to defend some pretty indefensible positions, and the press takes him at his word.”) The third term, they say, is a lost cause. How much longer can Mr. Wolfson want to be spend time holding the bag?

His job now, he says, is to get the mayor simply to build the platform so that his words get amplified, no easy task after a decade in the mayoralty. The mayor has been in many respects far less visible than he was during his first two terms, cutting down on the number of daily press conferences, and preferring instead major speeches in hand-picked venues on themes of national import.

“Like the president, the mayor, I don’t believe, should be overexposed. I think you have to pick your spots,” he said, adding, “You don’t really tell Mike Bloomberg what to say. But you can, in my position, attempt to advise him on the best venue, the best way to say what he wants to say … You make a decision to clear Zuccotti Park. How do you explain that to the people of the city?”

That job, of course, fell almost as much to Mr. Wolfson as it did to Mr. Bloomberg. The day after the press scrum in City Hall, he did the local Fox affiliate and then headed down to CNN. There the host asked about reports that members of the media were targeted during the raid on Zuccotti.

Mr. Wolfson went back to slamming the critics of the mayor for the hyperbolic statements they made in response to the raid.

Back at City Hall, he disputed the notion that the action had made the municipal problem of Occupy Wall Street worse.

“I don’t think it’s intractable. We should go to Zuccotti Park,” he said, confident the sight of the cleared plaza would prove his point.

dfreedlander@observer.com

twitter.com/freedlander

Today, we reached out to Christine Quinn, Bill Thompson, Bill de Blasio, Scott Stringer, John Liu and Tom Allon and asked them to respond to our post, especially to the question of whether or not tents and tarps should be allowed to remain in the park.

Only three of the potential candidates responded to our inquiry. 

Audrey Gelman, spokeswoman for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wrote to The Politicker in an email that the ruling yesterday should stand:

Justice Stallman found that the First Amendment does not protect the protesters’ right to have tents in the park. That decision may be appealed, but in the meantime, people must comply with his decision and the Police Department must enforce the rules equitably. The Borough President remains deeply troubled by the multiple arrests of reporters who were simply doing their job and reports of blocked media access during Tuesday morning's events.

Bill de Blasio meanwhile suggested that the tents and tarps should have been allowed to stay in Zuccotti Park until a new arrangement could be made:

The Administration should have let the situation in Zuccotti Park play out. There were still opportunities to resolve outstanding issues, including finding an alternative site that would have proved less problematic. Ibelieve the current state of the protests and the increased City resources required to manage them represent a significant setback.

Christine Quinn said that the administration shouldn't look backwards, but rather make sure that free speech remains protected going forward

Instead of looking backwards and relitigating a matter already settled by the courts, the Bloomberg Administration should be looking forward and working to ensure the protesters' First Amendment rights are protected while balancing the community's rights to a safe and secure neighborhood.

From a political messaging standpoint, it is worth noting how Mr. Wolfson is trying to shape the terms of the debate. While he says the question of tenting in Zuccotti is the critical issue of the week, those vying to replace his boss don't agree, and so don't really answer the question.  For Mr. Stringer, the major issue is reporters's rights; for Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Quinn, it's how the administration's brash actions created more trouble than was necessary.

For the record, a spokesman for Mr. Thompson declined to weigh in. We have not heard from Mr. Liu or Mr. Allon.

Update:

Mr. Allon wrote in with the following:

Deputy Mayor Wolfson's attempt to spin the Administration's dead of night, military-style raid on sleeping protesters into a health and safety issue simply doesn't conform with reality. Rather than worrying about the 2013 mayoral race, Wolfson should be explaining to the public why over the last two days roughing up and arresting journalists for daring to report on Occupy Wall Street has appeared to become a matter of policy.

"The action was handled absolutely professionally, there were no significant injuries, unlike Oakland where you had rioting--none of that happened here. This was exactly the right thing to do."

Mr. Wolfson, who serves as Mayor Bloomberg's first deputy mayor of communications, was then asked about complaints from the New York Press Club that reporters were kept away from the action on Monday.

"Standard operating procedure in this city...in the middle of an active, ongoing police operation you don't have reporters along," he said. "This is not an episode of 'Cops.'"

"I was shocked at the statements put out by many of those who say they are going to be running for mayor," Mr. Wolfson said. "The central issue before this mayor at this time was whether or not the tenting and tarping and camping can continue at Zuccotti Park. And not a single statement by any of the mayoral aspirants addressed that central issue. They all ducked the central issue before this mayor and this city yesterday and I would ask you and I would love to put the question to them directly—do you believe that the tenting and tarping should have continued in Zuccotti Park or do you think that it should have been stopped?"

Mr. Wolfson's introduction to city politics was in 2009 when he served as chief spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg in his re-election campaign against Bill Thompson. Mr. Bloomberg is not, as far as we know, running for a fourth term, but Mr. Wolfson sounded like he was competing against any of the five or so candidates jockeying for the Democratic nomination in 2013.

"That was the central question-- not whether the action should have taken place at 1 o’clock in the morning or three o’clock in the morning," he continued. "Not any other questions other than was the city going to  step in and act in the interest of public safety and stop the tenting in the park. I think it was a tremendous duck on the part of people running for mayor not to answer that central question. And frankly I would suggest anyone running for mayor ought or have a position on this issue, they ought to make it clear to the people of this city."

Later, Mr. Wolfson referred to statements made by Bill de Blasio--who suggested that the mayor "let this play out" and by John Liu who said that the raid was like the shock and awe tactics displayed in Iraq, as well as to Scott Stringer, who compared the raid to Tiananmen Square.

"If you are in favor of ending the tenting and the tarping in the interest of public safety you ought to be wiling to say 'that and if you think that is fine as one of the mayoral aspirants said 'to let this play out' and keep the tenting and the tarping there you should have been wiling to step up and say that. That’s what it means to run for mayor," Mr. Wolfson said, adding,   "I was shocked yesterday to see someone who is running for mayor to compare this to Tiananmen where hundreds of people were killed by soldiers-- that is an insult to the NYPD and the professionalism that they have demonstrated. I saw someone today compare it to the Iraq War where hundreds of thousands of people were killed,  that is an insult to the men and women of the NYPD who carried this out professionally. That kind of rhetoric is so overblown and so outrageous and so indicative of people who are not squaring up with …the central question which was whether or not we were going to allow a dangerous situation to continue."